Sean Barrett wrote:
Sydney Poore stated for the record:
Instead of a single image that can be presented in a context to make it clear it is educational , a bigger concern is external links to image boards with images of a child engaged in sexually explicit act. These appear on Wikipedia on a regular basis. When I went to image board web sites to look for inappropriate images, I felt disgusted that another Wikipedia editor would put it on Wikipedia. I think we need to modify our policy/guidelines dealing with images with children engaged in sexually explicit acts. They should not be permitted in my opinion. Editors that repeatedly add them should be blocked for being disruptive.
Certain sites stand out as excellent starting points for such a policy. The worst offender is something called "Google," which has innumerable links to inappropriate material.
I am not fully persuaded by this argument. I think that editorially speaking we can and should make sensible judgments, even difficult judgments, about the usefulness and appropriateness of various links to our end users.
I do think, though, that we have had much less of a problem with inappropriate external links (of various kinds) than we have had with inappropriate images (of various kinds). To move this out of the realm of a discussion of pedophilia and 'censorship', let's consider a much simpler case of fair use images that are on the site when free alternatives would be easy to come by.
If I put an irrelevant bit of text into an article, including a link, a bit which is problematic on any sort of grounds at all, then anyone can come along and delete or change it. It takes *one person* to eliminate the problem, though of course an edit war or a long discussion might follow.
With images, though, there has grown this bizarre culture that we must not delete anything until we have a consensus to do so. This is partly because images can't be easily restored, and there is some legitimacy to that as a factor in how we do things, but I think it has gotten much worse. Wildly inappropriate images which do not even have a majority support for keeping are kept in articles in a way that similarly inappropriate text would be shot on sight.
--Jimbo