On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 12:20:45 -0800 (PST), Rick giantsrick13@yahoo.com wrote:
We've had this discussion on several pages. Nobody can agree on what "explicit images" means. Do we slap that tag on the pictures from Abu Graib? From Auschwitz? From Dresden? How about images of Adolf Hitler and George Bush?
I would say that images which would not normally be found in school encyclopaedias or museums such as the Smithsonian would be a good rule of thumb, and I'm not just talking about sexual images.
I was in the Holocaust Museum in Washington a few weeks back and although schoolchildren are welcomed and encouraged to attend, certain exhibitions had warnings posted at the entrance. And rightly so.
I don't think there is any hard and fast guide as to what exactly makes an image offensive, disturbing or explicit, but I think that the Wikipedia community could be trusted to find a consensus on a case by case basis. My feeling is that the Autofellatio photograph would be generally agreed as being one that should not be generally accessible to schoolchildren.
I use schoolchildren as an example, not because I want to emasculate or prudify Wikipedia to the level that it offends nobody, but because schoolchildren are prime users of information resources such as Wikipedia, and the last thing we should do is to make it difficult for them to use Wikipedia. I know that some people here think that individula users should accept all responsibility, but many teachers and parents don't see it that way.
I was engaged in discussion in another forum, and someone brought up an example of the Wikipedia article on the Nile River. An innocuous article, one might imagine, but it so happened that at the time my correspondent was opening it up for the benefit of a schoolchild it had recently been vandalised and consisted of nothing but obscenities.
I can't see any way of getting around this sort of thing in the current state of Wikipedia, because inappropriate text or images could be inserted without warning - possibly by mischevious schoolchildren - and it might take some time before the situation is noticed and corrected.
Maybe we should be thinking about having default material that is known to be in a useful and "safe" state and that the "live" material can only be accessed by specifically setting some flag or clicking on an accept button or some similar mechanism.