Two responses to "The Tragedy of Wikipedia's Commons"

Following last week's op-ed by Gigs ("The Tragedy of Wikipedia's Commons"), the Signpost is carrying two contrary opinions from MichaelMaggs, a bureaucrat on Wikimedia Commons, and Mattbuck, a British Commons administrator.

The true tragedy

The title of last week's piece, "The Tragedy of Wikipedia's commons" was perhaps rather more ironic than its author intended. One of the truly great tragedies of medieval England was not so much the tragedy of the commons in its original sense but the forcible enclosure by powerful outside interests of the historic common land that had for centuries been available as a free resource for all. If there is any tragedy here, it is in the author's wish to use Wikipedia to take over Wikimedia Commons and to do very much the same thing online.

Background and remit

Commons always has and always will have a far broader free-content remit than that of supporting the narrow focus of an encyclopaedia. Commons provides media files in support not just the English Wikipedia but all of the WMF projects, including Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikivoyage and many more. These sister projects of Wikipedia often have a need to use media on Commons that could never be used on the Wikipedias as they are not - in Wikipedia's narrow sense - "encyclopaedic". Some of Commons' detractors like to give the impression that its collections are nothing more than a dumping ground for random non-educational content. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the energy expended by those who would criticise from the outside (but who are strangely reluctant to engage on wiki) bears little relation to the extremely small proportion of images that could in any way be considered contentious.

Commons' policies are of necessity different and more wide ranging than any of the individual projects. We hold many images that will never be useful to the English Wikipedia, and that is not only OK, but should be welcomed as Commons' contribution to the overall mission of the Wikimedia Foundation, "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally". Note that the overall mission of the WMF is not "to write an encyclopaedia", but rather to develop and disseminate educational content. Supporting the English Wikipedia is one way, but by no means the only way, in which we do that, and the idea that Commons should be forcibly subjugated to the policies of a specialist encyclopaedia project would do immeasurable harm to the mission which I had hoped we were all working to support.

Contrary to the suggestion that the Commons policy on scope of 2008 was an "unchallenged action by a tiny group of people", it was in fact largely an exercise in documenting for the first time the unwritten long-established practices of the community. The policy attracted very little controversy (despite it being very widely advertised, on Wikipedia and elsewhere) largely because the vast majority of it was uncontentious. Indeed, the fact that it has retained very wide community support since then indicates that we didn't do too bad a job.

With its specialised emphasis on media curation and the niceties of copyright law, Commons will never be as popular a place for editors to hang out as some of the bigger encyclopaedias. It requires not only a particular set of interests, but also at least for admins some level of specialist knowledge which not everyone has or is interested to acquire. Those outside the local community who only see the external carping may not realise that we have thousands of very committed editors who work tirelessly in the background curating and categorising content and bringing to the attention of the admins non-educational content that has no place in our collections.

Commons has never (as was claimed last week) been merely a repository that supports its sister WMF projects. Right from the start it had a remit to make content freely available to external re-users. As early as 2006 there was a formal proposal (since implemented as InstantCommons) to integrate into Mediawiki a mechanism specifically designed to support users on non WMF projects. Perhaps the real worry of last week's author was that Commons currently holds too many non-encyclopedic images of a sexual nature. But even assuming that is true, a proposal to revoke one of the fundamental free content aims of Commons hardly seems proportionate. Instead, let's have a proper discussion on what Commons' scope should be. Times change, as do priorities, and what made sense five years ago may now perhaps need to be revisited.

Over the last few months especially there has been a lot of discussion within Commons as well as outside about issues concerning the small proportion of our holdings that relate to sexual imagery and to privacy/the rights of the subject. Both have complex moral and legal dimensions, and neither has yet been fully resolved. I've set out the main strands of argument below, as objectively as I can, for those who may not be familiar with them. Of course, these summaries are by no means the whole story, and many of the discussions are far more subtle than I have space for here, so please bear with me if you are familiar with this and feel I have mis-characterised or omitted any important point that may be close to your own heart. I deliberately make no comment on the validity of any of these arguments.

