On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 21:08:31 -0500, Karl A. Krueger kkrueger@whoi.edu wrote:
On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 09:45:29AM +1100, Skyring wrote:
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.
The Smithsonian, of course, is the work of the U.S. government, which has all manner of politically-driven standards it must follow. This is not a problem we have.
Indeed not. Nevertheless, the standards are there and doubtless drive the public perception of what is proper to display to the public in general and schoolchildren in particular.
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 was in the National Museum of the American Indian a few months ago. I was surprised by how -little- there was about the bloodier and more unpleasant parts of the history. I don't know if that's because the museum operators chose to exhibit mostly "friendly" or "politically correct" bits, or because people with a well-deserved grudge didn't care to participate in creating the museum. Or maybe I somehow missed the wing with the smallpox blankets and the Trail of Tears.
You are correct, but I think you are reading more into my example than was ever put into it. Certainly Wikipedia does not seem to suffer from any such coyness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Trail_of_Tears
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.
My opinion is that the Autofellatio photograph is not a very good image for an encyclopedia ... *not* because it depicts a man licking his penis, but because it is stylistically poor and unfitting.
Likewise, my opinion is that the Goatse.cx image is not fitting for Wikipedia because displaying it is far too close to *participating* in the trolling-behavior with which that image is so closely linked.
Schoolchildren don't much enter into it.
Perhaps we are beating different drums. I don't particularly care about such images. In the grand scheme of Wikipedia they are trivia. What I do care about is the spectre of some hardliner with a huge television following deciding that such images make Wikipedia unsuitable for children, demonstrating how easily such images may be accessed, and mounting a crusade against Wikipedia with the objective of forcing schools and parents to boycott this thing of ours.
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'm guessing that by saying that we would "make it difficult for school- children to use Wikipedia" you mean that by depicting sexuality frankly we would tickle the sensors of [[censorware]] programs, causing Wikipedia to be blocked.
No.
Sadly, there are many fools in the world, and fools appear to be the chief market for censorware. Both the flaws and the deliberate biases of popular censorware products have been more than adequately demonstrated. We are talking about software which already regularly blocks educational material on breast cancer and HIV/AIDS; which has been found to selectively block pro-choice (abortion-rights) sites but not pro-life (anti-abortion) sites; and which in one case has blocked TIME Magazine's Web site when TIME criticized censorware.
(See http://www.peacefire.org/info/blocking-software-faq.html.)
I don't see any way Wikipedia can benefit from kowtowing to that kind of nonsense. If Wikipedia is blocked by censorware, so much the worse for censorware; it will be one more illustration of its uselessness and one more charge to be brought against its use.
I agree, but the inevitable result of allowing offensive images, especially sexually explicit images, to be freely available to anyone who looks up Wikipedia is that there will be strong and vocal opposition, and millions of US schoolchildren will be denied access. The more well-known Wikipedia becomes, the sooner this will happen. I really cannot blame parents, school boards and other community leaders if they act to prevent children from accessing graphic images such as a bloke sucking himself off, but such action would also deny children access to thousands of well-researched articles which are not in themselves offensive.
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.
This sounds to me like you're comparing people who upload controversial images with people who vandalize Wikipedia.
No. I've moved on to another topic now.
That doesn't seem to me like a very productive comparison to make.
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.
Wikipedia's job is to describe the world, and the world is "live" and not "safe", too.
The world also includes bigots and religious crusaders with huge followings, and I make no doubt that they do not share your opinions.