[WikiEN-l] Jimbo on Commons

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:03 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10 May 2010 23:53, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>>> On the talk page, I mostly see people calling it out for the
>>> censorship stalking horse it was.
>>> You can tag a goat "a very special sort of chicken," but people will
>>> see through that.
>
>> So you are saying anything labelled "content guidelines" will be
>> called "censorship"? That's silly. You have to have limits when
>> writing an encyclopedia, otherwise you just end up with a mess like
>> the internet.
>
> No indeed, that's not what I said, it's a version you appear to have
> derived through an "all A is B therefore all B is A" fallacy. I was
> speaking of the example at hand.

OK. Would you like to try writing something that would be suitable for
use as "image content guidelines", or at least being more specific
about what you find objectionable about the wording of the text of
what I proposed.

Or to put it another way, many websites have guidelines relating to
the following:

* Explicit sexual content
* Explicit medical content
* Images of identifiable people
* Images depicting death
* Images depicting violence
* Images depicting religious figures

Can you explain why Wikipedia and Wikimedia tends to avoid having
explicit guidelines on such matters?

My position is that a single sentence ("Do not place shocking or
explicit pictures into an article unless they have been approved by a
consensus of editors for that article") is insufficient as guidance.
The opposing position (which I assume is the one you take, but please
correct me if I am wrong) is that anything stronger or more detailed
or specific than that that would tip things over the line towards
censorship?

Carcharoth