While this can work in some situations, in a Wiki run by volunteers you rely on people to accurately self-classify their work, which many would not. Or you rely on other volunteers changing the rating. Whether up or down, it probably will lead to a big debate. This dozens or even hundreds of debates a day, which would be quite time consuming. Too many people already try to AfD photos for phony reasons. ("I don't like that person; I don't believe you took the picture!" being one I encountered myself.)
On 7/23/2014 9:51 PM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
I agree that offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder. And while there may be all manner of very niche groups who find strange things offensiveness, maybe some people object to seeing refrigerators or reading about cakes, nonetheless we know that there are a lot of widespread categories of offensiveness that generate the bulk of discussions about the inclusion of items on Wikipedia or Commons.
What we could do is to have to some system of classification (like the movies) for articles, images, and/or categories indicating that they are potentially offensive for various reasons. Perhaps along similar lines to the "content advisories" in IMDB, e.g.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295297/parentalguide?ref_=tt_stry_pg
People could then put in their profiles that all classifications are acceptable or them or that these are the classifications they don't want to see (e.g. Sex and Nudity, Gore and Violence, Profanity, etc -- obviously our classifications might not be identical to IMDB as we are dealing with different kinds of content but you get the idea). When that person searches Wikipedia or Commons, then those articles, images and categories that they would find offensive are not returned. When a person reads an article containing an offensive-to-them categorised image, it is simply not displayed or some image saying "Suppressed at your request (Sex and Nudity)". We could possibly bundle such these finer classifications into common collections, e.g. Inappropriate for Children, Suitable for Muslims, or whatever, so for many people it's a simple tick-one-box.
For anonymous users or users who have not explicitly set their preferences, rendering of an article or image could first ask "This article/image has been tagged as potentially offensive for SuchAndSuch reason, click OK to confirm you want to view it". If they are a logged-in user, it could also offer a link to set their preferences for future use.
I note that movies are often made with variants for different countries. Sometimes that's simply a matter of being dubbed into another language but it can also include the deletion (or replacement) of certain scenes or language that would be offensive in those countries. So it is not as if we are reinventing the wheel here, just customising it to Wikipedia.
Kerry