On 03/09/12 9:39 PM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 2:16 AM, Ray Saintonge<sainto...@telus.net> wrote:
On 03/08/12 2:20 AM, Theo10011 wrote:
The other issue is morality and responsibility. I don't think any
executives or board members should make a statement about that video. It's
a stated policy that they are not responsible for the content on the
project. To hold them legally or morally responsible, for what 100,000
contributors might do at any given point, is unrealistic and unreasonable.
They can not be held liable for actions of vandals, as much as of
community
members who upload media in good faith. Depending on how you perceive
this,
who does have some responsibility is the community itself. It governs
itself, has its own rules about content, WMF regularly points to it in
cases of content dispute.
This raises an important point about the role of the board, and of
staff. The status of an ISP implies blindness to content. The more it
assumes editorial rights, the more it puts its role as an ISP into
question. It does not know about these contents until it receives a
properly formulated demand to take something down, at which point it must
act according to law. Third parties who just happen to feel offended by
some material tend to approach these matters with a strong bias, which may
or may not reflect the reality of the law. Such people need to be informed
of the proper legal channels with the assurance of knowing that management
will abide with the law without itself being a tryer of the facts.
Why is it that the instinctive Wikimedia response to a problem is always
burying one's head in the sand and hoping that the problem will go
away? For goodness' sake. Sue has blogged her views about editorial
judgment. The Board is in the habit of passing resolutions on project
content. And in one of these, the Board decided last year that we would
have an image filter, and instructed Sue to install one. To turn around now
and say that all of this is something the Board can't even so much as
*comment* on, when they've gave specific management instructions on this
last year, is ludicrous.
It's not at all question of burying one's head in the sand. It's a
question of the communities solving their own problems. Serious
injustices are a common occurrence in the communities, but a community
is diminished when it has to run to mother-WMF's apron strings to solve
its problems. Some communities will implement filters, others not;
that's fine. Eventually, each community will find its own balanced solution.
Ray
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
