David Gerard wrote:
2008/12/23 Delirium delirium@hackish.org:
I, too, lament the shocking lack of illustrative material in our article on [[shock site]]s.
May I say how glad I am that Goatse is not expressly under a free licence.
Surely a fair-use argument could be made? Not replaceable, use in an encyclopedic context for scholarly commentary on the subject, limited to no impact on commercial value of the image. ;-)
More seriously, images are a bit more problematic than text, simply because they are sometimes unexpectedly unpleasant to look at, and extremely distracting in your peripheral vision while trying to read an article unless you take technical measures in your browser that most people don't know how to take. I know I no longer read most Wikipedia articles on medical procedures, diseases, or anything else that could have a "shock site" style image potentially in it, because I know there's a 50% chance some schmuck has deliberately put a ridiculously gruesome image in it to illustrate some sort of "Wikipedia isn't censored" principle. It's sort of the Wikipedia version of shock sites, only you get lauded for it instead of banned as a troll, like on the rest of the internet.
And yet /sometimes/ I do actually want information about a topic without graphic illustrations thereof, especially if I already know what it is and am just looking up some specific details. Granted, other articles have unnecessary images as well, but the proliferation of images on a place like [[Golden Gate Bridge]] doesn't cause me any harm other than making the text a bit more badly formatted than it might ideally have been.
-Mark