[WikiEN-l] Naughty/violent pictures

Wed Feb 16 20:10:37 UTC 2005

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:39:58 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> David Gerard said:
> > Christopher Mahan (chris_mahan at yahoo.com) [050216 14:27]:
> >> --- Arno M <redgum46 at lycos.com> wrote:
> >
> >> > It is not an encycopedia's task to do PR for terrorists,
> >> > especially
> >> > ones who are as ruthless as these.
> >
> >> Then Auschwitz pics are out of the question, right?
> >
> >
> > I don't know if anyone's working on code for the inline vs link user
> > option, but it would probably beat the fork that appears to be coming
> > on the issue.
> 
> Are forks such a bad idea?  It would solve the child-safe problem.  The
> adult Wikipedia could possibly also drop a lot of the trivia that are
> mostly of interest to children.  TV show episode guides, comics, games and
> the like.  Presumably article and history information could still be
> interchanged.
> 

Duplicated efforts, divergent versions, and a fewer eyeballs: forks
are an exceptionally bad idea.

If it's terribly important to have whole articles without requiring
users to click to separated images, I suggest template-driven
transclusion as used on [[Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse]].

A more intuitive method of transclussion was made by Violet/riga. It
involves titling the images based on the article name and using
{{PAGENAME}} in the image tag so that alternate versions (ie
"Autofellatio (no pictures)") will still show the caption but break
the image. I've just added a demonstration of this technique on my
userpage ([[User:Cool Hand Luke]]) since it's no longer on
Violetriga's.

Using this sort of technique we avoid forking (both versions are
generated from the same stock), and we give even technically unsavvy
users the choice whether to see the image or not by simply clicking a
link. Furthermore, addressing the concern some have over linking
images, we don't deny readers the ability to see a whole article with
images in context.

I believe giving users an actual choice is much better than lecturing
them about how incompetent they are with their web browser or
chastising them for looking up a topic in the first place.

I'm one of those that might read autofellatio, but would look it up
without the expectation, much less a desire, to see that trashy
copyrightvio.