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