On Tuesday 13 January 2004 06:16 pm, Delirium wrote:
Sascha Noyes wrote:
In your opinion this is a legitimate question. I don't consider it
legitimate
because I don't consider nudity offensive. (I have previously given the example that if puritans consider exposure to nudity a bad thing for children, they have to in the same vein consider a child looking at their
own
unclothed body as harmful. That position is patently ridiculous. (And a sad reflection on the influence of religious fundamentalists on societies the world over.)
Ah, but should we add some graphic photographs to [[anus]], [[feces]], and a variety of other subjects people perhaps wouldn't want to see images of? After all, unless you're offended by your own bowel movements, you can't possibly find images of feces offensive, right?
That is correct. I see my feces nearly every day, and recognise that defecation is a normal and natural act. I am not in the least bit offended by the sight of feces. People study feces of animals to infer what they ate, etc. I don't find these people to be morally reprehensible characters because they are interested in feces. Similarly for anuses.
And even if you think that's alright, I'm sure I can find *some* image you'd prefer not to look at. We have to draw the line somewhere unless Wikipedia is just going to become rotten.com and offend absolutely everyone. Where we draw it is a subjective judgment.
Ah, but you fail to see that even if there exist images that I would prefer not to look at, I would not seek them out. You make it sound as though I am advocating putting pictures of anuses on the cover of the encyclopedia. Another false assumption is that if (in the hypothetical) I prefer not to look at pictures of self-mutilation, I would want you to take the decision to remove an exemplary picture from the article [[self-mutilation]]. This is not the case. I would firstly not actively seek such a picture, and if I had stumbled upon it accidentally I would simply look away.
In any case, I'm less worried about offending people per se than in simply forcing people to see these images. What's wrong with making them a link? Many people, myself included, do not want to see a picture of [[penis]] inline in the article, and are quite capable of clicking on the link if we did at some point wish to see the picture. This is not because I am offended by penises or pictures thereof, but simply because I consider it a private matter and don't generally wish to be accosted by them for no good reason. And I think adding them inline adds very little vs. "click here", so don't consider it a good reason.
"Forcing" is a very strong word. Do you consider yourself "forced" to see a penis when you, of your own volition visit [[penis]]? And when you visit [[anatomy]]? Who decides what is considered "force"? Regarding linking to images. I did not in any way state that I oppose the idea of having images that are almost universally offensive located on a page that people need to click to view the image, with a notice that there will be eg. an image of self-mutilation, or of eg. a car-crash. You are misrepresenting my view in order to be able to attack it. Now, I don't think that it is plausible that a version of wikipedia that is censored in accordance with the moral doctrine of the puritans would include images of a penis, anus, feces, etc. with the limitation that they would have to be clicked and not displayed inline. Don't tell me that you honestly think that they would settle for that.
Same goes for other photographs, such as [[feces]], [[car accident]], and etc. We should have all these photographs (up to some very high level--perhaps we shouldn't have goatse.cx photographs), but we shouldn't have them all inline. So those who choose to see them can see them. I don't see how this is censorship, since we are not removing the information, or even making it hard to get.
But in which encyclopedic article would you include the goatse.cx picture? Again, you are misrepresenting my position. I did not state that not having an image inline is censorship. Perhaps I should have been clearer on this point.
I have made what I believe to be a well-founded argument that we should not have an officially censored version of wikipedia. If people want to have a censored version, they should (and can) go ahead and do so. But I argue against integrating any censorship into either wikipedia or wikipedia 1.0. You have not presented any argument that censorship of wikipedia or wikipedia 1.0 to remove potential and/or actual offensive material beside the one that I myself have mentioned: popularity. And this is where I find that we step onto a slippery slope. I know that some people consider the slippery slope argument a fallacy, but I shall employ it here nonetheless. If we submit to the censorship of the american puritans, why not to that of fundamental islamists? Why not to that of those who do not whish to have "God" spelled out? Why not to that of those who do not wish to see pictoral representations of deities? Then you have to start arguing that "my offense at seeing a penis is justified", whereas "your offense at seeing a depicition of a deity is not justified".
It seems, on the contrary, that there is a small segment of people here trying to push a POV that nudity (or at least pictures of nudity) ought to be acceptable in public, and are resisting any efforts to compromise in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda from being advanced.
As Erik said in his response to this point, our goal as an encyclopedia is to provide encyclopedic knowledge. There are probably very few people that would disagree that a picture of a penis adds encyclopedic knowledge to the article [[penis]] (otherwise why do we include pictures at all?). Note that our goal is not to provide a sanitised version of reality but, I repeat, to provide encyclopedic knowledge. The onus is therefore on the censors to justify the removal of encyclopedic knowledge from an encyclopedia. I have just latched onto the nudity issue because that seemed like a particularly relevant example of people trying to remove encyclopedic knowldge from an encyclopedia. Whether or not I find nudity offensive is not the issue - Although I will freely admit that I did not hesitate to point out the stupidity of finding nudity offensive ;-)
Best, Sascha Noyes