Sexual imagery

Some argue that pornographic images (as defined in some way) are never appropriate for any of the Wikimedia projects and are simply not educational.

Others argue that we should keep most images, almost whatever the subject matter, as we need to show the whole range of human experience if we are to call ourselves a comprehensive educational resource. Anything else would be censorship.

Yet others suggest that not all the sexual images held by Commons are "educational", properly defined. Some are photographs that have been taken for non-educational purposes, for example personal gratification/entertainment, and/or have been uploaded for the same purpose or by users who wish to push an extreme view that equates any limits at all with unacceptable "censorship".

Finally, some hold that Commons has too many images in certain marginally-educational areas that, taken overall, create an oppressive or threatening environment (e.g. for women) which may be harming the project as a whole.

Privacy and the rights of the subject

One strand of argument is that we should do more to respect the rights of individuals who are identifiable in a photograph, and recognise that, even where the image may be legal, it can be highly damaging to the individual. Even when an outsider might naively think the image unremarkable, it may still be considered threatening, harassing or oppressive by its subject.

Another strand is that allowing the subject of a photograph a say on whether it should stay on Commons or not opens the door to all sorts of censorship. Proponents argue it's essential that we are able to collect all types of educational image, including those that may offend the subject.

Review

If there is indeed a problem with the boundaries of Commons' scope - perceived or otherwise - we should tackle it head-on with open community discussion. Commons should be and I believe is receptive to the views of everyone within the Wikimedia community in reviewing its curatorial policies. But the way to get things changed is to engage rather than to criticise from afar.

A comprehensive review of Commons' scope is just starting now, and you need never say again that your voice cannot be heard. Please talk.

Please visit Commons' Review of Scope pages now, and make your views known for the sake of all the Wiki communities.

Conclusion

Commons has proved to be a phenomenal success in the years since its introduction, and we should be proud of what has been achieved. We should keep it, improve it, and celebrate it.

Last week, the Signpost published a rather scathing op-ed about Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia project which seeks to be a resource of free, educational media. Perhaps you feel it presented a valid argument, perhaps not, that's for you to make up your mind on. I would like to take this chance to offer a defence of Commons.

As you probably know, Wikimedia Commons acts as a central repository for images. Once an image is on Commons, any project can use it, exactly the same way they can use their own images. It's an incredibly valuable tool for the Wikimedia project as a whole, as it prevents duplication and provides a central place to search. You want an image of something for your Wikipedia article? Commons probably has a category for it. And that is the same whether you're editing in English, German, Arabic or even Tagalog.

I first joined Commons back in October 2007, when I was working on an eclectic mix of the Ffestiniog Railway and McFly. About six months later I became a Flickrreviewr, checking uploads from Flickr that for some reason couldn't be checked by a bot, and a month or so after that I became an admin, primarily so I could deal with all the copyright violations I came across with the Flickr work. In the five years since my interest in admin duties has waxed and waned, and I had little side-projects, but Commons had swiftly become my home-wiki. My watchlist has some 60,000 pages on it, of which 10,000 are my own photos.

Commons has its problems, I cannot deny that. The number of people who believe that because they found a photo on Google it can be uploaded to Commons is simply staggering. The search engine is designed for pages not images (a limitation of the software). The community can be a bit fractured, it can be very difficult to get people blocked for being terminally incapable of working with others (even when their name comes back to the admin noticeboards week after week after week), and we have remarkably little in the way of actual policy. Indeed our main guiding principles boil down to two pages: Commons:Licensing and Commons:Project Scope. The former tells us what files we're allowed, the latter which we want. Scope is the real issue of the moment, and in a nutshell it says that Commons collects educational media. Which brings the question, "what is educational?"

A similar problem has existed on Wikipedia for years - what is notable? There are even factions - deletionists, who think articles must prove their notability, and inclusionists, who think that there's no harm in letting potentially non-notable articles stay. And so it is on Commons - those who adhere to a strict definition of educational, and those who accept a somewhat looser guide.

