Jimmy-
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"
??? That's not the proposal. I think you misunderstood what has been
discussed. See
http://scireview.de/wikipedia/ihide/ (tested in Mozilla).
You would have a link to dynamically hide images *on that particular
page*. To prevent people from viewing the image before they choose to hide
it, the offensive image would be moved out of immediate view, perhaps to
the bottom of the page. (It would be required by policy that adding such
images is only allowed when the page is long enough to do that.)
There would be a user preference to hide images on such pages (those with
a <warning> tag) by default to avoid all risk of stumbling across one by
accident. That should not be the default, however, because then we would
implicitly endorse the majority POV -- instead we endorse no POV, make
only neutral statements about the offensiveness of images, and offer
people the choice to tell the server "Please endorse my POV on this
image", by clicking the hide link.
Last but not least, when there is clear consensus on the matter, images
could still be moved to a separate page.
Regards,
Erik