David Gerard wrote:
2008/12/23 Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>rg>:
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