And this dispute would be fine, if it were argued on Commons and in the abstract. But that is not what happens. The major rift happened a few years ago, when, apparently due to a disparaging Fox News article about the amount of "porn" on Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales, co-founder of Wikimedia, came onto Commons and starting deleting sexuality images. That didn't really go over well with the Commons community, of which Jimbo has never been a part, especially when it was found he was deleting images which were in use on multiple projects. To cut a long story short, the deleted images were restored and Jimbo lost admin rights at Commons, as did several admins who had joined him in his purge. Many of the images Jimbo deleted were in fact subsequently deleted again, following deletion requests to allow for Community input. But the deed had been done, and for a large proportion of the Commons community, it appeared that Jimbo was not to be trusted to have the best interests of the project at heart.

The issue stewed for a few years, and reemerged with a vengeance last year. Again, it has been fought almost entirely over what some describe, disparagingly, as "porn". As I mentioned earlier, the Commons search engine is not really designed for images, and so it tends to give unexpected results. One of those results was the search "toothbrush" returning a picture of a woman using an electric toothbrush for self-pleasure as one of the top results. This was entirely a legitimate result - it was a picture of a toothbrush, and it was titled as such. And while the so-called "principle of least astonishment" can easily be applied to categories - Commons has a whole proliferation of "nude or semi-nude people with X" categories on the grounds that nudity should not appear in the parent category "X" - it doesn't really work for a search algorithm, not if you want to continue with correct categorisation. Until the Wikimedia Foundation develops some form of search content filter (which itself brings up issues of what exactly should be filtered - should images of Muhammed be filtered out? What about Nazi images due to German law?) all that can really be done is to either delete the image or rename it to try and reduce the chances of an innocuous search returning it. I personally favour keeping the images, and this has led me to be named as part of a "porn cabal" by people, most of whom rarely if ever edit on Commons, who favour deleting the images.

But the issue, for me, is that these issues so rarely get brought up on Commons. Instead of using the deletion request system to highlight potentially problematic images (which is after all what the process is for), the detractors would rather just soapbox on Wikipedia - usually on Jimbo's talk page - about how awful Commons is, and how this latest penis photo proves once and for all that I (or some other member of the "porn cabal") am the worst admin in the history of forever and deserve to be shot out of a cannon into a pit of ravenous crocodiles. What people don't seem to understand is that in large part, I do agree. Commons has problems. We do have too many low quality penis pictures - so many that we even have a policy on it - and so I have a bot which searches new uploads for nudity categories and creates a gallery so I can see any problematic ones, and thus nominate them for deletion. This somehow seems to make me an even worse admin in many people's eyes. We should indeed have better checks to ensure that people in sexual pictures consented to having their pictures uploaded, and I would like to see a proper policy on this. I'd like to see the community as a whole have a reasoned discussion on the matter, for a policy to be drafted, amended, voted on and finally adopted. But that is very difficult when you feel you are under attack all the time, where your attackers are not willing to actually work with you to create a better project.

Wikimedia projects are based around collaboration and discussion within the community. I would urge those of you who feel that Commons is "broken" to come to Commons and offer constructive advice. Attacking long-term Commons users will get you nowhere, nor will pasting links on other projects, or on Jimbo's talk page. If you truly want to make Commons a better place, and are not in fact just looking for any reason to tear it down, then come to Commons. Come to the village pump - tell us what is wrong, and how you feel we could do better. Use the systems we have in place for project discussions to discuss the project. Sitting back and sniping from afar does nothing for your cause, and it only embitters the Commons community.

Come and talk to us. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-06-19/In focus

2013-06-19

The Farmbrough amendment request—automation and arbitration enforcement

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By Neotarf

Richard Farmbrough

Editor's note: the "Arbitration report" invited Richard Farmbrough to comment on his recent request to the arbitration committee. In an effort to represent all sides of the issue, we also asked arbitrators T. Canens and Carcharoth if they would take the time to answer some questions about the case, since they both commented on the initial request. Carcharoth declined, but T. Canens agreed to talk to us from his own perspective.

