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A potential use for the proposed image filter
There’s currently a massive debate going on in Wikipedia/Wikimedia-land over whether or not there should be an opt-in personal image filter. Basically, imagine each user could hit a little button and up would pop a list of categories of images, and they could choose which ones they don’t want to see. From then on, the images would be replaced with a box saying clearly that the image has been removed. They could then click on the box and the picture would immediately load in place and they could disable the filter any time.
There’s been, as I said, a massive stink about this. I’m not that bothered either way: I probably wouldn’t use it, and so long as it doesn’t affect others, including children, I’m okay. Filtering for yourself is fine, filtering for others sucks. You end up with barmy situations like an academic network I was using a few years ago which banned access to the Wikipedia page for “Same-sex marriage” because it had the word “sex” in the URI. But filtering for yourself is fine: I don’t like seeing adverts or tweets about Justin Bieber.
But I had a situation as a Wikipedia editor the other day which might have prompted me to have such a filter. A friend was anti-vandal-patrolling and came across an editor making a big stink about a pornographic image on Wikipedia. They didn’t want it removed, they had concerns about whether the, err, model in the image was complying with the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act (aka. USC 2257). The user was removing the image from the article, and there was a discussion going on about whether bringing up the USC 2257 issue counted as a legal threat under Wikipedia’s No legal threats policy and whether the user should be blocked.
Said friend of mine was asking for a second opinion from me and some other Wikipedians. At the time I was on my laptop on a busy commuter train going home from work on a shaky 3G connection. I don’t have a problem with downloading or seeing a pornographic image, but I’m not sure the guy next to me or any of the other commuters wants to see a picture of what turned out to be a male contortionist pleasuring himself. I actually couldn’t care less about the content of the image, nor the content of the article: the only things I cared about was whether the actions taken and the justifications given in the edit summaries and on the talk page matched up with the metadata of the image on Commons (I can see a Playboy-esque anecdote now: “I read the Wikimedia Commons sex categories for the metadata!”). If I had a simple way to turn off the images or just the pornographic images both in the article, in File: space on enwiki and on Commons, that would actually be quite useful. Because plenty of anti-vandalism patrollers and other assorted WikiGnomes often don’t care about the particulars of the content while involved in those tasks and aren’t particularly interested in going to jail for public indecency if they happen to be gnoming in public.
