[Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)

[Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva]

2010/5/13 Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>:
> On 05/11/2010 09:45 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
>> The obvious solution is not to display images by default that a large
>> number of viewers would prefer not to view.  Instead, provide links,
>> or maybe have them blurred out and allow a click to unblur them.  You
>> don't hide any information from people who actually want it (you
>> require an extra click at most), and you don't force people to view
>> images that they don't want to view.  This allows as many people as
>> possible to get what they want: people who want to see the images can
>> see them, and those who don't can choose not to.  The status quo
>> forces people to view the images whether or not they want to.  And a
>> lot of people don't want to look at naked people without warning, for
>> whatever reason.
>>
>
> I don't actually mind this proposal, and would like it myself for a lot
> of pages. But I'm not sure naked people are actually at the top of the
> list (perhaps someone should try to determine it empirically via some
> sort of research on our readers?). If I personally were to list two
> kinds of images I would want hidden by default, it'd be: 1. spiders; and
> 2. gory medical conditions. Do I get that option? Do I get that option
> if more than x% of readers agree?

(At a first read, I thought your response as a statement you found
this proposal amusing)

I might risk restating some points I already mentioned on other emails
(and, worse, being a complete stranger, to not 'fit' on the
discussions here), but I'm not disturbed by sexual content at all. I
feel torture images disturbing, however. In fact, I remember not
sleeping well after reading some random Wikipedia articles on the
subject. To paraphrase Sharon Stone, blocking/blurring porn by default
and failing to do this with torture images is an indecency.

[ Actually I would find ok if a parent didn't liked his or her small
children to view this (not just images, but text included - the
richness of some wikipedians' prose is frightening..). But I find
misguided any attempts by WMF sites to cooperate with any kind of
parental control. That is, I think that building a place where
everyone has access to the sum of human knowledge does not include or
permit provisions for parental control. ]

Other than that, I find that browsing the web at random might be
embarrassing, if there are strangers at the room - like at an
university lab or cybercafe (it's not a Wikipedia-specific problem
actually). It's only a matter of chance if the next clicked link will
have this kind of stuff or not. (Random example, many sites have porn
ads, many forum links contains embedded pictures, etc). So I might
disable image loading with a browser feature (I wouldn't trust the
site to do this filtering - or, worse, IM friend links, with a lot of
4chan-like stuff: those memes will often spread porn to blogs and
forums that wouldn't otherwise have it). This makes loading faster,
plus if I the content I want to see require image loading, I may just
click a button. Some browsers support this by default (such as opera),
and others through an extension. (I don't usually do this btw, because
I'm generally ok with it)

Anyway, I am not proposing here to just include torture depictions in
the (maybe long) of images censored for casual, unregistered readers.
I disagree with any kind of opt-out censoring, for any purpose or
pretext, even if to evade the censor it just requires a sign up.
(Also, I think any poll for selecting the targets of the block would
be biased towards supposing the majority of the voters supports some
kind of censoring - even if 'nothing at all' is an option)

But, to think about this a bit, it's a lot harder to block torture
images than explicit porn, because of the political component here.
For example: blocking recent Iraq american explicit torture images and
failing to block detailed depictions of historical torture devices is
unreasonable, since the shocking component - for me, at least - is
often centered on it happening to some human being. The issue here
would be where to draw the line, and the exact place might be
interpreted as a form of political pushing. Wouldn't it be awesome if
some pro-america editor managed to "clean" some articles for the
casual reader? :)

[ You might replace pro-america to anti-pornography as well - that's
how I would see it ]

-- 
Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva <tolkiendili at gmail.com>