[WikiEN-l] Offensive photos policy

Wed May 12 19:41:23 UTC 2004

There is no issue of censorship involved in having the good sense and
good taste to not automatically display graphic photos that are likely
to be offensive or upsetting to large numbers of people.

There will always be difficult questions of where to draw the line, I
suppose, but we solve that issue in other cases by "going meta",
i.e. avoiding the controversy.

With most issues, the wiki process works perfectly fine.  It is almost
never "either/or" with the text of an article -- creative people can
almost always find a way to compromise on a text that is different
from either of two extreme positions.

With photos, the "show" versus "don't show" really is an "either/or",
though.  The only possible compromise, and one which I think will
almost always work just fine, is to *link* to the picture, with
suitable warnings, and leave it at that.

That is the proposal that Anthere has proposed in this case, and that
is what I support.

I do think that there are cases of photos that we ought to not even
have on our site at all.  Were it not for the extreme newsworthiness
of this particular photo, and it's likely longterm political
importance, I would argue for deleting it.  This is not rotten.com.

I think that there is great validity to the concern for the family and
for human dignity in general, with respect to photos of this nature.

--Jimbo