That's a pretty ugly discussion, but reading over their (somewhat misguided) page does bring up one possible addition to the discussion on "inappropriate" images which I didn't see raised before.
Namely, if the English Wiki servers are hosted in a U.S. state, then the site does, if I am not mistaken, fall under various laws about the distribution of "obscene" images to minors. "Obscene" is of course a subject term, in the legal realm as well as here, but there is some precedent which could allow one to make such decisions.
Now this isn't a plea to delete such images; it's a point of departure for thinking about them. If images which would very likely count as "obscene" under that particular state law (Florida?) were able to be X-ed out (that is, their presence would be visible, even though their content would not be) by default, and could be "enabled" by people who swore that they were not minors (or didn't live in the U.S.), wouldn't that solve a few problems at once? Those who are worried about seeing a nipple wouldn't by default, while those who wanted to see them could easily do so, and instead of doing it under the guise of someone's projected "decency", we were doing it simply to comply with U.S. law (blame U.S. prudery on this all you want, but I'm betting laws of a similar sort, though with different boundaries set, exist in most countries).
Well.. it's a thought. I'm not interested in playing nanny to the world but I am interested in Wikipedia being legally safe. An additional thought which occurred to me is that I'm fairly sure a federal law was passed not too long ago which requires age verification information for nude models to be hosted by the website hosting their pictures (proof that they are at least 18 years old). If that's the case, that's another unpleasant legal/technical thing to think about.
FF
On 8/17/05, Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com wrote:
There's quite a stink going on about this [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedians_for_Decency]] and its ensuing VfD. I think the project is totally bogus and un-Wiki, but I'm interested in what some other people (Jimbo, although I somehow doubt he would want to go near this one) have to say about it.
Anyway, I pity the admin who closes that VfD.
- Ryan
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