Tony Sidaway wrote:
Rebecca said:
I really think this comes down to an issue of
accessibility. If we're
aiming to build a large, open and accessible encyclopedia, then I
don't think it helps that cause to effectively limit its readership to
the most extremely liberal people on the planet - which rules out a
vast amount of our potential readers and contributors.
There are no a priori access restrictions on Wikipedia. If the
pictures offend you, don't download them.
But often a person has no way of knowing whether a picture will be
offensive until he has seen it. We can only suggest that a picture
*may* be offensive to some, perhaps with some offensiveness rating.
That can still give the user the option to set his own tolerance level.
I don't think we can say whether a given picture is or is not likely to be
offensive to anyone--for instance I was utterly unprepared for the
apparently genuine expressions of distress at the presence of a smudgy
nipple, and I don't think that's an untypical attitude.
I'm not going to stand in the way of those who want to give it a go,
though. We use consensus for judging a lot of stuff on Wikipedia and
although it isn't infallible it seems to work better than you'd think it
oughta.