[WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.

Wed May 12 17:43:41 UTC 2004

 On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 05:12, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Letting the *majority* view win on this matter would be the first step  
> toward abandoning NPOV. And when this issue was brought up in the past,  
> people started arguing: Well, maybe we *should* abandon NPOV on this, just  
> to avoid losing readers. If you accept that argument, you might as well  
> take all the criticisms out of the [[Mother Teresa]] article because they  
> might drive readers away, or "mask them" by moving them to a separate  
> page, as was initially proposed.

I don't agree that "majority rule" on this is POV.  If we form a policy
such as "images which 50% of our readers will find offensive should be
masked behind a (clearly labeled) link", then we are retreating from the
POV "this image is offensive" to the NPOV "50% of readers find this
image offensive".

Other tests, such as "images of male and female genitalia should be
treated the same", are definitely POV.  Many people would agree with
such a principle; others would disagree.  If we adhere to this
principle, then we are forcing our "enlightened, correct" POV on our
readers.

I think that "Images which are offensive to N% of our readers are
masked" is the only NPOV policy possible.  There is room for debate on
what N should be; Erik has proposed "universally offensive" at 90 or
95%; Rich Holton has proposed 30%.  I think 30% is a much better number
than 90 or 95%.  (I don't remember whether it was Erik who associated
"universally offensive" with 90 or 95%.)

I disagree that the issue of masking images is similar to the idea of
masking information.  Images are obvious and immediate, and have a very
different impact than text.

Carl Witty