[WikiEN-l] Genitalia, etc.

Wed Jan 14 23:34:44 UTC 2004

It seems to me that there's no difference between this and any other 
controversial or contentious issue. I have the impression that some are 
asserting that there's some kind of fundamental difference that has to 
be handled in some fundamentally different way because it involves 
taboos or offensiveness. That's what I don't get.

It seems to me that the right word for these issues is "tastefulness." 
As in "de gustibus no disputandum est." Well, we know darn well there 
certainly est disputandum, but I don't see that's it's different from 
issues such as whether, say, Nazism is a kind of Socialism.

This is a wikiwiki, and just recently someone moved some pictures of 
peni from the article on "penis" to the article on "circumcision" by 
the process of deciding they ought to be moved and moving them. They're 
there now, and they'll stay there until someone else decides to do 
something else, and eventually it will or will not reach a metastable 
state.

As for diagrams versus photos, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to 
communicate information, not to induce sexual arousal, and deciding 
what picture is likely to do what is a matter of editorial judgement 
based on a guess as to the expected audience and on what the Supreme 
Court once called "contemporary community standards." You can't predict 
exactly what the audience is going to be, however. The "Professor 
Somebody" who authored the anatomy textbook mentioned in _Tom Sawyer_ 
probably did not expect the teen-aged Becky Thatcher to read his book 
or view the "handsomely engraved and colored frontispiece -- a human 
figure, stark naked." We had not expected our copy of "The Whole Earth 
Catalog," a rather Wikipedian enterprise, to serve as sex education 
material for our children, either.

We probably don't need to be as restrained as the 1911 Encyclopedia 
Britannica.

I just don't see what the big deal is. There should probably be 
pictures of a lot of things. If you think there should be a picture, 
put one in. If a picture seems much too strong, substitute on that's 
more toned down. If it seems absurdly prudish, substitute one that's 
franker. Why is there any need for this to be any different from any 
other controversial material requiring editorial judgement? What's the 
big problem?

Now, for something serious to argue about: what is the correct plural 
of the word "clitoris?"

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at world.std.com alternate: 
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu