Misplaced Pages

talk:Follow the principle of least astonishment - Misplaced Pages

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Czarkoff (talk | contribs) at 17:58, 10 January 2012 (→If you reject the Resolution, you are in violation of WMF's (future) Terms of Use, and thus you may be banned: replied). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 17:58, 10 January 2012 by Czarkoff (talk | contribs) (→If you reject the Resolution, you are in violation of WMF's (future) Terms of Use, and thus you may be banned: replied)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Follow the principle of least astonishment page.

To accept as a wikipedia guideline or not

Please consider joining the feedback request service.
An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. This page has been added to the following list: When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below.

The WP:Wikimedia Foundation has released resolutions in regard to controversial content "urging" the community to take it on board. WP:POLA is a reflection of the foundations position. This RFC is in regard to the simple question of, shall we accept the foundations recommendation in regards to this resolution and include it as having WP:Guideline status or not? - Youreallycan (talk) 18:25, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

  • WP:POLA doesn't go against WP:Not censored at all, not unless you misinterpret "not censored" - not censored is not an allowance to publish anything at all on en wikipedia. Wiki en is a responsible educational website and not the cutting edge of vocal on line freedom. This is a guideline clarification from the foundation that adds clarity to WP:Not censored, rather than overrides that WP:Policy Youreallycan (talk) 19:23, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
WP:Principle of least astonishment is a Misplaced Pages essay only. Association to Misplaced Pages:Offensive material that is a WP:Guideline was removed and rejected by User:Hobit. Such as that is the reason for this RFC. Let the community reply to the foundation - if the community rejects the foundations good faith "urged resolutions" then the foundation needs to understand that. Youreallycan (talk) 22:09, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
I think it was more that the person who added it to the other page without prior discussion, and potential or actual involvement in an Arbcom case. We should take the board's resolution, and craft policy/guideline wording through discussion and consensus and add it to the appropriate page. We don't need a separate page full of vague wording that duplicates the purposes and aims of another guideline page. (You did ask me what else could use the POLA shortcut, and I gave you one.) Imzadi 1979 → 22:26, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
The POLA shortcut is not my major focus here. My primary issue is that this and other foundation resolutions resolves as a minimum at a level of WP:Guideline - if the community objects to the foundations resolutions then that will need resolving moving forward, Youreallycan (talk) 22:37, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
If this RFC fails there WILL be appropriate mention made of the fact on that page, I presume. This "policy resolution" is a fraudulent and undemocratic backdoor attempt to subvert Misplaced Pages's decision-making process and I'll be god damned if I'm gonna watch a fanatic minority subvert democracy through backdoor machinations agains consensus. Carrite (talk)
  • Oppose A very general idea of POLA is fine, and if it specifically applied to Commons, that would be perfectly fine. But the way it is worded here and the way it is abused shows that it should not be policy, especially since it is so poorly defined, even by the Foundation. Specifically, worrying about "least astonishment" and "offense" constrains editors' abilities to write a quality educational encyclopedia. Silverseren 20:21, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Mark as Wikimedia Foundation guideline It is clear that this is dictum from the WMF, and it is not up to us to be ostriches about it <g>. What we can do is word it as simply as possible, and trust the WMF does not impose something else on us in its stead. Collect (talk) 22:51, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
  • If they were trying to pass something in relation to editors and such, that would be fine. But we cannot idly stand by and allow the Foundation to make policy about content, policy which is detrimental to the encyclopedia. Silverseren 23:16, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Reject The specific "urge the community" wording copied here is from a paragraph which addresses the Commons community. Then there are two individual board members claiming retroactively that it applies to all "projects", when Projects has a whole different meaning in the resolution. Those opinions have no force or effect, for all we know they were the hotheads in the room and the rest of the Board specifically worded it the way they did for a good reason. If the Board really meant to "urge" everyone everywhere, they can bloody well get back together and write that out plainly, or resign and let us elect other people to do it. They can also discuss why Jimbo is saying that "the other projects already generally do a very good job of dealing with these issues" and explain why we suddenly have to go into contortions. That Board resolution supports the principle of least astonishment. Yeah fine, so do we. The way it's being used (distorted?) on en:wiki though, will inevitably lead to every religious group in the world, or their proxies, getting a shot at limiting our content by simply being astonished, astonished!, that we don't present their own world-view. This was an ill-thought resolution if it was intended as some sort of blanket vaguely-worded imprecation for everyone to scurry around and DO SOMETHING. We should just kick it back upstairs, and we can get on with the encyclopedia-building. Franamax (talk) 23:17, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
  • reject per Franamax. Who is it we are trying not to astonish? Experts in the field? Believers in a given faith? North Americans? English speakers? It's too vague to be guideline or policy and I worry it will be used to censor our coverage. Hobit (talk) 23:24, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Oppose I am unclear whether the proposal relates to style of pages or content. As explained in the page link about POLA, examples given there are about practical page behaviour. I do not oppose a principle that wiki pages should behave in a 'natural' way. However, we seem to be talking about censorship of content so that only content expected by a user will appear on a page. Since users are presumably ignorant about the subject of a page before they read and learn, such a policy is an oxymoron. We cannot accept a policy that essentialy says a page should only contain information which a reader expects. The only way to deal with controversial content is to explain the controversy in detail. It cannot be accepted that such content should be suppressed. Sandpiper (talk) 23:40, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Too early. The background to the resolution is scattered over disparate pages; the meaning of "least astonishment" is still being debated; though I trust Jimbo and Ting Chen to honestly represent their understanding of the meaning of the ambiguous paragraph

