Erik Moeller wrote:
Delirium-
In any case, I'm less worried about offending people per se than in simply forcing people to see these images. What's wrong with making them a link? Many people, myself included, do not want to see a picture of [[penis]] inline in the article, and are quite capable of clicking on the link if we did at some point wish to see the picture.
Many people do not want to see a picture of a woman in public without a veil, and are quite capable of clicking on the link if they did at some point wish to see the picture.
It seems, on the contrary, that there is a small segment of people here trying to push a POV that nudity (or at least pictures of nudity) ought to be acceptable in public, and are resisting any efforts to compromise in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda from being advanced.
"It seems that there is a small segment of people here trying to push the POV that women walking in public (or at least pictures of women walking in public) ought to be acceptable, and are resisting any efforts to compromise in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda from being advanced."
Exclusion of such content is fundamentally irreconcilable with our neutrality policy, and should only happen in cases where we can assume near universal offensiveness. This clearly advances an agenda - just as doing the opposite would. Neutrality is the lack of involvement -- philosophically speaking, as soon as we have decided to create an encyclopedia, we have at the very least taken the position that bringing knowledge to human beings is a good thing to do. By making our NPOV policy non-negotiable, we have also taken the position that Wikipedia does not subscribe to absolute truths, but presents all points of view instead.
It seems that you are assuming what you find personally offensive has "near universal offensiveness", and what you do not find personally offensive does not. For example, I'd argue that close-up pictures of genitalia are considered offensive by a similar proportion of the world's population as pictures of someone slitting their wrist (the latter appear quite often in mainstream movies, for example, while the former generally only appear in pornographic movies). So then we'd have to include those too. And if our article on [[feces]] has pictures of feces, our article on [[clitoris]] has a detailed photo of a clitoris, our article on [[suicide methods]] (hypothetical; I'm not sure if such an article exists and Wikipedia is too slow to check at the moment) includes photos of slit wrists, and so on, a large proportion of Wikipedia will simply be unreadable by a large number of people. I certainly wouldn't read it, anyway, and I'm more liberal in these matters than most people I know.
You sound like you may be arguing that close-up pictures of a clitoris are of a similar level of offensiveness to photos of women without a veil, which is simply not true: the former are far more offensive to far more people. It is true that they do not offend everyone, but I think they offend enough people to make it a poor idea to include them inline, much as slit wrists and feces and other things that a very large proportion of people don't particularly want to see casually unless they're looking for that photo on purpose.
-Mark