Erik Moeller wrote:
I also imagine that different Wikipedia language versions will come up with whatever policies best fit them.
That would mean giving up on the idea that there is a neutral point of view, and instead succumbing to local cultural biases.
It is not clear to me that NPOV could ever require a _single_ version of all policies and all articles. Certainly the concept does push in the direction of a general sort of consistency, but not every kind of difference is "succumbing to local cultural biases".
For example, we don't insist that the German wikipedia be written in English, so as to avoid the local cultural bias of "speaking in German".
Or, imagine that a particular battle in Europe during World War II had some unusual but local impact on Japan. We might quite naturally imagine that the Japanese article _without bias_ but _with an eye towards the needs and interests of the local audience_ would have a different degree of detail on that topic than say en or fr or de.
Similarly, there can be different sorts of lines drawn as to when we put an image where you have no choice but to look at it in order to learn about a topic form us, versus place it on a separate page where you can learn about it if you like.
This is not censorship, and it need not be any more biased than writing in a local language or focussing on different details of local interest in general articles. Neutrality is perfectly consistent with respecting the preferences and needs of the audience in a great many cases.
(It isn't necessary to retreat into subjectivism, either, in order to affirmatively respect the values and needs of the reader.)
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Separately, I don't think the argument that "Those who want to hide these images don't trust the audience to be able to handle it" is very compelling, because the opposite argument could be made just as well. "Those who want to force the audience to see the image don't trust them to make up their own minds about what to read."
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying offensiveness should not be taken into account at all. The "default view" of Wikipedia could hide certain images which are considered offensive by the vast majority of editors. But our real goal should be to make the decision what is displayed an individual one, rather than a community choice that is imposed on the reader. We could also, on the request of schools and libraries, associate certain IP addresses with certain filter settings. Ideally, this would just be a switch in stylesheets and not affect the caching of the article pages.
Indeed, this would a good thing. In the past when content ratings were suggested, there was a firestorm of criticism as I recall.
But "would be a good thing" doesn't help us much with where we stand today, I am afraid.
It's a difficult issue.
--Jimbo