[Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[Kim Bruning]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 09:41:41AM +1000, Andrew Garrett wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:
> > Well, when I ask people why they want the feature, that's what it
> > comes down to. They say they want to be able to hide things that are
> > offensive to their own culture. (Given that it would work) This
> > method would allow them to do so, without imposing straight-out
> > censorship on their fellow (wo)man.
> >
> > Why else would you need to hide things from yourself, if not because
> > somewhere in your past, you learned that it was "wrong" or
> > "uncomfortable" to look at?
> 
> I'll answer with an example.
> 
> Therefore, it would be really nice if I could choose, just for my own
> sake and on my own behalf, to have these images hidden to start with,
> and if I want to see them I can click on them and have them shown to
> me.

And that's fine. Your user agent can do this for you in part. If you don't
understand how your user agent works [1], we could certainly add some
options to wikipedia to do this for you. There is exactly 0 problem
with this.

The only problem is with people who make categories that say "this
might be an offensive image". (They probably would miss medical
anyway. The bias is against sex, nudity, and etc). It turns out that
such categories are censorship tools, and should be avoided. Even if
we don't use them to censor, others certainly can and will.

Clicking something to "Hide all images until I want them shown", is a
standard function of your browser[2], or a plugin could be made to
provide an extra button in the wikipedia UI.

Hmm, the default firefox image options are not that great actually. There's
no way to tell that there were images there in the first place.
HideImages plugin is close to what you want. Maybe we need a better
firefox plugin. And maybe an extension could be written that does
this function.

sincerely,
	Kim Bruning


[1] many people have never heard of F5 or CTRL-F, let alone suchd
complex things as clicking in a menu. I don't understand this, but
I've given up and am willing to work with it.
[2] In firefox: Edit->Preferences [content] [X] Load images automatically

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