2008/12/23 Thomas Larsen <larsen.thomas.h(a)gmail.com>om>:
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.
From a more general standpoint, we're helped in
ensuring the image
needs to be there to be discussed by the fact that the image is
copyrighted and not available freely... so it neatly dovetails with
our own criteria of "we must need this image for editorial purposes"
in order to use it. If we hadn't needed that, we'd have more reason
for quietly killing it.
These criteria are fairly robust, if sometimes handled a bit loosely,
and it's worth thinking about them. They don't apply to
freely-licensed material, of course, but in a discussion last week
(about a CC image I was arguing to remove), I suggested that we could
do a lot worse than apply a modified version of the non-free content
criteria to any lurid images, and rigorously think - do we need this,
can we reasonably discuss the topic without it, can we replace it with
an equally useful image, is it just decoration?
It might be worth considering something like this - we don't want
lurid or shocking images plastered across the site unless they have
editorial merit, but conversely removing them *merely* for their
content can prove counterproductive. Some kind of policy that says
"think hard about it and have a good reason; make sure it needs to be
there" could turn out to have much of the desired effect.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk