On 6/14/05, Poor, Edmund W Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
*You shouldn't make such a big deal out of poo. Here's some in your face, get used to it, it's real, it's here; nothing to make a fuss over.
That is prescriptive. It's an attempt to change attitudes.
If we need images of human feces or dog turds or horse manure, why not create a sidebare article called [[Images of feces]]? A link or two in the article won't offend too many people.
Hogwash.
When you systematically remove informative content that your personal system of values deems as offensive or unethical you force the encyclopedia to adopt your bias: By removing content that is considered by some to be 'wrong' because it is considered to be 'wrong' we make the statement that the encyclopedia considers the content is wrong and therefor present a non neutral point of view.
There are plenty of people who would be sufficently shocked by our mentioning of matters sexual or outside a single religion, so when we are done removing useful images because some people are offended do we then begin to delete articles about 'wrong' subjects?
The question for exclusion should be based on the images ability to inform. We should exclude content that has no value to teach. This does not mean we should include every potentially informative image, but rather we should select the most informative subset and of the remaining equally most informative results we should select the ones which best satisfy secondary artistic and editorial criteria.
So for example, perhaps a particular image of feces is considered especially disgusting but someone has found an image of equal informative ability that most consider less disgusting. Thus decision between the two images is an editorial judgement and does not interact with NPOV. I do not advocate that 'majority shock' should be encouraged or the risk of which intentionally ignored, but rather that because of NPOV all decisions of taste should take a secondary role by only being used to decide among multiple choices of substantially equally informative value.
I'm pretty clueless when it comes to feces, and would like to stay that way :), so I can't fairly gauge what the informative ability of a given image is... But I strongly object to how you've framed the argument.