[Foundation-l] Principle and pragmatism with nudity and sexual content

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
We create nothing because other people will have to write it.

When you look at many crucifixes, you will see human suffering in a really
stark way. This is deeply troubling to some people and others will say that
it depicts the suffering of Jezus on our behalf. Both have a conflicting
point of view about the visibility of this image.

Someone I know did not recognise a venereal disease and as a consequence she
became barren. It is because of this that I asked a Dutch organisation for
illustrations of how venereal diseases visually manifest themselves. The
images I got show sexual organs, show ulcers and other things that are quite
horrid. The only way I know that gives people a fighting chance is by
educating them, by providing information. That is in our mission. Our
mission does not say we will give you information, "sanitised" information,
information that will not help you because it is incomplete.

When you argue that there is no need for "arty" nude pictures, I agree. That
is a completely different subject then hiding essential information that we
need in our articles. Our articles require the highest quality illustrations
because in this way we are true to our mission to inform.
Thanks,
       GerardM


2009/4/21 Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org>

> Yaroslav M. Blanter hett schreven:
> > May be I misunderstand smth but as far as nudity is concerned (to return
> > to the original topic), obviously standards are very much different in
> > Denmark and Iran. Does it make sense to make a global standard and impose
> > it on Danish and Farsi wikipedias at the same time? Especially if this
> > standard gets voted for on Meta dominated by Americans who have the third
> > standard? As far as I am concerned as soon as the issue gets over BLP
> (for
> > which we need to have the common policy) it is not a subject for global
> > meta or foundation decision anymore.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Yaroslav
> >
> In my opinion the best system would be like this:
> We create a software measure to apply tags to specific content. These
> tags would say something like "contains explicit depiction of human
> vaginal intercourse", "contains explicit depiction of human penis",
> "contains depiction of fascist propaganda material" (so this system
> would cover all types of content that are not universally considered
> inoffensive), "contains depiction of naked child", "contains explicit
> depiction of 'very ugly' disease" (e.g. open ulcer). These tags should
> be rather fine-grained (so no tag would say "contains nudity", but the
> exact naked body parts would be part of the tag) and should cover all
> topics that are considered to be "taboo" by one of the societies on our
> planet (and when I say "society" I mean ethnic, cultural and religious
> societies, but not political societies, I'd rather not like to see this
> system applied for political censorship, but only for censorship, that
> is common sense in a specific civil society).
>
> Every project could then decide what kind of tags would be allowed on
> their project. As options they could prohibit the inclusion of that
> content (ideally namespace-wise), or make them hidden by default (so if
> an image is included in an article, you would have to do one more click
> to display it).
> Every user then could change the behavior in the preferences. So if
> sexually explicit images are hidden by default on the project, any user
> could change his preferences to show those pictures by default.
> If a user visits an image description page of an image that is tagged
> with one of the tags that are specified in the project's preferences or
> in his personal preferences, the user will get a warning "Do you really
> want to see this X?" (where X is the type of "tabooness") and can decide
> whether he wants to see it or not.
>
> Perhaps this could also be extended to provide a child-proof measure.
> Instead of getting a warning the user would be blocked from looking at
> the content. Although this would be on the border to real censorship and
> could be abused.
>
> I think, a system like that would provide the highest amount of
> flexibility without imposing any restrictions on anybody.
>
> Marcus Buck
> User:Slomox
>
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