Delirium-
It seems that you are assuming what you find personally offensive has "near universal offensiveness", and what you do not find personally offensive does not.
I'm willing to tolerate quite a lot of images that I find personally offensive. For example, I tolerate and defend a link to goatse.cx, even though I find that site highly offensive. I'm personally no big fan of violence, but I would defend the inclusion of such pictures where they are useful.
It is simply not true that I am arguing to justify my own moral preconceptions. I am arguing for minimizing censorship. I think I have a very good track record of doing so consistently and without bias. You appear to be advocating a ban in explicit imagery, on the other hand, that purely suits your personal feelings. Before accusing me of bias, you should reflect on your own.
For example, I'd argue that close-up pictures of genitalia are considered offensive by a similar proportion of the world's population as pictures of someone slitting their wrist (the latter appear quite often in mainstream movies, for example, while the former generally only appear in pornographic movies). So then we'd have to include those too. And if our article on [[feces]] has pictures of feces, our article on [[clitoris]] has a detailed photo of a clitoris, our article on [[suicide methods]] (hypothetical; I'm not sure if such an article exists and Wikipedia is too slow to check at the moment) includes photos of slit wrists, and so on, a large proportion of Wikipedia will simply be unreadable by a large number of people. I certainly wouldn't read it, anyway, and I'm more liberal in these matters than most people I know.
The fact that you compare human body parts to suicide methods and excrements is somewhat disturbing, but let's not get into this. Just some basic cause and effect. Feces are prone to carry disease, that is why most human beings are taught to avoid touching or even eating them (there may also be a biological taboo that is triggered by the smell and/or taste; note that baby feces smell differently). Similarly, most human beings with a functional brain avoid pain, as such, events that are likely to cause pain or death, as well as images of pain and death, are likely to trigger the emotional associations that have been built through a lifetime to teach avoidance thereof.
I challenge you to point to a single culture that had a notable absence of the feces taboo. I doubt that one exists. However, it is easy to see that many cultures have much weaker nudity taboos or none at all (the latter usually living in warm climates where clothing is not required -- hiding our bodies constantly obviously creates a mystery about them). Some societies have condoned or required suicide in certain circumstances, but the act itself has usually been a private one. Some cultures celebrate violence and sadism, but that is simply the opposite of a taboo; we need not pander to it by including as many gory pictures as we can find (nor should we endorse a violence taboo by including none).
Instead, we should apply the standard of maximizing our usefulness and neutrality. When writing about suicide methods, illustrations of different methods would be entirely appropriate. (I'm fairly certain people would trot out the "how-to" argument to prevent such an article from getting too instructive, although I disagree with that logic.) Photos and blood add little to the usefulness. In articles about body parts, photos help with the identification and should not replace but complement illustrations. In how-to articles, abstract illustrations are often more useful than photos, but if someone came up with a good, not unreasonably violent "suicide methods" video, hey, why not.
As for suicides in movies, they are rarely very explicit, unless the movies are made for shocking purposes, which validates the taboo rathern than refuting it. Nudity in movies on the other hand obviously varies a great degree by culture -- I've seen full erections on regular German daytime TV, not sure about clitorises.
You sound like you may be arguing that close-up pictures of a clitoris are of a similar level of offensiveness to photos of women without a veil, which is simply not true: the former are far more offensive to far more people.
Yeah, because the latter are a subset of the former ;-). Current dominant western attitudes regarding sexuality are descendants of views that culminated in anti masturbation electric schock devices and [[bathing house]]s. There is a clear relationship between these attitudes that cannot realistically be denied.
The "near universal" standard seems to pass your "feces and suicide" test. Feces is almost universally considered repulsing, and suicide is almost universally a private matter (justifying some toning down of the imagery). I therefore submit that this test is fully sufficient as our guideline for deciding whether and where we want to censor ourselves.
Regards,
Erik