    We urge the Commons community to continue to practice rigorous active curation of content, including applying appropriate categorization, removing media that does not meet existing policies and guidelines for inclusion, and actively commissioning media that is deemed needed but missing. We urge the community to pay particular attention to curating all kinds of potentially controversial content, including determining whether it has a realistic educational use and applying the principle of least astonishment in categorization and placement.

    (Does the second sentence refer to the community as a whole, or only Commons?)

Franamax is questioning the intentions of the entire board. There's no rush to insert this into policy; the resolution's been out there since May and clarification of its meaning and discussion about its policy implications are ongoing. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 01:05, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for posting the full paragraph, though I'd encourage readers to examine the entirety of the Resolution as well. Note too that I intend no disrespect to the two board members who commented later, though I suppose I am dissing the entire board for bad/unclear writing. I'm fine with the general principles, what I would call the "whereas"es of the resolution (the stuff in the top half). It is the "now therefore"s that I have a problem with, I don't read any of those as being a call to action on the part of en:wiki. One of the "therefore"s is also about the image filter (mentioned on this page at present), can't lay my hands on the link, but somewhere on Meta I just read the CEO saying the image filter is stalled because de:wiki sorta threatened to quit en masse if the proposed implementation went through. This is one of those things where it all needs to be done right. Franamax (talk) 02:01, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
The point in question was clarified by both Jimbo and Ting Chen, in the former case at Anthonyhcole's request a few days ago. See which contains links to and ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 02:45, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
And I certainly respect the individual opinions of those editors, and they should have no trouble at all in convincing the Board to issue a clarification, speaking as a whole. After all, that's the entire purpose of a board. Note how Jimbo takes care to be "speaking for myself" in your link above, and earlier advises against reading tea-leaves - which we seem to be doing again in parsing exactly what these two have "clarified". So we're left with an unsatisfactory situaton, which I suggest either the Board resolve, or we dismiss pending definitive clarification. I'd be happy to modify policy to comply with a binding resolution of the WMF Board - if I knew what the heck it was. Franamax (talk) 03:29, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
Well, WP:JIMBO seems to have special powers on Misplaced Pages, so he might not need the full board. However, whether his powers still include policy making by fiat or not is something that only dragons know nowadays. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 05:02, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Oppose. There's nothing here to implement. "Follow the principle of least astonishment" is the only thing that can be picked out of the statement as potentially implementable, but the problem is, what is least astonishing? I'm an inclusionist and I say that it would be astonishing for syphilis not to have pictures of syphilis or cock and ball torture not to have one or more images of a genital getting "tortured". "Astonishment" is a code word for "implement your own prejudices", perhaps with the implication, unspecified, that some people's prejudices will be ascendant over others. But that still doesn't explain when that is so. It's a useless guideline; we would each interpret it to mean whatever we think already. Wnt (talk) 05:01, 31 December 2011 (UTC) (to be fair, it has more meaning in the context of Commons categorization; this whole missive seems largely if not entirely addressed at Commons)
  • Reject - In my opinion this is a Muhammed-images-related proposal, an attempt to subvert Misplaced Pages's normal decision-making process with executive edict: (1) Aggrieved minority screams for redress on Talk:Jimbo Wales; (2) Jimbo Wales concurs; (3) Ukaze appears from Wikimedia Foundation implementing new "policy" without discussion. That's what's going on here. It is undemocratic and it must be fought tooth and nail. We don't need "benevolent sovereigns" ad-libbing policy to address the concerns of factions, we need constitutional and democratic decision-making. Carrite (talk) 05:08, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
Um, "Misplaced Pages is not a democracy"? (also policy, like WP:NOTCENSORED). Just sayin... AndyTheGrump (talk) 05:15, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
Ummm, Misplaced Pages works on consensus decision-making among the community, not arbitrary fiat received from San Francisco or London because somebody in the office has an inkling to change things. Carrite (talk) 05:26, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
Ultimately - no, it doesn't. The Foundation actually controls resources etc. You can argue about whether this is moral, legitimate etc or not, but that is the way it is. Somewhere or other (can't be bothered to find it) there is an essay describing your 'rights' on wikipedia: you have two - the right to fork (and set up your own alternative), and the right to leave. A little less hyperbole about 'democracy', and a little more attention to the fact that we are writing an online encyclopaedia rather than constructing a new-model utopia might actually help here... AndyTheGrump (talk) 05:36, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
