Matt R wrote:
Your argument is that any poor fool who visits such a page "deserves whatever they get". I disagree. For a start, it may be that the person does not even understand what the topic means -- the reason that they're looking it up in Wikipedia in the first place (it's quite possible that I'd choose to visit Wikipedia first, rather than Google or a dictionary, when investigating an unfamiliar noun). Furthermore, I don't think it follows that, even if a reader knows what it means, that there would be any expectation of a graphic photographic illustration. It's unusual to see "porno-style" images in an dry, academic reference work -- like Wikipedia. And still furthermore, I think it is quite legitimate to want to read the text but not view such an image -- I would fall into this category, for instance. Images can be very potent -- which is why "Goatse" is a photo and not a chunk of prose.
I do think readers must be given the opportunity to choose whether they see images like this or not. I don't think they should have to fiddle around crippling their browsers to achieve this, either. It would be nice to have some elegant cookie/server-filtering/optional software feature, but inlining is an effective (albeit inelegant) solution for now.
-- Matt
[[User:Matt Crypto]]
I'd just like to point out that some of the most alarming and (to me) disgusting images I have ever seen were in medical encyclopedias, which are undoubtedly serious academic works. As medical topics are covered in more detail, we should expect to see more (unfortunately, quite appropriate) pictures of hideous injuries and deformities included in these articles.
Similarly, the images in gynaecology and urology textbooks (necessarily) exceed anything ever generated by a pornographer in their anatomical explictiness, although they cannot even remotely be described as sexually arousing.
-- Neil