On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 01:17:34PM -0500, Jim Trodel wrote:
"Karl A. Krueger" <kkrueger(a)whoi.edu>
wrote:
Rather, the issue here seems to me to be whether
Wikipedia needs some
kind of rules under which people's work will be deleted or hidden away
on the grounds of being "offensive". I hold that it does not; indeed,
that such rules would harm the project. Existing ad-hoc practices work
just fine for selecting the work that should be included, on the basis
of accuracy, style, neutrality, copyright, and other such rules.
I agree - however, the argument here is being made that linking to a
image that is beyond the bounds is NPOV despite the voting and actions
by Jimbo.
Setting up "bounds" on the basis solely of offense is not NPOV and is
not legitimate for Wikipedia. There are, however, perfectly good
legitimate criteria which exclude some of the same images which also
offend people.
Note, for instance, that Jimbo did not defend his unlinking of the image
on the basis of its offending people, and specifically disclaimed that
motive: see [[Talk:Autofellatio#Raul's convo]].
Here's another approach:
The class of images I suspect more people are concerned about is not the
class "offensive images", but rather the class "gratuitously offensive
images". Most everyone recognizes that there is also a class of
"informative images which also offend some people" -- for instance,
internal organs, caterpillars, swastikas, hammer-and-sickles, Abu
Ghraib, Jesus fish, etc., and that we must use these images in articles
where they are relevant.
For an image to be gratuitously offensive, it has to be gratuitous; that
is, not appreciably informative. But ... if an image is not appreciably
informative, then it has no business being in an encyclopedia article in
the first place. (The same standard applies to external links: we
remove useless ones, not because they are offensive but because they are
useless clutter.)
The "offensiveness" criterion cancels out, since we have no use for
uninformative images, be they offensive or no.
So the argument basically comes down to a case-by-case decision by
editors of whether each individual image is informative -- or, better,
which of a number of image options is the most informative. This is
what happens already.
The presence
or absence of images would not, then, control whether
Wikipedia were accessible to those students.
I think it could - especially as censorware controls become more
finely tunable (if that is such a word).
(It is. "Your eyes are lode-stars, and your tongue sweet air / More
tunable than lark to shepherd's ear" -- Shakespeare, "A Midsummer
Night's Dream".)
Unfortunately, the state of the world today is that "offensive" text is
much easier for automated systems such as censorware to recognize than
"offensive" images. It is easier for a program to pattern-match the
word "fellatio" than a picture of same.
Offense is not
a good criterion on which to judge whether material
should be presented in an encyclopedia. If it were, we would be unable
to cover adequately any number of subjects which offend people.
But offense to a great number of people is good critera for deciding
whether something could be included as a link or inline.
I'm not so sure. If the image is informative, then hiding it behind a
link relegates it to a second-class status. It has, to me, connotations
of sneakiness or dirtiness: "Heh-heh, do you *really* want to see?"
I believe this matter was extensively hashed out in the matter of the
[[Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse]] article, where presentation of
a "censored" or "images suppressed" version of an article was
rejected.
The talk-page and VfD discussions surrounding that article cluster are
informative.
Images are much more powerful communicators than text.
To include
graphic images that provide no educational or encyclopedic content and
would offend most people in the article without a link or warning
would be IMHO foolish. And to provide it through the link should
satisfy (but for some reason doesn't) those that want to claim
censorship and NPOV.
If an image has no educational or encyclopedic content, then it doesn't
belong on Wikipedia at all, regardless of whether it offends people.
--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger(a)whoi.edu>