Nicholas Knight:
I don't see anything wrong with "an encyclopedia" having such a blanket policy, either. On the other hand, I do have a problem with the idea that my favorite encyclopedia might suddenly become less informative due to strict implementation of a policy enforcing cultural taboos that interfere with the ability to provide useful, factual, relevant information. As such, I don't think I can in good conscience support such a policy for Wikipedia. One of the problems with "blanket" policies like that is that they tend to cover good things as well as bad.
If it's pertinent and not gratuitous, I don't tend to have a problem with it. In cases where a substantial demographic does, it might be reasonable to move it off-page without removing it entirely, if some simpler visitor-controlled mechanism for "censoring" the visible content is not available.
Don't fool yourself, though -- claiming that something is "indecent" just because it's graphic is a matter of personal perspective, not of absolutist principles.
-- Chad
(PS: I'm breaking with my usual standard of bottom-posting for clarity, here. The reason is simply that I don't want to cut out context, but also don't want to force anyone to scroll a page and a half down to find my response. My apologies for top-posting.)
Nicholas Knight wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
Nicholas Knight said:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
I agree that, at most, it's a nice-to-have. But really the users should be taking this issue up with the designers of their browsers, not the producers of content. http is not a push medium.
And yet I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be able to browse an encyclopedia with images on and not run across disgusting crap that adds no value to the article whatsoever.
You should never encounter disgusting crap that adds no value to an article. If you find any, remove it.
*points at [[Autofellatio]]*
Now we've returned to the very subjective realm of trying to define "disgusting crap". I don't know whether the image in question added value to the article. I am largely neutral on the subject. I am, however, extremely concerned with matters such as how we deal with the problem of potentially "disgusting crap" images because whatever mechanisms are put in place will also run the risk of getting false positives.
Some people clearly believe your pointing constitutes a false positive. Others do not. A reasonable mechanism (whether technical or a matter of policy) for sorting the issue out would be desirable, here.
I see nothing wrong with an encyclopedia having a blanket policy that sexually explicit photographs not be displayed in articles. You can argue relativism, subjectiveness, and "censorship" all you want, we both know it's crap. We're here to provide an educational resource. Inlined explicit photographs of sex acts as a whole do little to educate that a line drawing wouldn't do, and only turn people off to Wikipedia as an educational resource. Crap like the autofellatio image is even worse.