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.