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