It seems to me that there's no difference between this and any other controversial or contentious issue. I have the impression that some are asserting that there's some kind of fundamental difference that has to be handled in some fundamentally different way because it involves taboos or offensiveness. That's what I don't get.

It seems to me that the right word for these issues is "tastefulness." As in "de gustibus no disputandum est." Well, we know darn well there certainly est disputandum, but I don't see that's it's different from issues such as whether, say, Nazism is a kind of Socialism.

This is a wikiwiki, and just recently someone moved some pictures of peni from the article on "penis" to the article on "circumcision" by the process of deciding they ought to be moved and moving them. They're there now, and they'll stay there until someone else decides to do something else, and eventually it will or will not reach a metastable state.

As for diagrams versus photos, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to communicate information, not to induce sexual arousal, and deciding what picture is likely to do what is a matter of editorial judgement based on a guess as to the expected audience and on what the Supreme Court once called "contemporary community standards." You can't predict exactly what the audience is going to be, however. The "Professor Somebody" who authored the anatomy textbook mentioned in _Tom Sawyer_ probably did not expect the teen-aged Becky Thatcher to read his book or view the "handsomely engraved and colored frontispiece -- a human figure, stark naked." We had not expected our copy of "The Whole Earth Catalog," a rather Wikipedian enterprise, to serve as sex education material for our children, either.

We probably don't need to be as restrained as the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

I just don't see what the big deal is. There should probably be pictures of a lot of things. If you think there should be a picture, put one in. If a picture seems much too strong, substitute on that's more toned down. If it seems absurdly prudish, substitute one that's franker. Why is there any need for this to be any different from any other controversial material requiring editorial judgement? What's the big problem?

Now, for something serious to argue about: what is the correct plural of the word "clitoris?"

-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@world.std.com alternate: dpbsmith@alum.mit.edu