On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 05:12, Erik Moeller wrote:
Letting the *majority* view win on this matter would be the first step toward abandoning NPOV. And when this issue was brought up in the past, people started arguing: Well, maybe we *should* abandon NPOV on this, just to avoid losing readers. If you accept that argument, you might as well take all the criticisms out of the [[Mother Teresa]] article because they might drive readers away, or "mask them" by moving them to a separate page, as was initially proposed.
I don't agree that "majority rule" on this is POV. If we form a policy such as "images which 50% of our readers will find offensive should be masked behind a (clearly labeled) link", then we are retreating from the POV "this image is offensive" to the NPOV "50% of readers find this image offensive".
Other tests, such as "images of male and female genitalia should be treated the same", are definitely POV. Many people would agree with such a principle; others would disagree. If we adhere to this principle, then we are forcing our "enlightened, correct" POV on our readers.
I think that "Images which are offensive to N% of our readers are masked" is the only NPOV policy possible. There is room for debate on what N should be; Erik has proposed "universally offensive" at 90 or 95%; Rich Holton has proposed 30%. I think 30% is a much better number than 90 or 95%. (I don't remember whether it was Erik who associated "universally offensive" with 90 or 95%.)
I disagree that the issue of masking images is similar to the idea of masking information. Images are obvious and immediate, and have a very different impact than text.
Carl Witty