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(a)world.std.com alternate:
dpbsmith(a)alum.mit.edu