Erik Moeller wrote:
Exactly. If you take a look at Talk:Clitoris/Image discussion, you will see that all options were offered, and the option of *showing the photo inline* (instead of just a link) got the most votes of all.
This shows me that you are right that majority vote is not the right way to determine the correct result. Majority vote is very frequently not helpful in finding or determining NPOV.
(Some advanced voting algorithms probably do a much better job of helping to find or determine a consensus, of course.)
So your belief that people will readily accept hiding "offensive" images behind links is clearly wrong; many people (including myself) perceive this as an endorsement of a pro-censorship POV and are therefore against it. Even if these people were in the minority, there would hardly be any consensus on the matter.
I doubt very much that in most cases, the people who would like to show the photo inline are so unreasonable as to absolutely insist that only their own viewpoint is the correct one, and that no compromise is possible.
So it appears that you believe that there will be consensus in cases where there clearly won't; that's fine, as long as we agree that consensus is a requirement for hiding an image behind a link.
Well, of course I can agree to that, since consensus is the requirement for everything that we do. "Showing the image" can hold no privileged position, "hiding the image behind a link" can hold no privileged position, "delete the image" can hold no privileged position.
I think I see where we disagree now. Your position is that we should show the image in all cases unless 95% of the people think it should not be shown, and that this should be a policy which overrides consensus and compromise. That's a perfectly acceptable position to hold, but will you agree that it would amount to abandoning NPOV for pictures and substituting instead a policy that most matches your own (and my own, I should add!) views about what should be shown?
With text, I feel that any form of voting is almost always inferior to creatively solving the problem with repeated revision of the text.
If there are cases where voting is absolutely necessary, and if I'm forced to say exactly what it means to have NPOV consensus, the answer surely can't be "NPOV is my own preferred position unless 95% of the people disagree with me."
Instead, the exact meaning of consensus in a voting situation has to be something like Condorcet, Approval voting, Instant Runoff or the like.
I think if we re-ran the vote on clitoris, with the same voters participating, but did it as a Condorcet, then "linking to the image" would be the clear winner by a longshot. Do you disagree? Or, if you do disagree, then let me suppose that I'm wrong, and ask another question: do you agree with me that going with the Condorcet winner would be the best available option?
--Jimbo