WP:You don't own Misplaced Pages. However, don't ignore that the WMF backed down before when confronted with overwhelming community consensus, like with the image filter on the de.wiki: . ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 05:42, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
The idea of WMF "ownership" of Misplaced Pages is overrated. Yes, WMF owns servers, collects donations, and many other things; nonetheless, the main asset of the site is the content, which by design is free, and the editors produce that. In theory, the editors might be able to arrange some kind of Misplaced Pages substitute spread out among mirror sites and free Wikis, but the WMF can't do much without us. Of course, the reality is, if we fight each other that hard, we all lose pretty badly. But the WMF 'urging' people is not exactly a war to the knife. Wnt (talk) 17:01, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Support in principle, though Anthony and others are right that there is still work to be done. However, that work may progress more swiftly if it is clear that it will be a guideline. "Least surprise" should be defined through reliable sources – our presentation of a topic should be broadly consistent with how the most reputable mainstream, authoritative sources (including significant minority viewpoints) present the same topic, etc. --JN466 08:04, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
    • My understanding is that POLA is only defined in the context of user interfaces in reliable sources. How to map that to social controversies where various groups have different expectations is not something that can be easily inferred. Perhaps you know of more research or care to propose a wording? ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 17:37, 9 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Reject, mainly per Franamax -- it's not a coherent idea, it hasn't been adopted via a legitimate process, and it is inconsistent with more important principles. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 11:05, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Reject. Too many avenues for censorship enabled by a vague principle.—Kww(talk) 16:44, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment If this is being imposed by the WMF, I question whether this RFC is even valid at all. Jtrainor (talk) 22:50, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
  • I think thats the point. The foundation only "urges" the community to implement. What support anything they "urge" has amongst the community is what is being questioned in this RFC. Ask yourself, if the foundation wants the project to move in a certain direction, or to consider certain issues with greater sensitivity, how much weight do you, or the community apply to that guidance? Youreallycan (talk) 23:01, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
"Certain issues" being Muhammad Pictures, by any chance? Carrite (talk) 09:20, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
I personally have never posted a single comment about the pictures of Muhammad and I have no personal position about that issue. I have read a couple of the discussions and imo a good intellectual case has been made to reduce the number of pictures in that article. That is with or without any foundation resolution being accepted as a guideline or not. I think as a community there is a good case for us to be generally accepting of the guidance from the hub of the project, they are the people with a deep understanding of issues restricting growth, and the long term stability of the project. Taking a position of, reject, they will use it to remove a couple of pics here and there is imo a short term tunnel vision view. We are not an activist, free speech, publish and be damned site, we are educationally biased. Not censored as you know does not interpret as you can add anything you can find in a wikipedia reliable source, we are already requested to use responsible editorial control. This is not some fearful statement to support censorship, it's just a clarification of foundation guidance in relation to sensitive and contentious content. Youreallycan (talk) 11:07, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Reject. In general, there are some good arguments here against adopting this as a guideline, and the best argument against is 'lack of clarity' -- it is unclear what exactly parts of the Board's statement mean, and it is unclear that it was intended to apply to the English (or any other) Misplaced Pages. With regard to the specific elephant in the room (images of Muhammad), while I would prefer that a reasonable spectrum of representations of Muhammad remain in the article and given that this is a non-legal issue, a consensus decision by en-Wikipedians that most or all of the images must go is preferable in the long run to any imposed decision from the WMF board, even one that I would ordinarily agree with. -- ArglebargleIV (talk) 23:15, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment I think this needs a rewrite. If its given one I'll support, but not in its current state. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 11:18, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose I'd be OK if it specifically excluded religious content from its scope--GrapedApe (talk) 19:38, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
