John Lee said:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
[John]
If you think an image will offend a substantial amount of people, link it instead of inlining, or bring up the issue on the talk page.
Well, that's precisely what I am *not* seeing. I'm seeing a substantial minority, nearly 40%, who are in favor of inlining. This tells me that there is not a consensus that it's such an offensive image.>
What I find difficult to accept is the argument that we should never ever link to images because it would inconvenience the group of people who desire to view the image with the article. I could understand this once we get a technical solution in place,
The technical solution is in place. Nearly all modern browsers can disable image downloads. The most we could do with a site-based system would be to emulate the capability that already exists in modern browsers.
If you start thinking like the average internet user (i.e. those affluent middle class people who got so riled up about the Super Bowl last year)
Only in one country. The rest of the world was left scratching its heads and wondering what all the fuss was about. US news programs even carried th images with the breast pixellated out, while non-US news programs showed the incident uncensored. Please do not assume that the standards of one country are universal.>
I don't really buy the argument we should be forcing upon users our choice of web browser and/or our choice of software either.
This is not part of my argument. IE is available to 95%+ of the web-using population and it will download images or not at the user's option.
the idea of the web is to make things accessible to people easily.
A task that IE, Firefox, Opera and other browsers do very well indeed.
It really sickens me to hear the kind of logic used to push the idea of selling people on browsers other than IE via Wikipedia.
I have at no time mentioned IE; I mentioned Firefox solely in connection with a claim by a Firefox user who didn't think his browser was capable of being controlled in the manner that I described. I could have said precisely the same thing about IE (except that the capability in question comes with IE, "out of the box", no additionaly downloads required).[...]
caterpillars (while there are a few people out there disgusted by them, again, objecting to the picture of a caterpillar displayed for educational purposes would have ridicule heaped on you. Objecting to a picture of a man fellating himself? That's a different case...).
I don't believe the above for one second. Sorry, that's just silly.
text. While perhaps there would be less laughter if you objected to it this time, there would still be quite a bit, simply because...? I don't know. Probably a combination of the three factors I mentioned, but for a lot of people, it's just not that offensive. Perverted, yes, but not shockingly offensive like the autofellatio image.
*I* don't see anybody laughing, John. Also I doubt that you would find the average person to be more shocked by a man sucking his own penis than an eroticised little girl holding a teddy with a huge dildo.
Of course. However, this group would be far larger if we made it a common practice of displaying shockingly offensive images _by default_.
Which we do.
By not doing so, we limit the number of our enemies; they are far more likely to be right-wing wackos in a small number.
It's a little girl, John. With a dildo. And nobody has ever suggested inlining it, much less deleting it. [...]
It's not my concern so much which decisions are made, so much as that the decision made should be made with open eyes. Not by the editors, but by Jimbo and the Board, who own and ultimately take responsibility for this project.
I'm not sure if I agree with you there. While I have a distaste for letting people other than the community of editors make editorial decisions, perhaps they could issue a "recommendation" we could elect to follow?
My rationale for saying it's a board decision is that clearly the membership is not about to vote for the removal of articles that will render Wikipedia beyond the pale for educational use. I mentioned the VfD nomination of Donkey punch earlier; this is basically an extreme, near-lethal physical and sexual assault described by Wikipedia as a "sex move." They were voting 2 to 1 to keep, last time I looked.
If Jimbo does not have an appetite for a fight with the religious right of his country, now is the time to consider toning down Wikipedia content. Only the board could enforce such a decision.
I'm not all too sure. If the sysops rebelled, the board couldn't enforce the decision without forcibly closing down the website and destroying the community.
I agree that it's a difficult decision. For me, the path of least resistance is to permit content as extreme as Lolicon and the like, but use a technical fix for filtering for educational purposes and provide on-site cat-based filtering (because it's easy to do) and then the people who are really serious about filtering and who come up against how utterly unmanageable cat-based filtering is, well we'll tell them to do what we do, turn image downloads off and click "load" when we want to see a picture.