[WikiEN-l] Re: Writing about sexual topics responsibly is not censorship

Mon Feb 14 22:45:29 UTC 2005

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 12:20:45 -0800 (PST), Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> We've had this discussion on several pages.  Nobody can agree on what "explicit images" means.  Do we slap that tag on the pictures from Abu Graib?  From Auschwitz?  From Dresden?  How about images of Adolf Hitler and George Bush?

I would say that images which would not normally be found in school
encyclopaedias or museums such as the Smithsonian would be a good rule
of thumb, and I'm not just talking about sexual images.

I was in the Holocaust Museum in Washington a few weeks back and
although schoolchildren are welcomed and encouraged to attend, certain
exhibitions had warnings posted at the entrance. And rightly so.

I don't think there is any hard and fast guide as to what exactly
makes an image offensive, disturbing or explicit, but I think that the
Wikipedia community could be trusted to find a consensus on a case by
case basis. My feeling is that the Autofellatio photograph would be
generally agreed as being one that should not be generally accessible
to schoolchildren.

I use schoolchildren as an example, not because I want to emasculate
or prudify Wikipedia to the level that it offends nobody, but because
schoolchildren are prime users of information resources such as
Wikipedia, and the last thing we should do is to make it difficult for
them to use Wikipedia. I know that some people here think that
individula users should accept all responsibility, but many teachers
and parents don't see it that way.

I was engaged in discussion in another forum, and someone brought up
an example of the Wikipedia article on the Nile River. An innocuous
article, one might imagine, but it so happened that at the time my
correspondent was opening it up for the benefit of a schoolchild it
had recently been vandalised and consisted of nothing but obscenities.

I can't see any way of getting around this sort of thing in the
current state of Wikipedia, because inappropriate text or images could
be inserted without warning - possibly by mischevious schoolchildren -
and it might take some time before the situation is noticed and
corrected.

Maybe we should be thinking about having default material that is
known to be in a useful and "safe" state and that the "live" material
can only be accessed by specifically setting some flag or clicking on
an accept button or some similar mechanism.
-- 
Peter in Canberra