[WikiEN-l] Offensive photos policy

Thu May 13 14:32:52 UTC 2004

On Thu, 13 May 2004 07:02:04 -0700, Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> If someone says "Gee, I'd like to be able to read an article about the
> Nick Berg situation without having to look at the actual picture
> unless I choose to do so" then responding with: "Fine, you may turn
> off every single image in Wikipedia" doesn't sound helpful to me.  I
> doubt if many of the people who have a preference against looking at
> severed heads are going to be satisfied with that answer.

The man talks sense once again. Wikipedia is great in that I can view
a page about any number of shock sites without seeing the actual
image.

I still have yet to discover any *practical* reasons why the image
must remain in the article. It's fairly clear, in this case at least,
that many, many people find it offensive, and this is a good practical
reason to link instead of showing the image. On the other hand, we see
several objections to linking along the lines of "it could be
construed as censorship" or "it could be construed as POV" et cetera.
No one even argued that it would be excessively inconvenient or
anything like that...

I view images as a convenience to the reader. When they are offensive
to a significant number of readers, they should not be immediately
displayed. Even if that number isn't a majority, if (say) even a third
of the population is disturbed by the mere sight of the image- why
would we NOT want to link instead of embed?

Then there's the matter of "offensive". I mean this more in the
gut-reaction sense of "oh my god that is HORRIBLE!" or "eww, gross,
why are they showing that?"- perhaps "disturbing" or "disgusting"
would be more accurate. I would imagine that many people would have
philisophical objections to stuff portrayed in images (think Bush,
Gore, Image:Angelab.jpg, other related issues... do we have any
pictures of flag burnings, perhaps?) I think it would be rather
obvious that it's the "disgusting" and objectionable sort of images
which we would attempt to obscure rather than the ones which are
philisophically/politically/etc disagreeable.

Wisdom in a private IRC conversation:
<CimonAvaro> I think the only thing to do is to cool things down, and
later, when the dust has settled, get serious about what our
_fundamental_ policy with images should be, beyond copyright concerns.
We (including you), can't see this clearly while staring at Bergs
head.