Faraaz Damji said:
Not offending people should always be secondary to
educating them.
Exactly. There's nothing wrong with tweaking a few tweakable noses,
especially those who raise purely personal objections, based on local
cultural sensitivities, to aspects of an encyclopedic project. Such
pressure is a naked and (because we're nice people and don't like to
offend, largely successful) attempt to distort the encyclopedia on
non-encyclopedic grounds. We can give a little but only where it doesn't
matter much.
Also, we can't promise to avoid offending *everybody* if we get into
displaying images as links.
This is my long-term objection to the path of appeasement. The only thing
we can do in the long term is to remind people who are offended that they
don't have to download, let alone render, the pictures. We can't make
everybody happy.