[WikiEN-l] How much?

Wed Jan 14 17:57:13 UTC 2004

On Wednesday 14 January 2004 11:54 am, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Peter Jaros wrote:
> > It seems like a diagram, rather than a picture, would be much more
> > informative, which is obviously the point.  And if we offend fewer
> > people, so much the better.
>
> I think Peter points the way towards a principle that can resolve
> most, though perhaps not all, of the dilemmas we will face in this
> area.
>
> The goal of our articles is to be informative, not offensive.  It
> turns out that in most cases (penis, for example) the ways of
> presenting the content that are offensive are also lacking in terms of
> informativeness.  A photo "in the style of" pornography takes away
> from our mission of informativeness, while a photo "in the style of" a
> medical text comports with that mission.

I am in total agreement that the images should be akin to those seen medical 
texts. However, I think that the people wo don't want to have pictures of 
various parts of the human body included in wikipedia won't be satisfied by 
that. 

The question of diagrams vs. images is a very interesting one. Images and 
diagrams have slightly different aims, in my opinion. The aim of diagrams is 
to reduce the visual information to a minimum in order to illustrate either 
the constituent parts or the functionality of a system (or both). An image on 
the other hand tells us exactly how something looks. Take for example an 
article on the mars rover. A diagram of the rover would clearly and concisely 
display what parts it is made up of and how they function and interact. It 
would not, however give a detailed account of how it looks. While viewing an 
article on the mars rover which only had a diagram, I would ask myself "but 
what does it actually look like". As I have stated in anothe email in this 
thread, I think that images don't add a vast amount of information, but they 
add relevant and encyclopedic information nonetheless.

Best,
Sascha Noyes
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