I am unconvinced that a photo of this nature adds anything to the article, or will remain that newsworthy. The incident is tragic, and documenting it is important, but a graphic picture of a severed head? Why? Mark
--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
There is no issue of censorship involved in having the good sense and good taste to not automatically display graphic photos that are likely to be offensive or upsetting to large numbers of people.
There will always be difficult questions of where to draw the line, I suppose, but we solve that issue in other cases by "going meta", i.e. avoiding the controversy.
With most issues, the wiki process works perfectly fine. It is almost never "either/or" with the text of an article -- creative people can almost always find a way to compromise on a text that is different from either of two extreme positions.
With photos, the "show" versus "don't show" really is an "either/or", though. The only possible compromise, and one which I think will almost always work just fine, is to *link* to the picture, with suitable warnings, and leave it at that.
That is the proposal that Anthere has proposed in this case, and that is what I support.
I do think that there are cases of photos that we ought to not even have on our site at all. Were it not for the extreme newsworthiness of this particular photo, and it's likely longterm political importance, I would argue for deleting it. This is not rotten.com.
I think that there is great validity to the concern for the family and for human dignity in general, with respect to photos of this nature.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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