Fastfission wrote:
Personally, I'd rather it be an either/or choice. I
don't want to help
people enforce arbitrary limits on knowledge (if you don't think it is
arbitrary, consider the difference in which a partially-exposed female
breast is considered on American television in comparison to images of
gratuitous violence). I think the principle stands whether it is
pornography or subversive politics, whether the censor is a school
board in Ohio or the Ayatollah.
I think actively censoring Wikipedia is a problem, yes, but providing
more accurate metadata to our reusers, and ideally using some of it to
give visitors to
wikipedia.org more options, serves a number of purposes.
I wouldn't turn any filtering on by default, but I have often wished for
some way to filter which images are shown, usually simply because I find
them distracting than because I'm actually offended by them. For
example, on occasion I've looked up species of insects on Wikipedia, and
if I already know what they look like, I don't usually want to have to
read the whole article while staring at a close-up view of a mandible.
I of course would like images to be available, but I'd like to be able
to say, "don't show me insect pictures unless I ask for them", because I
find it distracting. Others might want them shown, but it would be nice
if logged-in users had some options. As it stands now, I have to screw
around with firefox to turn off images, which is a hassle.
-Mark