[WikiEN-l] How much?

Wed Jan 14 00:21:44 UTC 2004

Delirium-
> In any case, I'm less worried about offending people per se than in
> simply forcing people to see these images.  What's wrong with making
> them a link?  Many people, myself included, do not want to see a picture
> of [[penis]] inline in the article, and are quite capable of clicking on
> the link if we did at some point wish to see the picture.

Many people do not want to see a picture of a woman in public without a  
veil, and are quite capable of clicking on the link if they did at some  
point wish to see the picture.

> It seems, on the contrary, that there is a small segment of people here
> trying to push a POV that nudity (or at least pictures of nudity) ought
> to be acceptable in public, and are resisting any efforts to compromise
> in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda from
> being advanced.

"It seems that there is a small segment of people here trying to push the  
POV that women walking in public (or at least pictures of women walking in  
public) ought to be acceptable, and are resisting any efforts to  
compromise in a manner that would prevent their own personal moral agenda  
from being advanced."

Exclusion of such content is fundamentally irreconcilable with our  
neutrality policy, and should only happen in cases where we can assume  
near universal offensiveness. This clearly advances an agenda - just as  
doing the opposite would. Neutrality is the lack of involvement --  
philosophically speaking, as soon as we have decided to create an  
encyclopedia, we have at the very least taken the position that bringing  
knowledge to human beings is a good thing to do. By making our NPOV policy  
non-negotiable, we have also taken the position that Wikipedia does not  
subscribe to absolute truths, but presents all points of view instead.

Combine these two "agendas" and you arrive at the inevitable outcome that  
we *have* to include such images. Removing them would mean that we fail in  
terms of providing knowledge, and hiding them as links means that we fail  
in terms of being free of bias.

We make an exception to the latter rule in order to further the former: We  
link pictures that we consider almost universally offensive (sometimes  
with warnings) in order to avoid turning away readers, and in order to get  
them to actually read the article that contains the pictures. But as soon  
as we start pandering to local cultural biases, we inevitably fail in both  
regards.

The inclusion itself must be allowed not because of a particular  
*personal* agenda. It must be allowed because it is our *collective*  
agenda to provide knowledge without bias, and keeping Wikipedia as free of  
censorship as reasonably possible is necessary to do so.

Regards,

Erik