On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 09:25:16 +0000, Christiaan Briggs
<christiaan(a)last-straw.net> wrote:
I'm intrigued by the efforts to label this an
issue of editorial
control. That presumes an extremely narrow definition of the word
censorship and seems wholly disingenuous to me.
Still no one has attempted a rational response to my question to
Jimbo...
What is it about a picture of a man performing autofellatio in an
article about autofellatio that makes it "pornographic"?
Well, I'm not Jimbo, but I don't think he ever claimed it was
pornographic. One doesn't even need to tackle the pornography question
to realize it's a bad photo. Jimbo said that it was "unacceptable".
"This photo is terrible."
It hurts the eyes on purely aesthetic and editorial
grounds which have
nothing to do with prudishness or censorship.
Editorially, this should make sense. As he said, it has high shock
value, distracting readers from the article, but has low educational
value. Furthermore, it's not clinical. It looks like porn, so it's not
an NPOV document of the act, and Jimbo analogized it to the original
clitoris image, which likely derived from porn and much less
educational than our current and indisputably GDFL image.
And it is also objective to say that if the purpose
of a photo is educational, then it should focus on the informational
aspect rather than on sexually arousing (or shocking, or whatever) the
viewer.
Finally, as he points out, it's almost certainly a copyright violation.
I believe appropriately illustrative photos of sex acts must have a
place on wikipedia (presumably presented in such a way to avoid
shocking viewers), but this photo is just plain bad for an
encyclopedia.