[WikiEN-l] Controversial pictures: when in doubt, link?

Wed May 12 17:13:24 UTC 2004

You know, I really don't see much objection to the idea that controversial pictures should be linked to (within the Wiki, of course), and that the general policy should be that anyone who finds a picture offensive should replace it with a link to the picture, and that people who do NOT find it offense should not revert such a change.

The real problem with censorship occurs when something is suppressed. But using a link doesn't suppress anything. (And it doesn't create the problems involved in the real world where something is behind the counter or your have to ask a pharmacist for it...)

Let's take it to an absurd extreme. Suppose that everyone agreed to "when in doubt, link," but nobody agreed on what was offensive, and an all-out battle resulted. Group A finds pictures of X offensive, so the replace them with link. Group B dislikes A's actions and retaliates by replacing pictures of Y, which group A likes, with links.  Soon you have hordes of contentious trolls insisting that a Microsoft logo, or a picture of the Statue of Liberty, or a diagram of lightwave interference in a soap bubble, are deeply, deeply offensive to them... and a hundred thousand edits later, no image in Wikipedia is directly visible any more, they've ALL been replaced by links...

...would that be _so very_ terrible?

Sure, I see the objection that replacing an image link, thereby identifying it as potentially offensive, asserts a point of view, but that can be dealt with by balancing text on the page.