Rich-
One might suggest that there is near universal
agreement that those images should be masked (or would
you say censored?). But if the goal is to achieve
"near universal offensiveness", what better way to
achieve it than to display such images? Why have *any*
images masked?
By masking those images which are nearly universally considered offensive,
we are providing a service to our community in hiding images that they
will not want to see unless they explicitly request them. If we set this
threshold low - at 70%, for example - then we are trampling on the POV of
30% of our readers. But if we set it very high - 95-100% - then we are in
NPOV territory.
In the NPOV policy we can only treat something as a fact if it is
universally considered as one by informed persons. Similarly, if a photo
is accepted as offensive by all, then we can treat its offensiveness as
*fact*, and act on the basis of this fact. If it is considered offensive
by some, when we act on this *opinion*, we are endorsing a specific POV.
The argument that when we set a threshold at, for example, 50%, and
enforce this threshold *consistently* we are acting in an NPOV manner is
fallacious. Instead we would be abandoning NPOV - neutral point of view -
in favor of MPOV - majority point of view.
Here's a test for any idea of dealing with offensive pictures: Apply the
same methodology to text. Would the result be desirable and acceptable per
NPOV?
Let's take the Mother Teresa article as an example. It accords a
significant amount of space to criticisms of Mother Teresa, even though
there is a strong majority who believes that MT was, if not a living
saint, a courageous helper of the poor and who may consider these
criticisms offensive. Would it be NPOV to say "If 50% (or 70%) of people
find a certain text in an article offensive, it should be moved somewhere
else and a link should be provided to it"? In that case, we would have to
move the criticisms away to make the article more amenable to Christians
and MT-admirers.
Now you can come up with lots of reasons to justify this. You're acting in
the interest of *accessibility*, you say. You want to make sure that
Wikipedia can be read without problems in Catholic schools. You cite an
example of a kid on the Philippines who lost his Internet access after
viewing the Mother Teresa article on a school computer. "This young child,
only 12 years old, could still be reading Wikipedia if we would only move
certain segments of pages away. It's not censorship, you see? The pages
are still there for those who want to read them. And we do this
consistently across all pages -- any minority point of view that is
offensive to the majority will be treated in the same way. So it's
perfectly neutral treatment. It could be done by a computer!"
And you may find these arguments persuasive. I'm sure that over time,
people will make these arguments for text as they are making them for
images now. But the simple fact is that this is *not* our neutral point of
view policy which does not implicitly or explicitly endorse any single
point of view, be it the majority point of view or one which is defined by
some committee.
This doesn't mean that we have to tolerate all images everywhere, of
course. It merely answers the first question, offensiveness. Other key
questions are usefulness and redundancy. And we may even make the
compromise of saying that if a photo's offensiveness to a large number of
readers clearly outweighs its usefulness, the photo should be removed or
linked to. Again, such a determination can only be made in consensus.
Regards,
Erik