[WikiEN-l] One argument I do not find compelling

Mon Apr 18 07:54:22 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales said:
>
> Tony suggests that users can browse with *all* images turned off and
> simply click to view them.  He apparently concedes that with Firefox,
> you have to download an extension to make this easy.  But even with
> this, users who come to Wikipedia for the first time (and each
> subsequent time) have to think: gee, I'm going to a serious
> encyclopedia project, so I might see a photo of someone engaging in
> autofellatio so I had better turn off all images just in case.
>
> This is forcing the user to go through a lot of hoops

Only the ones who have a problem with images.  The rest of us have much
more choice if we have inlines.  Put it this way: use linking and you're
forever sacrificing the chance to have the image actually illustrate the
article it's supposed to.  Use inlining and you leave the choice with the
user. If he really is bothered by certain images, he can turn them off. 
This seems reasonable to me as long as the images themselves are
appropriate to the article in the first place.
The problem lies with the user, and so the user should deal with it.  Push
it up the chain and change Wikipedia to suit *some* users, and you simply
distribute an individual problem to lots of other individuals, and degrade
the usefulness of Wikipedia as a whole.