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

Tue Feb 15 11:31:51 UTC 2005

Nicholas Knight wrote:

>
> Tag controversial images, preferably into a couple categories (nudity, 
> blood/gore, could probably think of one or two other good ones). Let 
> the user set a preference for their defaults (maybe give them a toggle 
> they can hit at will while browsing to turn all on/off), and then let 
> them easily select single controversial images to display. There are 
> several options for the last part, Javascript being the easiest, and 
> it can be combined with a server-side mechanism for those that have 
> disabled or lack Javascript support.
>
I agree in principle with the idea of tagging potentially controversial
images, similar to the existing scheme of licence tagging, so that users
of Wikipedia material can use this information for whatever downstream
processing they wish. I can also see that one use of this should be to
allow different user-preference-set presentations of whether
controversial images should be inlined or linked.  (If we are going to
do this, let's have only one implementation, not two).

However, the issue of what the default presentation should be remains.
If we make "controversial images off" the default for editors, they will
not be able to exercise oversight over image content, and we could have
a worse problem than before. Some articles actually do have a
justification for having depictions of violence or nudity: do we want to
remove all images of classical nude sculpture and paintings, or violent
images of great journalistic importance? This is a very tricky problem,
with the wowsers on one side, the porn trolls on another, and the
reasonable point of view somewhere in the middle, needing to be decided
on a case-by-case basis per article. A techical solution alone is not
enough.

-- Neil