Rich-
I'm not sure if you meant this literally, figuratively, or sarcastically. If you really meant that a picture must be "universally considered offensive" before if is moved behind a link, I must disagree.
It was meant figuratively rather than literally. I am talking about 95- 100% agreement. If I added a photo of the decapitated hostage, Nick Berg, to an article and insisted on voting on it, I'm sure that's pretty much what we would get - 95-100% in favor of removing the image or replacing it with one just showing the hostage when he was still alive.
This is the kind of case where a link (if anything) is appropriate. I hesitate to use the word "consensus" here because this is increasingly interpreted as "80%", which is really much too low for such a decision.
How much is lost if we "mask" an image that a significant number of people find offensive?
Quite a bit, in my opinion. By doing so, we emphasize this particular bias. For example, if we censor images of body parts (connected to their body *cough*), we emphasize the bias of modern US society against nudity, a bias which is by no means universal.
Of course you can argue that by not censoring ourselves, we become biased *against* that viewpoint. But that is not true if our lack of censorship is consistent. Then we are merely biased in favor of being inclusive which, in my opinion, is a necessary bias for an encyclopedia, just like we are pro-knowledge rather than anti-knowledge and pro-neutrality rather than pro-atheism or pro-theism, etc.
Regards,
Erik