Richard Farmbrough was set to have his day in court, but as events transpired, this was not to be so. On 25 March 2013, an accusation was made against Farmbrough at Arbitration Enforcement (AE), claiming that he violated the terms of an automated edit restriction. Within hours, Farmbrough had filed his own request with the arbitration committee, citing the newly filed AE request and claiming that the motion was being used "in an absurd way" in the filing of enforcement requests: "I have not made any edits that a sane person would consider automation."

The AE arm of the arbitration committee blocked Farmbrough for one year, after receiving a go-ahead from arbitrator T Canens and without waiting for input from either Farmbrough or the community. The committee, noting that Farmbrough was blocked, then declined to consider Farmbrough's request.

Meet Richard Farmbrough

Richard Farmbrough is something of an icon in the Wikipedia saga. In 2007, Smith Magazine interviewed him as one of the most prolific editors on Wikipedia. In 2011, he was cited by R. Stuart Geiger in "The Lives of Bots" as the creator of the {{nobots}} opt-out template and an advocate of the "bots are better behaved than people" philosophy of bot development. Farmbrough is also credited with coining the word "botophobia", to make the point that bot policy needs to be as responsive to public perceptions as to technical considerations. Farmbrough described himself to the Signpost as "a reader and sometime editor and administrator of the English Wikipedia ... [I've] contributed to and started many articles, worked on policy, edited templates, created and organised categories, participated in discussions, helped new users, run database extraction, created file lists and reports for Wikipedians, done anti-vandal work, and was a host at Tea-house. I also wrote and ran bots."

Genesis

Farmbrough's first bot was Smackbot, later renamed Helpful Pixie Bot "to be more welcoming". Helpful Pixie Bot worked mainly on article space, using mostly the AWB (AutoWikiBrowser) program for general clean-up, dating maintenance tags, checking and formatting ISBN numbers, and other tasks that are listed on its user page; it also ran tasks requested by individual editors or projects. Femto Bot was created later, and did more "meta" tasks, such as archiving and maintaining page lists for WikiProjects.

All of the bots' tasks were approved by BAG, the Bot Approvals Group, "although in the less restrictive environment of 2007 a more liberal approach was taken to 'obviously' good extensions of existing tasks than was later the case." Before being submitted to BAG's testing regime, bot tasks underwent a significant amount of manual testing. In one typical case, Farmbrough manually checked and saved more than 3000 edits over the course of six or seven weeks.

None of Farmbrough's bots are currently running. Some of the code and data from his bots is used in other bots, such as AnomieBot and AWB-based bots. AnomieBot has taken over some of Helpful Pixie Bot's dating tasks, but the other general fixes are not being performed.

Dwarves vs gnomes?

So what went wrong? "In September 2010 I made some changes to the general clean-up, there was some opposition and I agreed to revert the changes ... However, an avalanche had been unleashed, and the matter was escalated to ANI. Subsequently I removed all custom general fixes, and rewrote the entire bot in perl, since AWB at that time could not meet the exacting standards that were being demanded. ... One would think that having agreed to do everything asked, and even gone beyond it, the matter would have rested there; but a series of ANI and ARB filings ensued, some rejected out of hand, others gaining traction until by mid-2012 it had become impossible to edit."

As one observer put it, "What we are seeing here is 'The War of the Dwarves and the Gnomes'. Dwarves are editors who work mainly on content, and typically put a lot of thought into each edit; gnomes are editors who work mainly on form, and tend to make large numbers of edits doing things like changing a - to a –. Richard is a Supergnome, and the comparatively small fraction of errors generated by his huge volume of automated edits ended up costing the dwarves who maintain articles an enormous amount of time. Eventually, after repeated failed attempts to rein him in, the outraged dwarves banded together to ban him."

