2008/12/23 Thomas Larsen larsen.thomas.h@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.
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.