    • There's an interesting background to that. The Harries report recommended such an exclusion. But the WMF Controversial Content Working Group specifically dismissed that recommendation. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 05:23, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose As per the German wikipedia's rejection of the WMF proposal. That is to say that I don't agree that what has been proposed by WMF on this isn't, in fact, a form of censorship, and one that stands contrary to many of the older principles and policies that make this project work. I think the wikipedians at de.wiki had the right idea.--XomicTalk 04:22, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Conflicts with existing policy, which actually has served us pretty well. Besides, "astonishment" is subjective. And bullet point 6 in the WMF resolution contains wording—"when first viewing the image"—that's pretty scary. Rivertorch (talk) 09:27, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose - It just boils down to "hey, it looks like we accomplished something" jargon by the WMF. The issue with nekkid chicks at pregnancy was solved via discussion there at the talk page, the Mihammad kerfuffle is winding down. We don't need yet another dumb wiki-acronym to throw at each other when deciding content usage in the project. Tarc (talk) 13:50, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Everything relevant to what everybody here states/implies/assumes this is about is already covered by WP:NOTCENSORED and WP:DUE. As it's really not clear whether this contradicts either or both of these (or indeed whether it is compatible with WP:NPOV) or not (evidence: all the discussions and requests for clarification about it), nor do people agree about what it means, adopting this as a guideline or similar is clearly not going to help promote agreement at all. While hopefully not as extreme, I am seeing parallels with the userbox wars where the (now repealed) CSD criterion for "divisive and inflammatory templates" caused more divisiveness than the problem it attempted to solve. Thryduulf (talk) 17:36, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Reject. I have no problem with the resolution, but this proposed guideline as currently worded is simply too vague and incoherent to be of any use. --Michig (talk) 22:08, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Reject. Actually, I support a fair bit of the ideas contained within it, but the image hiding feature is problematic. As I have described in greater detail elsewhere, such a feature will, in my opinion, unavoidability lead to content bias around (to pick an example) sexual orientation, and is as a result is at odds with WP:NPOV. --joe decker 07:01, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Disagree in this form. I agree with most of the resolution, including the principle of least astonishment and the need for rigorous active curation of content, but I do not think that an image hiding feature is a good answer to the problem of content disagreements. We forbid content forks because we expect people to work on one consensus version. Image hiding would implement content forking (a version with or without images) at the technical level.  Sandstein  08:48, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose (1) Contentious phrase, (2) synonym for "plz avoid offending anyone", a very bad path to head down and one which some will try to push if allowed, (3) sometimes consensus may feel that content and layout which is not "least astonishing" is more appropriate and I rate consensus and NPOV and "being an encyclopedia" over this, and in any case (4) this proposal isn't a proposal or a guideline, it doesn't specify or urge any action, it just summarizes a deliberation. FT2  15:38, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
    • Rewriting it in the imperative is the trivial part, e.g. "In accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation Resolution on controversial content, editors must pay particular attention to curating all kinds of potentially controversial content, particularly that of a sexual, violent or religious nature. Editors must determine whether controversial material has a realistic educational use, and must apply the principle of least astonishment in categorization and placement." The less trivial part is finding the exact principle that the board urges us to implement. The question on the binding status of the supporting documents detailing that (WG report, referendum FAQ) remains open. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 11:44, 9 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose, I recognize that Misplaced Pages is probably pushed from all kind of lobbyists to finally do something against the "offensive" images, but that doesn't at all mean we have to accept this WMF guideline here. In fact, this guideline wasn't even developed by the local consensus, but by the Wikimedia Foundation, and in general we shouldn't accept any such guideline. But even if this guideline was, I had to reject it, because adopting this guideline makes us even more open for lobbyism and manipulation from outside, thus going against the core principle of a neutral point of view. Even though the latter isn't even perfectly implemented, we shouldn't make it any worse. As of now, the guideline as proposed has only a minority support locally, and in fact, within due time at least, it will always appear—even if it might not be the case—as if pushed from outside. BTW, I'd just be curious which sort of lobbyists want to see this guideline applied here. --The Evil IP address (talk) 09:23, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose: this document doesn't instruct, it informs of the decision. In order to become a guideline this document has to explain the relation of the principle of least astonishment to the editing practices on Misplaced Pages. And only then it can actually be discussed as guideline to be accepted or rejected. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 17:18, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

