Ed Poor wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>Do we have a standard on not showing the goat
man's naked butt?
>We have standards on not violating copyright and on vandalising;
>either of these alone is sufficient for those specific cases.
>I personally wouldn't want to enshrine an additional standard.
Don't we have a standard?
We have standards, but I'm not aware of any about goatse as such.
There isn't a single instance of a link to the
goatse image other than on the
article about it.
I can't think of anywhere else that such a link would be relevant.
We have a standard against inclusion of irrelevant links,
and we had it before goatse ever appeared.
Every time it has appeared, people have given it a good
swift kick in the, er,
I mean deleted the link as soon as possible. It's the single most common entry
in "vandalism in progress".
Every time it has appeared has been, in fact, a case of vandalism.
It's also presumably been a copyright infringement.
We have standards against vandalism and copyright infringement,
and we had them before goatse ever appeared.
Then someone decided to remove the ability of ANYONE to
make in-line links to
external images. I noticed that when the "mediator" cartoon gracing my user
page disappeared.
This change was suggested in the wake of one goatse vandalism spree, yes,
but I (and many others) supported it for quite different reasons,
all (IIRC) of which have been mentioned to you in others' responses by now.
So we have a standard against directly linking external images,
for those reasons.
Oh, we have a standard all right. We're debating
whether it should be
"official" or what.
I don't think that it's much of a surprise that ordinary standards
would lead to a situation where goatse has a difficult time
legitimately appearing in about any form at about any place on Wikipedia.
It really is true that that image is hardly appropriate for Wikipedia;
that follows from general principles, not as a special case.
This isn't a conspiracy of hypocritcal standards
designed to banish that image without admitting that we're doing so.
So there's no reason to create an explicit standard against it,
and I'd certainly oppose such a thing.
-- Toby