[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and "indecent" content

[Andrew Gray]

2008/12/23 Thomas Larsen <larsen.thomas.h at gmail.com>:

> I've heard two main arguments in favour of keeping the specific Virgin
> Killer picture, and similar images, so far. The first position pivots
> on the clause in [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]] (which is
> official Wikipedia policy) that states that "Wikipedia is not
> censored"; the second is based on the argument that the picture has
> not been declared illegal under any jurisdiction, and thus can be
> included in Wikipedia.

As you note, these arguments are both easily refutable, and indeed
they're tangential. (I really hate it when people try arguing solely
from an "it isn't banned so we can do it" approach; it's fallacious
and tangential...)

I for one won't complain if you ignore anyone who advances either of
these positions as their sole justification for including an image :-)

The *real* justifiable reason for doing it is one you touch on in passing below:

> Pictures like these can be described using words, and they do not have

The only sensible reason for including it, encyclopedically speaking,
is the idea that we cannot reasonably describe it without using the
image. And can we?

Well, it helps that we've had an awful lot of articles written about
the album cover this month! I'm not sure any of them have effectively
managed to describe the image without either unintentionally
representing it as substantially more pornographic than it is, or
making it sound entirely tame and causing you to wonder what all the
fuss was about.

(Seriously. To read some descriptions of it, you'd think the reporters
had looked at two different sets of images...)

So, yeah, the image is actually helpful to the discussion here, in
many ways more so than in most comparable articles. A comparable
example would perhaps be [[L'Origine du monde]], a famously
sensational painting, and one undeniably indecent, which really needs
illustrated to discuss it - the textual description doesn't quite
work.