2011/9/13 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 3:40 AM, Fae fae@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
On 13 September 2011 18:23, M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Are you kidding? Pictures of mummies, a cup with a depiction of two guys doing it that can only be noticed if you look really closely, and what
is
supposed to be a depiction of intercourse but actually looks more like a piece of stale bread? Wow.
That's rather the point of putting up these examples for illustration and as a test for any proposal. Where do you draw the line?
Thanks Fae. So far there are very few documented instances of external regulators rating/censoring Wikipedia content.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
I think it is useful to put other what-ifs on the table to discuss. Most of the time we'll have good reasons to disagree with an external regulators desire to hide an image. However there may be instances where we can fix the problem by removing gratuitous images from articles, and leave them in a Commons category.
Which images are "gratuitous"? Doesn't this vary based on your POV (and degree of prudishness)? I wouldn't consider any of the images in any of the articles Fae mentioned to be gratuitous, but some people certainly might. I would hope that we would never resort to removing such images, which certainly serve an educational purpose and definitely belong in those articles, just because someone feels that they're "inappropriate". An article about "Penis" should include an image of its subject, just like the article "Banana" includes pictures of bananas; what I consider gratuitous is if somebody tries to include pictures of penises in the article "Photograph" as examples of photographs "because WP:NOTCENSORED" (for example). As long as it illustrates the article, we shouldn't remove it just because some person somewhere (or even a lot of people in a lot of places) finds it objectionable. So [[pregnancy]] should keep the image of the pregnant woman; (if someone tries to add an image of a penis saying "Penises tend to be involved in causing pregnancy", that would be "gratuitous" I think) nudity can be educational and illustrative without being pornographic. All of the articles Fae mentioned should keep their images intact, given that the subjects of those articles are directly depicted in the images.