Of course, the advantage to a Wiki is that we can change our content to match the mores of the times, unlike a print object. If this was 1972 we could link to the image, and then in 1990 we could inline it. No content lost. Nobody too confused. Maybe a few people upset that we would be ashamed at showing a human body inline. People who will find errors in any policy.
I'm not sure I see the advantages of trying to really parse out a hardline approach to defining "objectionable," but the lack of any easily quantifiable approach is itself not evidence that no policy should be created.
It has always seemed to me that a number of policies were "community judgment calls" (NPOV, VfD, etc.). I'm not sure why this should be any different. In the question of what is "objectionable" (which will of course will have as many opinions as there are people giving them), I think that a reasonable solution would be that in the event of a lack of clear consensus (which is not the same thing as majority), we ought to defer on the side of caution (linking to the content rather than inlining it).
The potential benefits though seem to be about equal to the potential harm in either case—what is respectable in one mind becomes offensive censorship/content in the other. When in doubt, though, perhaps we ought opt to not "surprise" anyone with something that a sizeable percentage of people find extremely unpleasant.
Just one opinion on it, just to clog up your inboxes...
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:06:59 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
Fred Bauder said:
Although many of our potential readers might object to these images they are unobjectionable.
Well the Pioneer plaque was controversial in its day. The Philadelphia Inquirer apparently retouched the copy of the image to hide the male genitals and the female nipples. The Chicago Sun Times at first published an unaltered picture and then successively airbrushed out features with each later edition. The LA Times carried the picture on its front page, and received angry letters about tax-payers' money being used to "spread this filth, even beyond our solar system", and decrying the lapse of the newspaper's standards in depicting "sexual exploitation" on its front page. The two figures are shown standing side by side, some distance apart, facing the viewer. The man's hand is raised in greeting. Some feminists objected to the "passivity" and "submissiveness" of the female figure. One man insisted that the man's hand was raised in a nazi salute, and proposed that another spacecraft be sent out to destroy Pioneer 10 along with this symbol of fascism. Frank Drake, the ETI researcher who along with Carl Sagan had designed the plaque, later remarked that the image had turned out to be "a cleverly disguised Rorschach test." (The Depths of Space, Mark Wolverton.) As well as the mission (it was Pioneer, not Voyager) I got the author of the plaque wrong. It was not Sagan's third and last wife Ann Druyan but his second, Linda Salzman, who drew the nekkid people. John Naugle, NASA's associate administrator for space science, approved the drawings after erasing the single line representing the woman's vulva.
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