An automation restriction

The outcome of the 2012 Rich Farmbrough arbitration case, along with its subsequent motions, was not at all in his favor. It contained the wording of the automation restriction that has become so controversial: "Rich Farmbrough is indefinitely prohibited from using any automation whatsoever on Wikipedia. For the purposes of this remedy, any edits that reasonably appear to be automated shall be assumed to be so." A later "amendment by motion" stated "Rich Farmbrough is directed ... to make only completely manual edits (i.e. by selecting the [EDIT] button and typing changes into the editing window)".

Is typing four tildes "automation"?

So did Farmbrough break his automation ban? And what exactly are "automated edits"? Opinion was divided over whether automation had been used. Some said there was no compelling reason to believe the edits were likely automated. Others speculated that the edits might have been done with the "search and replace" function in the edit window toolbar, and therefore not prohibited under the restriction. Still others said the edits could be completely manual. (Farmbrough told the Signpost that it was "a manual error incidentally" that gave rise to the AE posting.)

The Arbitration Enforcement administrator, however, stated that "it appears very improbable that this sort of repetitive change was made without some sort of automation, if only the copy/paste or search/replace functions (which are forbidden under the terms of the decision, which prohibits 'any automation whatsoever')", and defined "find and replace" as automation because "it produces the effect of many keystrokes with one or few keystrokes". If "search and replace" is automation, replied the commenters, then so is "copy and paste" or signing posts with four tildes. Farmbrough pointed out that caps-lock also fits the definition of producing the effect of many keystrokes with one keystroke.

Defining automation

What interpretation of "automated edits" is reasonable? We asked Farmbrough if some automated edits are potentially damaging and others not:

“

In order to establish a useful definition of "automated" we should establish why we want it. The putative reason is that automation "gone wrong" allows creation of many many errors that us poor humans cannot deal with. This is false, though, as I have inspected about 176,000 edits of HPB looking for a particular error; it took maybe a few hours—try inspecting that many human edits. Moreover, automated edits can be rolled back and reapplied in an emergency. Nonetheless, granting that people have reservations, [the definition of automation] should clearly be looking edits that are repetitive, high speed and affect many pages.

”

Chilling effect on bot operators?

It has been suggested that this will have a chilling effect on other bot operators, that they will be afraid of making mistakes and getting banned. Says one talk page commenter, "A lot of bot ops and potential botops think twice before starting a bot. I have talked with several editors who want too but are afraid if they make mistakes that the zero defect mentality will get them banned."

Arbitrator T. Canens responded:

“

Obviously bots cannot run if the botop is blocked/banned. However, nothing prevents other botops from taking over Rich's bots, provided that they comply with all relevant policies and guidelines, including promptly addressing any concerns about the bot raised by other members of the community. Bot defects are unavoidable (though I'm not sure if there's any statistics documenting exactly how frequent it is). The point is that botops need to be responsive to community concerns and promptly fix any reported defects. We have many bot operators, but to the best of my knowledge only a very small number were ever blocked/banned over bot-related issues (Rich and Betacommand are the only two that come to mind).

”

Does it matter if edits are beneficial?

We did not think to ask whether sub-optimal edits are beneficial, as long as they move the project forward, but both Farmbrough and T. Canens identified this as an issue.

Said T. Canens, "It is very clear to me that the committee in both the initial sanction and the subsequent motion intended to ban all forms of automated editing whatsoever from Rich, regardless of whether any particular automated edit is beneficial. In general, this happens when the Committee determines that 1) the disruption caused by the totality of the automated editing outweighs the benefits of said editing and 2) there is no less restrictive sanction that is both workable and capable of preventing further disruption. In this case, for instance, given the high volume of Rich's automated edits, a remedy that only prohibits him from making problematic edits would be impractical."

Farmbrough stated, "What we should be concerned about is the encyclopedic project, is something someone is doing damaging or benefiting the project? If it is damging we should look at steps to address that, if it is benefiting we should look at ways to improve it further."

