From: Craig Franklin <craig@halo-17.net>
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Fwd: [Gendergap] Photo of the Day on Wikimedia Commons
To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Tuesday, 17 May, 2011, 12:54

I'm going to add my voice to the "yeah, that wasn't cool".  To give a bit of an anecdote, John Vandenberg and I were doing a demonstration of Commons to some librarians and cultural curators yesterday, and it was a bit of a rude shock seeing that particular image on the frontpage.  One of the more elderly contributors remarked on it to me privately in a negative sense afterwards, all I could do was look embarassed and say "Yes, it's a bit of a racy image, isn't it.  Can't imagine how anyone thought that would be a good idea".  That's probably one contributor who won't be beating a path to our door in the future.

And, at the risk of editorialising here, those who are responding to this criticism by claiming that we're asking for "censorship" or that the freedom to plaster graphic images over the Commons frontpage is a battle for liberty along the lines of the fight against slavery or for universal suffrage... need to take an aspirin and have a good lie down.  Nobody is claiming that such images are not within Commons' scope; they quite clearly are, just like pictures of penises, medical procedures, and other images that people might find unpleasant are.  Should they be in scope for the main page though?  I don't think so, the same as a picture of a genital piercing, Osama bin Laden's bloodied corpse, or other pictures that could possibly cause innocent people to get in trouble should be out of main page scope.  As a community, I think most of us are mature enough to apply a common sense test to these things, and common sense would indicate that that image was likely to be one that would cause needless offense to people and hurt the project.