[Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 1:13 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On foundation-l we are divided between moderates and libertarians. The
> libertarians are more strident in their views, so the debate can seem
> one-sided at times, but there is a substantial moderate contingent,
> and I count myself among them. Conservatives have no direct voice
> here, but they are conceptually represented by Fox News and its audience.

There are some people here who exactly fit your description of
conservatives, such as me.  But we're forced by the overwhelming
libertarian majority to play the part of moderates as a compromise.
Regardless, more people than just religious conservatives would prefer
not to see naked people without warning.  At the very least, few
people would be happy in unexpected nudity showing up while they're
browsing at work, with children watching them, etc. -- it's
embarrassing.  You're probably correct that this is *historically* due
to religious conservatism, but the preference remains even for
completely irreligious people.

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 11:44 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hundreds of millions of viewers a month visit Wikipedia, many of them
> religious conservatives.  But our structure is not one that produces
> articles on sexuality or religion (and sometimes on politics, and
> science...) that are found to be acceptable by, at least, the most
> hard-line among them.

Sure, and that's inevitable.  You aren't going to please people who
have ideological problems with Wikipedia's entire premise.  But
leaving aside people who think nudity is morally wrong on principle,
we are still left with a very large number of people who would simply
prefer not to see it.  Or would at least *sometimes* prefer not to see
it (at work, when kids are around, etc.).  If these people want to
look at even totally innocuous articles like [[Human]], they will be
forced to look at images they don't want to see, with no warning.

This is completely unnecessary.  First of all, the images rarely add
much value.  If anyone has *not* often seen a naked person or erect
penis or whatever before, it is almost certainly because they have
gone out of their way not to and don't want to see it right now, so
including it doesn't help them get what they want.  If they have seen
it often before, then they gain no real information from the image.
At best it serves as decoration, and decoration that a lot of people
don't want to see is counterproductive.

Sure, fine, there are going to be some people who want to find some
high-quality freely-licensed nude photographs for whatever reason.
But they'll be a small minority of visitors to an article like
[[Human]].  If you discount people who are reading Wikipedia for
titillation rather than information (and we should -- our goal is not
to provide titillation), then likely only a minority of visitors even
to [[Penis]] are interested in a photograph.  If you want information
about penises, you're looking for biological facts, not a simple
photo.  You've seen photos plenty of times before, if not the real
thing.  A photo just distracts from genuinely informative content like
a diagram or prose.

The obvious solution is not to display images by default that a large
number of viewers would prefer not to view.  Instead, provide links,
or maybe have them blurred out and allow a click to unblur them.  You
don't hide any information from people who actually want it (you
require an extra click at most), and you don't force people to view
images that they don't want to view.  This allows as many people as
possible to get what they want: people who want to see the images can
see them, and those who don't can choose not to.  The status quo
forces people to view the images whether or not they want to.  And a
lot of people don't want to look at naked people without warning, for
whatever reason.

The standard objection here is "But then we have to hide Muhammad
images too!"  This is, of course, a non sequitur.  A large percentage
of English speakers prefer not to see nude images without warning, but
only a tiny percentage prefer not to see pictures of Muhammad, so the
English Wikipedia should cater to the former group but not the latter.
 The Arabic Wikipedia might also cater to the latter group -- indeed,
I see no pictures of Muhammad at <http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/محمد>.
But we only need to look at large groups of viewers, not small
minorities.  If the minority is small enough, their benefit from not
having to see the images is outweighed by the majority's benefit in
the aesthetic appeal of the images.

It's not like the English Wikipedia isn't making judgments calls
exactly like this already.  [[Daniel Pearl]] does not contain an image
of him being beheaded (although it's what he's famous for), and
[[Goatse.cx]] does not contain an image of its subject matter.  Why?
Because enwiki editors prefer not to see those images without warning,
so they don't show them without warning.  ([[Goatse.cx]] does indeed
contain an external link to its subject matter, as I suggest.  I get
the impression there's been edit-warring about [[Daniel Pearl]], but
probably out of respect for his family, not because the video is
gruesome.)

It's really very easy to determine where to draw the line.  There are
a multitude of English-language informative publications
(encyclopedias, newspapers, news shows, etc.) published by many
independent companies, and the major ones all follow quite similar
standards on what sorts of images they publish.  Since news reporting,
for instance, is very competitive, we can surmise that they avoid
showing images only because their viewers don't want to see them.  Or
if it's because of regulations, those are instituted democratically,
so a similar conclusion follows.

The solution is very simple.  Keep all the images if you like.
Determine, by policy, what sorts of images should not be shown by
default, based on the policies of major publications in the relevant
language.  If an image is informative but falls afoul of the policy,
then include it as a link, or a blurred-out version, or something like
that.  This way people can see the images only if they actually want
to see them, and not be forced to see them regardless.  It would
hardly be any great burden when compared to the innumerable byzantine
policies that already encumber everything on Wikipedia.

The reason that this isn't the status quo has nothing to do with
libertarianism.  As I argue above, the properly libertarian solution
would be to give people a choice of which images they view if there's
doubt whether they'd like to view them.  Rather, quite simply, we have
sexual images in articles without warning because Wikipedia editors
tend to be sexually liberal as a matter of demographics, and have a
lot more tolerance for nudity than the average person.  With no
effective means of gathering input from non-editors, they decide on an
image policy that's much more liberal than what their viewers would
actually like.  This is a gratuitous disservice to Wikipedia's
viewers, and should be rectified.