Jimmy- I beg to differ. So far, I still haven't seen any reasonable argument on what was wrong with the original picture. And, as I recall, it could be tracked down to a website about the clitoris, not to a porn site. You will have to accept that many people are not happy to follow someone else's opinion on what is "terrible and in poor taste"." Aesthetics is not something which is easy to argue about, obviously. In the clitoris discussion, I got the impression that some people deliberately were looking for "ugly" pictures in order to make sure that any sexual arousal by the image is prevented. Someone even suggested a truly horrible and inaccurate illustration from 1866, when women weren't even believed to be capable of orgasm. Is it objective to say that a vagina or penis which is unattractive is more tasteful and encyclopedic than one which is attractive? Truthfully, the distinction between "taste and aesthetics" and "offensiveness" is not as big as you seem to imply. The perceptions of both are very much based on personal experiences and values. I think we should stick first and foremost to criteria which are easy to compare. Is the picture accurate? Does it add information to the article? Is the copyright situation clear? Are any personal rights being violated (being in an encyclopedia for the next 100 years might not be agreeable to the subject of a photo)? Only when we have images which are identical in all these matters, the feelings of the community could be the deciding factor. For example, I'm sure there could be an illustration of autofellatio in the style of the sex position images which would be generally considered more tasteful and less offensive in an encyclopedia article. But I would not want to remove an image which satisfies the above criteria -- not saying the autofellatio one does -- on the grounds that we could potentially have a nicer one in the future. That just seems like an invitation for people to use their personal views of what is tasteful or non-offensive as a justification to push an agenda. The outcome would be a very culturally biased project, though results would vary from page to page. I have no problem in principle with the removal of the autofellatio photograph on copyright grounds. But aesthetics alone is, I think, a fairly weak argument, and really very similar, if not often identical, to the general argument about offensiveness. The correct answer to that, I believe, is labeling of the content with metadata to allow people to hide it based on their preferences of what they want to see. Let's be honest here: Someone who really wanted to know about autofellatio -- out of the desire to know about the subject, not out of the desire to discuss its merits as we do -- probably would like to see that photo, even if it's not the best possible one. So I think, if the other criteria were fulfilled, which does not appear to be the case, that it should be available until a generally more popular replacement can be found. Regards, Erik

Jimbo said: You do get a page of reasonable illustrations if you click such a link; however it's a bit hit and miss because what you get depends on the status of the arms race between Google's search engine technology and those who try to game it by including inappropriate keywords. Currently the article has a link to solosuck.com, which contains some high quality stills and video clips or a very talented and enthusiastic autofellator. Of course as with all external sites we may wake up one morning to find that it has become an auction site, a viagra sales site, or something else that would be useless. Or the owner may replace his current stills with lower quality images and remove his video clips.

Delirium said: A surprising number of present-day web users seem to be unwilling to use, and sometimes even unaware of, their browser's options to turn picture downloads on and off. I have a caterpillar phobia, a rather severe one, but it doesn't stop me browsing Wikipedia because if I want to read about butterflies and the like I adjust my browser.

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: I understand the concept of appropriateness and to suggest that a picture of a man performing autofellatio on a page describing autofellatio is inappropriate seems farcical to me. To then attempt to turn it into an issue of aesthetics appears disingenuous. I'd be interested to see a picture of someone performing autofellatio that all these people trying to get rid of this picture would find aesthetically pleasing. Of course it boils down to prudishness and censorship, if not personal then cultural. What I would find most interesting in such debates would be statistics allowing us to analyse any systemic bias. Unfortunately we don't have the data to carry out such analysis. Christiaan

There seem to be way to much heat in this debate. So far people are focusing solely on three courses of action while forgetting all the rest. Here are some of my ideas: 1. Erik's idea - label it as sexually explicit and then people can turn the family filter on and off. 2. Edit the image so that the glands of the penis (or the whole penis) is blurred. 3. Show the image smaller. I guess the smaller it is showed the less "in your face" it feels. IMHO, the position of those that wants the image linked or deleted is rediculous. There are hundreds of images on Wikipedia that are "much wore" and there would be thousands of more if it wasn't so hard to find images suitable for the GFDL. I.e. ever seen an image of what a smokers lung look like? It's shown to elementary school children and are in many countries put on packs of cigarettes. I fully expect to see such an image when I go to the article [[Lung cancer]]. I also fully expect to see an image of a human brain when I visit [[Brain]] and I fully expect that those images will shock me much more than the innocent image of the autofellating man. I totally accept that some images are to gross for Wikipedia to show. Like the rumoured goatsex one. But removing images because some Wikipedia editors think it is porn is unacceptable. -- mvh Björn

I've noticed today that with a few articles I've edited it appears when I check back that my edits haven't been implemented (but in fact they have). I've also seen a few other complaints on talk pages about edits and comments being "erased" though it seems that, in fact, this hasn't happened, it's just that the editor in question cannot see their own edits. Is there some sort of glitch in the software when it comes to "updating" articles or to the ability of some accounts to "see" updated articles? Andy

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005, AndyL wrote: The latest Dr Dobb's Journal (March, 2005) has a table showing various Intel CPUs with information about the number of transistors & clock speeds (p. 17). At the bottom of the table, the sources are tersely given as "Intel, Wikipedia." I wonder if this would meet satisfy some contributors to Wikipedia as a adequate citation of source. Geoff

There is a delay, which is part of the setup. Fred

Puddl Duk said: The thing that convinced me to vote inline on the Goatse poll was seeing the screenshot on Alexa.