User talk:Wnt/Personal image blocking
Categories[edit]
I think being able to filter on categories would help greatly. One should be able to check commons categories which currently aren't available easily for the images on Wikipedia. Doing this efficiently would probably need support. A nice way might be to have a facility to automatically send the categories of all media that would be included and then let the javascript either include th file or put a marker on saying it was filtred out. Dmcq (talk) 16:17, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
- In order to prevent category assignments from being politicized, I think it's crucial that an individual user transform the category list to a blacklist. This is a simple matter of copying the names from the category to the blacklist page - unfortunately, the software makes it difficult, because neither editing the category nor using "What links here" will display the list of pages. Of course, the pages appear under the "media in category..." on the page itself - but the filenames often end "..." and they copy that way, without giving the full text. You're right that the script could check both the filename and the category against the list of blocked media (which would then come in two parts) but that means it has to download the picture (or at least the annotation text) before deciding if it is on the blacklist, and then hunt for the categories, and check each category ... and even then, the files won't list the higher level categories their categories are in ... I think it is both better and simpler to ask for a way to go to a web page and get a flat list of all the files in a category you name (including its subcategories!). For all I know this exists right now. Wnt (talk) 17:54, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
- You are talking about something that is big and hard to set up and maintain rather than something a person could describe easily in most cases. Exactly why would it be politicized? People could easily change the filter, it isn't as though someone was setting what the categories should contain. You're talking about what would happen if they were official categories rather than any old categories which is what would happen if we supported filters for sexual or Muslim or whatever. This would let people set up any filter they liked and share it.
- I'm still suspicious. There might be pressure to make official categories. There could be recriminations if someone takes an image out of one of the commonly used categories for some pedantic reason. But mostly, I'm just trying to think here of a scheme so simple that (depending on what a .js skin can do) it might be possible to implement it, in crude form, without Wikimedia developers getting involved. To exclude some category, you have to look up each file to be displayed, look for all the categories annotated in each file, and see whether any of these are subcategories of the category you want to block. Whereas what I proposed was just you search for the name of the file in a single text file you've already specified, without your browser ever having to open the page it points to. Wnt (talk) 00:50, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
- I suppose one could have an offline facility for generating such a list from some criteria. That way more complex criteria could be catered for and it would just need to be regenerated every so often. I was also worried about the size of such file lists but I suppose it might be okay. If one could easily generate such a list and compare it to an old list one could check out the differences and spot if people were doing strange things with the descriptions of some files and update the filter accordingly. That would certainly be a useful safety check for the developers of such lists and might be a generally useful facility for people looking after categories never mind just self censorship. Dmcq (talk) 07:02, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
- I'm still suspicious. There might be pressure to make official categories. There could be recriminations if someone takes an image out of one of the commonly used categories for some pedantic reason. But mostly, I'm just trying to think here of a scheme so simple that (depending on what a .js skin can do) it might be possible to implement it, in crude form, without Wikimedia developers getting involved. To exclude some category, you have to look up each file to be displayed, look for all the categories annotated in each file, and see whether any of these are subcategories of the category you want to block. Whereas what I proposed was just you search for the name of the file in a single text file you've already specified, without your browser ever having to open the page it points to. Wnt (talk) 00:50, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
- You are talking about something that is big and hard to set up and maintain rather than something a person could describe easily in most cases. Exactly why would it be politicized? People could easily change the filter, it isn't as though someone was setting what the categories should contain. You're talking about what would happen if they were official categories rather than any old categories which is what would happen if we supported filters for sexual or Muslim or whatever. This would let people set up any filter they liked and share it.
Meta[edit]
Wnt, you ought to post this at Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Controversial_content/Brainstorming
Here it will just gather dust. Regards. --JN466 14:25, 10 June 2012 (UTC)