Sounds very rational and resonable to me. Mark
--- James Rosenzweig jwrosenzweig@yahoo.com wrote:
The difficult thing for me is that I agree with all of you to some extent -- with Erik and Anthere's desire for openness and with Mark (and at least one other person whose name I've forgotten) who wants to make the encyclopedia more friendly and available to people who may be offended. I think we need to respect both viewpoints.
And for this reason, I think the choice is actually relatively clear. Linking someone to a photograph allows them to choose to see it -- yes, we can argue (with reason) that it is a form of censorship, but surely it's a mild one. Of course, we can argue that if we listen to all cultures' taboos we'll have to link even to pictures of Queen Elizabeth II because she's not veiled, but I think we all can agree that we're raising that here more as a debating point than an actual suggestion. There are obvious borderline cases. The human penis and clitoris are definitely among them -- I agree wholeheartedly that any solution for one should be applied equally to the other. I don't think there's any great public sentiment in any culture that warmly embraces public photos of the penis while rejecting those of the clitoris. So we link to them both.
Images of torture, etc., again, I think it's clear. We link to them. We carefully choose images that are least likely to alarm the reader and allow them to be displayed. We use the best judgment we can.
Editors do this, and that's what we are. I don't think we need to appeal to sweeping principles (though we should keep them in mind). We need to use reason and good sense. There isn't any answer that will always fit every occasion well. We will always have a tension between showing and not showing pictures, unless we choose to show them all (which, I think, will radically limit Wikipedia's audience) or to show none (which would be a horrid shame and lose us a bunch of editors). So we need to find a good middle ground that makes everyone slightly uncomfortable without truly upsetting more than a few. I feel we're all being pretty reasonable about this (for which I'm very glad), and I think we can settle this. I don't sense any real objection to hiding pictures of both clitoris and penis behind links, or to showing one or two pictures from Abu Ghraib while putting the rest in a gallery behind a link. If we can all live with that, let's do it -- I think it serves our readers and the cause of free speech equally well. And let's continue to address these issues as fairly as we can, always seeking compromises that try to meet the needs of everyone involved as fully as possible.
That's my two cents,
Jwrosenzweig
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