[WikiEN-l] Re: Offensive photos policy

Thu May 13 20:11:56 UTC 2004

Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> An option to hide all images is still useful, but that has nothing to do
>> with offensiveness.  It would be welcome by people with slow internet
>> connections as we keep getting away from plain vanilla text articles.
>
> Perhaps there is a software solution. We could add a field to the 
> "image" table called "img_rating," which could be used to indicate 
> potentially offensive characteristics of the image from a fixed list 
> of possibilities, e.g., "sex," "violence," "profanity," 
> "scatological." The same fixed list could be added to user options, so 
> that people could choose themselves which types of images they prefer 
> not to see.

This came up in one of our periodic debates about categories.  There's 
no reason why categories can't apply to images.  The items in your lists 
could all be treated as such categories.  In conjunction with 
Wikipedia's own internal search function (Does anyone remember when that 
was operational) a user could set a filter consistent with his own 
beliefs.  There was at least one voice then that was complaining that 
this would open the door to censorship.

Ec