On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 9:10 AM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > David Gerard wrote: >> On 9 October 2011 14:18, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> On 9 October 2011 13:55, Ting Chen <tc...@wikimedia.org> wrote: >>>> The majority of editors who responded to the referendum are not opposed >>>> to the feature. However, a significant minority is opposed. >>> >>> How do you know? The "referendum" didn't ask whether people were opposed or >>> not. >> >> I fear this point will need restating every time someone claims the >> "referendum" shows support. > > I wonder what the image filter referendum results would have had to look > like in order to get anything other than a rambling "we march forward, > unabated!" letter from the Board. > > MZMcBride
Hi MZM and all! Greetings from the end of a long -- but productive and inspiring -- meeting weekend. "Marching forward unabated" is not, in fact, what we are saying. The board, and individual members of the board, are quite aware of all of the criticisms from the vote and from the conversations on and off list -- believe me. This is not an official report on behalf of the board, but here is what we discussed doing: * not going ahead with the category-based design that was proposed in the mockups; it is clear there are too many substantive problems that have been raised with this. Although this design (or any other) was actually not specified in the resolution, it is obvious that many of the critical comments were about using categorization in particular, and we hear that. * we are asking the staff to explore alternative designs, e.g. for a way for readers to flag images for themselves, and collapse individual images. This isn't fixed yet because it shouldn't be: we need to have a further period of iterative community & technical design. * not changing or revoking the Board resolution, because we do still think that there is a problem with our handling of potentially controversial content that needs to be addressed. We don't want to ignore the criticism, and we *also* don't want to ignore the positive comments from those who identified a problem and thought such a tool would be helpful and useful in addressing it. Our view is holistic. The Board discussed amending the resolution (we think, in particular, that the word 'filter' has led to many assumptions about design), but decided that for now the language of the resolution is broad enough that it leaves room for alternative solutions. And we also do not want to ignore the rest of the resolution -- the parts that call for better tools for commons, and that lay out that we respect the principle of least astonishment. The speculation on this list the last few weeks about what individual board members think and want has generally been wildly, hilariously off base -- I have seen many statements about board member motivations that couldn't have been more wrong -- but so has the speculation that we don't care and have not been paying attention. My own views on whether a filter as proposed is workable have changed over the past couple of months. I appreciate especially the reasoned comments I have seen from people who have taken the time to think it through and who have wondered if a design as proposed would even work for readers, or would be implementable. And I have been gratified to see people dig up things like library statements of principle; as foundational documents these are a good place to start from (as someone who has always seen herself as a free speech advocate inside and outside of the library world, this tactic has made me glad, even if we may differ on interpretation). I also am glad for those comments that took the time to look critically at the vote process -- we did make a lot of mistakes, but we did learn a lot, and I hope with the help of all of this input we can do a better job next time we have a broad-scale vote (did you know that this was the single largest participatory exercise in wikimedia's history? I could not have imagined that at the beginning of this summer). None of us on the board have any intention of being censors; that is no one's desire and within no one's tolerance. I do think the resolution principles (neutrality, principle of least astonishment) that we laid out as guidelines for the tool are still good, strong principles; and I wouldn't have voted for the resolution in the first place if I thought what we were proposing encompassed or enabled censorship. And what hasn't changed for me is the impetus behind the resolution: a desire to work on behalf of *both* the editing community and our broad (up to 7 billion!) community of readers, and a desire to get perspectives from outside our own sometimes narrow conversational community on the mailing lists and wikis. We know there are a lot of questions that have been resolved over the last few weeks about releasing vote data and so on that aren't addressed in this letter; we did not address everything in our board meeting either. As a board, we trust Sue to continue to implement the resolution; that means both managing the vote and its results, and design issues as well. And while we all of course are coming from different backgrounds and have different opinions, I think we are all on the same page about wanting to build helpful things for both our readers and our editors, and in wanting to treat minority views in our community as well as we treat majority ones. best, phoebe _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
