On the whole discussion on pictures:
What about pictures of: Dead, bloody people (common on european TV) Drug paraphenalia Step by step bomb making Dangerous animals Deformed lifeforms from genetic experiments Injured people from combat (limbs tangled, guts spilled, heads disfigured) Medical pictures of diseased bodypart Election proceedings (hello PRC) War crimes (remember the photo of the US officer executing a vietnamese during the vietnam war?) Sexual acts, such as penetration, arousal, nipple clamps, bondage, etc. Domestic violence Aborted Foetuses
To paraphrase the founder of the nizkor project in a persional email:
Don't censor yourself. Plenty others will censor you for free.
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
Christopher-
What about pictures of: Dead, bloody people (common on european TV)
Are they? It's been a while since I last watched TV, but my impression always was that US TV is more violent than Euro-TV. I may be wrong, of course.
Answer: Depends on context - we don't needlessly throw pictures of "dead, bloody" people into articles. Why would we? An article about decompensation, rigor mortis etc. might include an image, but obviously, the more generally offensive such a picture would be, the more likely we would want to link to it instead of displaying it inline.
Drug paraphenalia
Sure, no problem.
Step by step bomb making
Could be legally problematic.
Deformed lifeforms from genetic experiments
Sure, if they warrant an article.
Injured people from combat (limbs tangled, guts spilled, heads disfigured)
Definitely, but only in an article that is explicitly about the effects of war; in a main article about war they should be linked to.
Medical pictures of diseased bodypart
Definitely useful, but preferably link instead of displaying inline.
War crimes (remember the photo of the US officer executing a vietnamese during the vietnam war?)
Definitely, see above re: combat.
Sexual acts, such as penetration, arousal, nipple clamps, bondage, etc.
Legally problematic. Nipple clamps no problem.
Domestic violence
Link to.
Aborted Foetuses
Link to.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Are they? It's been a while since I last watched TV, but my impression always was that US TV is more violent than Euro-TV. I may be wrong, of course.
I watch a lot of US TV.
In the US, television news rarely shows graphic images of blood and guts, but "if it bleeds it leads" they love to cover bloody stories. If there's been a horrible car accident, we will see only a body under a clean white sheet, or a child's shoe in a gutter. The most popular war footage is the twisted wreckage of vehiciles but actual dead people are virtually never seen.
Movies and television shows are similar -- lots of cartoon violence, but very little realistic blood and guts.
I might or might not agree with the specific answers that Erik gave here, but I would agree with his overall approach -- context matters, and mostly it just depends on the demands of quality writing and sound factual presentation of information. Editorial good taste can go a long way towards balancing competing concerns responsibly.
And there will always be hard cases that are tough to decide. We aren't the first to confront these issues, and I doubt if we will come up with a magic formula that will always resolve the issues cleanly.
--Jimbo
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
Christopher-
What about pictures of: Dead, bloody people (common on european TV)
Are they? It's been a while since I last watched TV, but my impression always was that US TV is more violent than Euro-TV. I may be wrong, of course.
On French Paris Match (paper magazine), last summer, saw photo of israeli soldier killed in combat, brain cavity was emply, brian had been removed by impact, cranium was 1/2 missing, and photo showed the inside of the head with the brain mostly removed, and part of the skull still attached and hanging. Soldier was on a stretcher, others were mulling about paying him no attention. This kind of photo, we don't see on US tv/print media.
Answer: Depends on context - we don't needlessly throw pictures of "dead, bloody" people into articles. Why would we? An article about decompensation, rigor mortis etc. might include an image, but obviously, the more generally offensive such a picture would be, the more likely we would want to link to it instead of displaying it inline.
Step by step bomb making
Could be legally problematic.
Deformed lifeforms from genetic experiments
Sure, if they warrant an article.
Injured people from combat (limbs tangled, guts spilled, heads disfigured)
Definitely, but only in an article that is explicitly about the effects of war; in a main article about war they should be linked to.
Medical pictures of diseased bodypart
Definitely useful, but preferably link instead of displaying inline.
War crimes (remember the photo of the US officer executing a vietnamese during the vietnam war?)
Definitely, see above re: combat.
Sexual acts, such as penetration, arousal, nipple clamps,
bondage,
etc.
Legally problematic. Nipple clamps no problem.
Domestic violence
Link to.
Aborted Foetuses
Link to.
Link to but where? What webserver do you trust will be there 2, 5 years down the road, with the same URL with the same picture?
The problem with a linked-to URL (and this has been discussed prior) is that the picture may change, the picture server may disappear, or the picture server may change its licensing.
As far as legality of images, we should let lawyers do that. I think this would be a good thing to spend money on: asking real legal advice on what photos can and cannot be posted. Anything that can be posted, on a legal standpoint, and adds to the imformation conveyed in the article, should be.
