Talk:Resolution:Controversial content

Announcement of the resolution, from foundation-l:

This week, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees unanimously passed a resolution addressing the issue of controversial content on the projects. The Board also unanimously passed a resolution addressing images of identifiable, living people on the projects. The resolutions are posted at: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Images_of_identifiable_people

These topics have been the subject of active debate on the Projects, and particularly on Commons, for a long time. Last June, following extensive community debate, the Wikimedia Foundation Board requested the Executive Director undertake a study of the issue of controversial content on the projects, acknowledging the difficulty of the issue: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Commissioning_Recommendations_from_the_Executive_Director

Robert and Dory Harris were commissioned to do this study, which they did on meta in consultation with the community, publishing recommendations in September 2010. Their report is available at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_Content

At its October 2010 meeting, the Board was presented with this report. The Board discussed the recommendations in depth, and developed a working group to act on them. The working group's report was presented at the Board's next in-person meeting, in March 2011; and these resolutions were subsequently drafted and voted on. The working group report has also been posted on meta, at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Controversial_content/Board_report

Note that the controversial content resolution uses the term "curation." We are using this term to refer to all aspects of managing images and other content on our projects, including recruiting and acquiring contributions and uploading, categorizing, placement of images in articles and other pages (including gallery pages and the main page), featuring or highlighting, flagging for improvement, and deletion and removal. All of our projects are curated in line with broad editorial principles; this is an essential feature that distinguishes our projects from indiscriminate or general-purpose repositories.

Not all of the Harris recommendations are addressed in this resolution. In particular: project to the editing community; the Board would like to see demonstrated community support before creating such a project. and changes be made to current editing and/or filtering regimes surrounding text in Wikimedia projects; we feel editorial mechanisms regarding text are working well.
 * At this time, we refer the recommendation to create a WikiJunior
 * In agreement with the Harris report, we do not recommend that

Finally, we urge that the community, the Foundation and the Wikimedia movement continue to discuss the appropriate scope of Commons for fulfilling Wikimedia's mission; this is a difficult and important question.

Thank you to everyone who has worked on this issue, and special thanks to Robert and Dory Harris for their hard work.

-- Phoebe Ayers, on behalf of the Board working group and the Board