Procedural issues about arbitration and enforcement

The Arbitration Enforcement request against Farmbrough was initiated at 10:29, 25 March 2013, and closed less than 13 hours later, at 23:04, with only the accuser and the AE administrator participating. After a request to leave the case open a little bit longer for discussion was declined, discussion continued on Sandstein's and Rich Farmbrough's talk pages.

Farmbrough's block at AE

T. Canens' statement at Farmbrough's Arbcom request that "I think the AE request can proceed as usual", and Richard's subsequent block, received comments at various talk pages ranging from "[it is] somewhat strange that T. Canens should encourage blocking of an editor who has made an appeal to ArbCom" to "the comments from arbitrators seem to say 'block him, we're not going to change the sanction' (T. Canens) and 'we're not going to change the sanction because he's blocked' (Carcharoth and Risker)."

"I was amazed that one arb suggesting Sandstein go ahead was considered authority to do so," Farmbrough told the Signpost. "Even more at the circular argument 'Rich is blocked so the request to remove the provision he was blocked under is moot'".

We asked arbitrator T. Canens why he had Farmbrough blocked while his Arbcom request was still open.

“

The filing of an amendment request to lift a sanction is by itself insufficient to delay an AE request seeking the enforcement of said sanction; were it otherwise, people could file tons of meritless amendment requests in the hopes that they'll delay the AE request long enough to get it closed as stale. There needs to be at least a reasonable probability that a majority of arbitrators would in fact grant the appeal to justify delaying action on the AE thread, but Rich's appeal is very unlikely to be granted, as the committee views with disfavor 1) multiple appeals in a short time period, and 2) appeals to lift a sanction that has been recently violated, as Rich's appeal fits both. Note that any AE block would not prevent Rich from emailing the committee with any additional comments on his request.

”

Autonomy of Arbitration Enforcement administrators

There was also some disagreement over the intentions of the arbitration committee with regard to automation and role of AE.

According to one interpretation of the Farmbrough arbitration case, "it isn't the automated editing itself that is harmful/disruptive, and if there is no harm being done here then the 1 year block does not prevent any problems. So in that sense it is neither punitive nor preventative!" and "the Enforcement By block section says 'may be blocked...' which I can't read any other way than to imply that some discretion is given to administrators to not block or to block for a shorter period when, for example, the infraction was so exceedingly minor or when there is no or very little disruption."

According to another view, "the underlying decision of the Arbitration Committee to consider all automated editing of whatever nature by Rich Farmbrough to be harmful, and to ban all such editing. ... Because Arbitration Committee decisions are binding, AE admins in particular have no authority to question the Committee's decisions; they must limit themselves to executing the decisions."

We asked T. Canens if, under these circumstances, "the arbitration committee needs to clarify their intentions about automation and mass editing". Canen replied:

“

Admins are volunteers and are free to refrain from taking action on any AE request if they do not want to, though they are not free to overturn another admin's AE action except under certain limited circumstances. For example, AE has, on occasion, declined to block for isolated 1RR violations when the edit being reverted was unquestionably problematic, even if it doesn't fall in one of the xRR exemptions. If Rich's edit were indeed completely correct, this fact might justify letting this particular violation go. On the other hand, the wilful nature of Rich's violation and his history of violations of the restriction would counsel against overlooking the violation. It is up to the AE admins to balance these competing considerations; arbcom generally does not interfere with AE in the absence of clear error or new developments.

”

Is there a way forward?

"I just want to get back to editing" says Farmbrough. "Wikipedians do not edit for thanks and barnstars, though they are both nice to receive. It is however a big disincentive to edit, and part of the hostile environment, when there's a constant (and I do mean constant) threat hanging over every editor's head that they're going to have to spend days and weeks fighting off ANI threads and Arbcom cases every time they do something that someone doesn't like."

Given the absence of any other formal mechanism for dealing with automation disputes, that may be exactly what will happen once the block is over. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-06-19/Humour

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