If you reject the Resolution, you are in violation of WMF's (future) Terms of Use, and thus you may be banned

See m:Terms of use#11. Resolutions and Project Policies and the sections above and below that for possible consequences. Thanks to User:WhatamIdoing for pointing this to me. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 07:40, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Is this resolution mandatory? I would really appreciate an explicit statement from the Board on that point, too. Timidity on that point will just drag out this discussion into next year. Does anybody think we should put these two questions to the board now? --Anthonyhcole (talk) 07:59, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
What is the official venue for such requests for clarification to be filed in? ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 08:02, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
I was thinking of emailing Sue Gardner and asking her to pass it up to the Board for consideration at their next scheduled meeting. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 09:24, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Is this some sort of threat, in regards to this discussion? Silverseren 11:50, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
    • I don't know. It depends how adamantly the WMF intends to enforce their ToU and Resolution(s). Good faith criticism of their decisions is explicitly excluded as grounds for blocking/banning (see point 10 in the proposed ToU), however refusal to go along isn't. So, I guess we shall live and see what happens after the new ToU is in place. ¶ However, WhatamIdoing has argued that this whole discussion is going to be null and void because anyone continuing to edit under the new ToU is implicitly giving legal assent to follow all WMF resolutions. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 13:57, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Which returns me to Mark as Wikimedia Foundation guideline as I said above. Cheers. Collect (talk) 12:39, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

  • The primary problem is that "least astonishment" is so ill-defined as to be entirely vacuous. At best, it's so vague and subjective as to become completely bereft of meaning, and at worst it's just a vague catch-all designed to blanket anything someone doesn't like. — Coren  16:02, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
  • If I decide to repeatedly replace all the lede images in our power tool articles with pictures of topless women holding the tools (and looking at the walls of any automotive shop, it's clear that only topless women actually use these tools), I already know I'm going to get banned, resolution or not. What are you going to do, double ban me? Franamax (talk) 21:09, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
  • This seems like a rather poor attempt at trolling the issue. The resolution was to encourage the community to apply the principle of least astonishment, not to require editors to follow any particular policy. Kaldari (talk) 06:15, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Duh. May, not shall. FT2  15:38, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
  • "We have an offer you can't refuse." 
--The Evil IP address (talk) 09:30, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
  • The text right below the section name shows complete lack of understanding of the matter discussed. While Wikipedians have to abide the resolutions of WMF, the text of guidelines is a matter of discussion. Right now this guideline is so completely improper worded, that supporting it constitutes a severe violation of WP:GUIDELINE, so I'm not really sure whether there is an excuse for banning its supporters. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 17:29, 9 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose I'm strongly in favour of the Principle Of Least Astonishment (POLA), but this isn't what I think of as POLA. As far as I'm concerned POLA already applies. If I click on someone's userpage I don't expect to see a porn collection, especially if they ever edit outside of that topic. Equally if I search this site for various terms related to erotica I would be astonished if we had written such articles as if this was intended for an audience of 7 year olds. Perhaps we need a guideline that covered issues such as the wording of links, or are we already following commonsense and if so would this be unnecessary wp:creep? I'm not aware of people using photographs of sex toys to illustrate articles about electricity, nor photos of scantily clad pornstars in the articles about their home town or highschool. My reading of this proposed guideline is that it is intended to censor contentious articles, not to make sure that you only see porn images if you click on a link that one would reasonably expect might lead to a porn image. ϢereSpielChequers 17:46, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
Category: