Fastfission wrote:
Personally, I'd rather it be an either/or choice. I don't want to help people enforce arbitrary limits on knowledge (if you don't think it is arbitrary, consider the difference in which a partially-exposed female breast is considered on American television in comparison to images of gratuitous violence). I think the principle stands whether it is pornography or subversive politics, whether the censor is a school board in Ohio or the Ayatollah.
I think actively censoring Wikipedia is a problem, yes, but providing more accurate metadata to our reusers, and ideally using some of it to give visitors to wikipedia.org more options, serves a number of purposes.
I wouldn't turn any filtering on by default, but I have often wished for some way to filter which images are shown, usually simply because I find them distracting than because I'm actually offended by them. For example, on occasion I've looked up species of insects on Wikipedia, and if I already know what they look like, I don't usually want to have to read the whole article while staring at a close-up view of a mandible. I of course would like images to be available, but I'd like to be able to say, "don't show me insect pictures unless I ask for them", because I find it distracting. Others might want them shown, but it would be nice if logged-in users had some options. As it stands now, I have to screw around with firefox to turn off images, which is a hassle.
-Mark