[WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.

Wed May 12 08:00:00 UTC 2004

Rich-
> The cost of catering to those who are offended by the
> images is a mouse-click from those who are not. The
> cost of catering to those who would be offended by
> having masked images is the non-participation of those
> who are offended by the images.

That is an incorrect statement. The cost of an additional mouse click (and  
finding out that there is an image to click to in the first place) may  
very well have the same effect on some readers as showing the image may  
have on others. To cite your own example, if we started censoring .. uh,  
excuse me, "masking" images of women's faces like that, I would 100%  
certainly leave the project, as would probably many others. And the  
argument for doing that is no stronger or weaker than the argument for  
masking the clitoris photo. In fact, I predict that if we masked *all*  
somewhat sexually explicit pictures (penises, buttocks, breasts ..) in  
this way, several people would be annoyed and/or leave the project.

If we are more forgiving of our own biases than of those of other  
cultures, then we effectively endorse a certain "POV" of what is and what  
isn't offensive, and this flies in the face of everything this project  
stands for. The standard of "near universal offensiveness" is the only one  
which avoids this problem.

Well, not the only one. Category tags on images and category filters in  
the user preferences might also work. Then you could have something like:

Show the following images in articles:
[ ] Animals
   [ ] Fictional animals
   [ ] Rabbits
[ ] Women
   [ ] Overweight women
      [ ] Overweight women wearing party hats
[ ] Priests
etc.

If we wanted to create a real family filter, we could add another set of  
options:
[ ] Allow me to view filtered images on a separate page
[ ] Allow logout
[             ] Preferences password

Censorious parents could then force their children into viewing only  
images of priests and rabbits, etc. (although such a filter could be  
easily circumvented). Others who merely want to avoid being "surprised" by  
offensive images could enable the "Allow me" option and would get a "View  
image" link on filtered images.

I'm not saying that I support such a system - my own POV is strongly anti- 
censorship and I'm not fond of any system that makes it easier for parents  
to indoctrinate their children - but from the standpoint of Wikipedia  
policy, this would be acceptable. "Masking" images that are not  
universally offensive is not.

Regards,

Erik