On Wednesday 14 January 2004 11:54 am, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Peter Jaros wrote:
It seems like a diagram, rather than a picture, would be much more informative, which is obviously the point. And if we offend fewer people, so much the better.
I think Peter points the way towards a principle that can resolve most, though perhaps not all, of the dilemmas we will face in this area.
The goal of our articles is to be informative, not offensive. It turns out that in most cases (penis, for example) the ways of presenting the content that are offensive are also lacking in terms of informativeness. A photo "in the style of" pornography takes away from our mission of informativeness, while a photo "in the style of" a medical text comports with that mission.
I am in total agreement that the images should be akin to those seen medical texts. However, I think that the people wo don't want to have pictures of various parts of the human body included in wikipedia won't be satisfied by that.
The question of diagrams vs. images is a very interesting one. Images and diagrams have slightly different aims, in my opinion. The aim of diagrams is to reduce the visual information to a minimum in order to illustrate either the constituent parts or the functionality of a system (or both). An image on the other hand tells us exactly how something looks. Take for example an article on the mars rover. A diagram of the rover would clearly and concisely display what parts it is made up of and how they function and interact. It would not, however give a detailed account of how it looks. While viewing an article on the mars rover which only had a diagram, I would ask myself "but what does it actually look like". As I have stated in anothe email in this thread, I think that images don't add a vast amount of information, but they add relevant and encyclopedic information nonetheless.
Best, Sascha Noyes