[WikiEN-l] Policy on shocking images (was: Improper sysop behavior)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 6/14/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> *You shouldn't make such a big deal out of poo. Here's some in your
> face, get used to it, it's real, it's here; nothing to make a fuss over.
> 
> That is prescriptive. It's an attempt to change attitudes.
> 
> If we need images of human feces or dog turds or horse manure, why not
> create a sidebare article called [[Images of feces]]? A link or two in
> the article won't offend too many people.

Hogwash. 

When you systematically remove informative content that your personal
system of values deems as offensive or unethical you force the
encyclopedia to adopt your bias: By removing content that is
considered by some to be 'wrong' because it is considered to be
'wrong' we make the statement that the encyclopedia considers the
content is wrong and therefor present a non neutral point of view.

There are plenty of people who would be sufficently shocked by our
mentioning of matters sexual or outside a single religion, so when we
are done removing useful images because some people are offended do we
then begin to delete articles about 'wrong' subjects?

The question for exclusion should be based on the images ability to
inform. We should exclude content that has no value to teach.  This
does not mean we should include every potentially informative image,
but rather we should select the most informative subset and of the
remaining equally most informative results we should select the ones
which best satisfy secondary artistic and editorial criteria.

So for example, perhaps a particular image of feces is considered
especially disgusting but someone has found an image of equal
informative ability that most consider less disgusting. Thus decision
between the two images is an editorial judgement and does not interact
with NPOV.  I do not advocate that 'majority shock' should be
encouraged or the risk of which intentionally ignored,  but rather
that because of NPOV all decisions of taste should take a secondary
role by only being used to decide among multiple choices of
substantially equally informative value.

I'm pretty clueless when it comes to feces, and would like to stay
that way :), so I can't fairly gauge what the informative ability of a
given image is... But I strongly object to how you've framed the
argument.