[Clipart] aggressive, potentially offensive language

[Nathan Eady]

chovynz <chovynz at gmail.com> writes:

> I think it has not come up before. I personally do not mind the
> titles, I'm a big guy, I can ignore stuff like that, however my
> Librarian side is saying this is not the appropriate venue to be
> saying such stuff.

It is certainly true that the OCAL is not intended to be a venue for
written political commentary.  If the drawing itself were a visual
expression of some political point, that would seem to be more in
keeping with what the OCAL is supposed to be, but that's not what's
going on here.

> So adding tags is a good idea, (bigot would be tagged "slander"?). 

> Do we really need tags such as "f***ing?" I'm inclined to remove those
> all-together. But then the question becomes "Do we change the tags and
> titles?" I am a little uncomfortable with that idea (changing someone
> else's tags or titles) as it smells of censorship to me,  

The tags (formerly keywords) are *our* (OCAL's) metadata, not part of
the author's work.  We routinely edit the tags.  They are intended to
help categorize the images, to enable both searching and filtering.  I
have absolutely no problem removing tags that are themselves obscene.
Heck, I remove tags just because they're not really relevant to the
image.  (Some authors upload large batches of images with the same set
of tags, some of which only apply to some of the images.)  The tags are
an organizational tool that OCAL uses to categorize the images.

Titles are somewhat more arguable, but I don't think OCAL is under any
obligation to retain obscene titles on otherwise non-obscene images.
Whether we feel it is important and worth our while to change the title
is open for discussion (the other option being, if it has an obscene
title, just tag the image as "profanity" and let it get filtered out
just because of the title).  So, let's discuss that.

I do want to clarify, regarding tags: I was not proposing tags
consisting of individual profane words.  I was proposing one tag
(probably "profanity") for all drawings that contain profane language.
However, if a given image is only obscene because of the title, changing
the title would make the tag unnecessary for that image.

If only the tags are obscene, then by all means any librarian can remove
the obscene ones.  The tags, as I said, are *our* organizational data.
Any tag that isn't useful for categorizing the image should be removed.
(Note that "categorizing the image" takes in more than just semantics.
We also have technical tags like b_w, grayscale, color, lineart, etc.
They aren't applied nearly consistently enough, but they exist.)

I also think it's high time we make a list of tags that some
organizations (such as schools and churches) may want to filter from
local copies of the collection.  Off the top of my head, such a list
should at least include "profanity", "nudity", "alcohol", "tobacco",
"weapon", and "violence".  Ideally, we should also provide a tool for
producing a filtered and easily searchable local copy of the collection.
Currently I'm not aware of any easy way to do that, which makes using
the collection problematic for some kinds of organizations.

> I am leaning towards tagging it cleanup, and asking him to remove the
> F and opinionated tags/titles.

Yeah, we should discuss titles.

I personally have no objection to changing titles.  The site is not
primarily intended as a place for authors to showcase their political
art.  It's intended as a *clipart* collection.  For clipart purposes,
the title is not an important part of the image.  It's metadata.  (This
doesn't mean that all titles with political implications need to be
changed.  Some of the images themselves have political implications, and
that doesn't stop them from being clip art someone might want to use in
a document or whatnot.)

Frankly, I would not object to changing titles purely for the purpose of
making them better reflect the actual content of the drawing.  Our
search feature uses the titles to inform its results.

But that's just my personal opinion.  We should probably attempt to
reach some kind of majority consensus before proceeding.

>> I'm assuming here that the people being insulted are public figures
>>
> I believe they are ministers of countries 

They're public figures, then, as I'd guessed.  Public figures have to
expect such opinions to be publicly directed at them.  It goes with the
territory.  Unless there's actual libel involved (i.e., concrete
non-verifiable claims), I am confident that we aren't under any actual
legal obligation to remove it.

However, our purpose here is to produce a useful clip-art collection.
If changing the titles improves the collection, I personally can't think
of any good reason *not* to change them.  We're a clipart library, not
an art showcase.  That's my opinion.

> that this person, personally does not like.

I figured that part out, yeah.

>> I'm also assuming that the images themselves are original material.  If
>> they're existing OCAL images with new titles as the only contribution,
>> they're redundant and should be marked as duplicates and hidden.
>>
> They seem to be original. 

If they're original, these images are worth keeping, IMO.  You never
know when somebody's going to be looking for an image of a dude in a
suit in just such-and-such a pose, or even an image of a specific
politician.  If we tag them appropriately, somebody who is looking for
such an image will hopefully be able to find them.

That just leaves the question of the titles, then.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library