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
Christopher-
On French Paris Match (paper magazine), last summer, saw photo of israeli soldier killed in combat, brain cavity was emply, brian had been removed by impact, cranium was 1/2 missing, and photo showed the inside of the head with the brain mostly removed, and part of the skull still attached and hanging. Soldier was on a stretcher, others were mulling about paying him no attention. This kind of photo, we don't see on US tv/print media.
Well, the conclusion that this is a US vs. Euro phenomenon seems overreaching. I've never seen such photos in German newspapers, for example. German media always seemed very sanitized to me.
Link to but where?
To a file uploaded on our server (provided copyright is not an issue), using a [[Media:]] link.
Regards,
Erik
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
Christopher-
On French Paris Match (paper magazine), last summer, saw photo of israeli soldier killed in combat, brain cavity was emply, brian
had
been removed by impact, cranium was 1/2 missing, and photo showed
the
inside of the head with the brain mostly removed, and part of the skull still attached and hanging. Soldier was on a stretcher,
others
were mulling about paying him no attention. This kind of photo,
we
don't see on US tv/print media.
Well, the conclusion that this is a US vs. Euro phenomenon seems overreaching. I've never seen such photos in German newspapers, for
example. German media always seemed very sanitized to me.
Point taken. Is there an article somewhere discussing the differences in media reporting between various european countries?
Link to but where?
To a file uploaded on our server (provided copyright is not an issue), using a [[Media:]] link.
So we host the photo but don't include it with the article, but on a separate instance (machine) that is easily accessible.
Do we provide thumprints?
What's truly gained? I mean, having a link to an image and the image itself are fairly the same. If we cloak the penis image because it offends, do we cloak the democratic demonstration? The photo of dalai Lama? The headshot wound? The gnarly, nasty, disgusting-looking yet medically significant photo of a "insert horrible, disfiguring medical condition"?
I wonder. I think this might lead to bias. What shows in the article, verus what is not shown. (Mao's photo shown in article, Sun Yat Sen's photo cloaked (available, but only through a link)...
I wonder.
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
Christopher-
Point taken. Is there an article somewhere discussing the differences in media reporting between various european countries?
I've found most general media-related articles on Wikipedia sorely lacking, but that may have changed. (Just checked: [[mass media]] is still crap.) We have fantastically detailed articles about individual publications, though ..
So we host the photo but don't include it with the article, but on a separate instance (machine) that is easily accessible.
It's a regularly uploaded image. You can do this with any image file by typing [[Media:name.jpg]].
Do we provide thumprints?
In these cases, probably not.
What's truly gained? I mean, having a link to an image and the image itself are fairly the same.
Not if the image has a very strong shock value to the vast majority of viewers. http://goatse.cx is one notorious example, see [[shock site]] for others. But I agree that the penis picture should be displayed inline. As I said before, my standard is: is it almost universally offensive? If yes, link to it. If no, show it inline. The only other standards that I can think of are 1) legality, 2) encyclopedic relevance.
Regards,
Erik
We have articles on [[Flour bomb]] and a couple of others that I asked about Wikipedia's liability on, and was told that it's not a problem.
RickK
Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote: Christopher-
Step by step bomb making
Could be legally problematic.
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
Christopher Mahan wrote:
On the whole discussion on pictures:
What about pictures of: Dead, bloody people (common on european TV) Drug paraphenalia Step by step bomb making Dangerous animals Deformed lifeforms from genetic experiments Injured people from combat (limbs tangled, guts spilled, heads disfigured) Medical pictures of diseased bodypart Election proceedings (hello PRC) War crimes (remember the photo of the US officer executing a vietnamese during the vietnam war?) Sexual acts, such as penetration, arousal, nipple clamps, bondage, etc. Domestic violence Aborted Foetuses
Of the ones you cited, I think the great majority should be included with "click here for a photo of [blah]", not inline in articles. I do not generally want to see a graphic picture of an aborted fetus even if I am reading an article on abortion; if I wish to do so, I am quite capable of clicking on the link to display the image. I see no benefit to forcing our readers to see images they may not wish to see based on a highly POV claim that they are "normal" images that they should not be offended by.
-Mark
--- Delirium delirium@rufus.d2g.com wrote:
Of the ones you cited, I think the great majority should be included with "click here for a photo of [blah]", not inline in articles.
Fair enough.
I do not generally want to see a graphic picture of an aborted fetus even if I am reading an article on abortion; if I wish to do so, I am quite
capable of clicking on the link to display the image. I see no benefit to forcing our readers to see images they may not wish to see based on a highly POV claim that they are "normal" images that they should not be offended by.
Granted, yet since offense is subjective, do we have a committee/voting cabal that decides which picture is inline and which picture is "offensive"?
Of course, if the picture was included in the article for "shock value", I would remove it myself.
If the picture, however, "made" the article, it would not be adequate to relegate it to another 1-click page. I specifically have in mind the picture of the student standing in front of a tank in tanamen square. I think if we had such a picture, it might be seen as offensive by some, yet would entirely belong in the article.
But I see your point very well.
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus