Erik Moeller wrote:
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.
It seems that you are assuming what you find personally offensive has
"near universal offensiveness", and what you do not find personally
offensive does not. For example, I'd argue that close-up pictures of
genitalia are considered offensive by a similar proportion of the
world's population as pictures of someone slitting their wrist (the
latter appear quite often in mainstream movies, for example, while the
former generally only appear in pornographic movies). So then we'd have
to include those too. And if our article on [[feces]] has pictures of
feces, our article on [[clitoris]] has a detailed photo of a clitoris,
our article on [[suicide methods]] (hypothetical; I'm not sure if such
an article exists and Wikipedia is too slow to check at the moment)
includes photos of slit wrists, and so on, a large proportion of
Wikipedia will simply be unreadable by a large number of people. I
certainly wouldn't read it, anyway, and I'm more liberal in these
matters than most people I know.
You sound like you may be arguing that close-up pictures of a clitoris
are of a similar level of offensiveness to photos of women without a
veil, which is simply not true: the former are far more offensive to far
more people. It is true that they do not offend everyone, but I think
they offend enough people to make it a poor idea to include them inline,
much as slit wrists and feces and other things that a very large
proportion of people don't particularly want to see casually unless
they're looking for that photo on purpose.
-Mark