Zach Alexander said:
the solution would be to **leave the choice of objectionable content in the hands of the end user**. We create [[Special:Censorship]]. If a user blanks it, Wikipedia is uncensored. If a user puts the tags {{img.genitals}}, {{img.femalebreasts}}, and {{paganism}} on it, he doesn't see genitals or Kate Winslet, or even see articles about pagans. If another user puts {{img.malechests}}, {{img.ankles}}, and {{christianity}}, she doesn't see pictures of those things or articles on Christianity.
This seems reasonable, though I'm not sure if it would be workable in practice. I still lean heavily towards the view that the reader know best precisely which images he prefers, and if it matters to him he can choose to download those images and precisely those images. But I think the best and simplest server-side support for suppressing downloads that we could give to users would be one that turned all inlines into links. The best browsers already provide a facility to do something similar and I use it all the time on Internet Explorer and Firefox. There should also be an option on links (all links, not just the ones that are suppressed inlines) that renders the image as part of the article. Incidentally anyone with IE can try this out:
Go to Tools/Internet Options
Click the Advanced tab
Under Multimedia make the following changes:
Ensure that Show Image Download Placeholders is checked
Ensure that Show Pictures is unchecked
If you now click OK and reload the current page, any pictures will be replaced by a placeholder. To view any of these pictures in the page, hover over the placeholder and select "Show Picture" in the right mouse button menu. It's that simple. No server-side support is required.
One possible way of making server-side filtering scale is for motivated editors to create their own ratings for images. [[User:Example/Classification/NotSuitableForKids]] might contain a list of links to images that, in the opinion of User:Example, are unsuitable for kids. Someone for whom this kind of thing matters can then pop this into his Censorship file, with the result that he won't be able to download anything that gets put into that article. The system would be based on trust. People with religious objections and whatnot could club together and maintain their censor lists without bothering anybody else.