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

[MacGyverMagic/Mgm]

I saw someone adding a whole buch of inclusions of a feces image a while back. 

What bothered me about it was mostly the size of the image. In some
articles the images was larger than the text itself.

That, and I really don't think such an image has added value in case
of the article on South Park's Mr. Hankey (in which he's depicted
himself).

--Mgm

On 6/14/05, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
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