geni said:
It seems to me
that which images are to be deferred would be decided
by someone other than the reader. This would probably compromise
NPOV.
Why? I am constantly deciding what the reader should see and the
reader should not see.
We are supposed to do so in a manner consistent with the neutral point of
view. Deciding that Leonardo's Vitruvian Man or Ann Druyan's drawing for
the Voyager plaque should not be displayed on the page seems to me to be
inescapably bound to the point of view that drawings of naked humans are
unacceptable.
If we would not provide the same facility for line drawings of steam
engines, then clearly there is a point of view at work in selecting one
category rather than another as a potential for filtering.
If we *would* provide the same facility for line drawings of steam
engines, the question becomes: why, what's so offensive about line
drawings of steam engines? The answer is presumably still that there does
exist a point of view that images of nudity are offensive and this point
of view is being encoded into the heart of Wikipedia itself.
I'm not entirely convinced by this argument, but I think it's worth asking
whether we should be in the business of deciding on the disposition or
otherwise of drawings on Wikipedia except on encyclopedic grounds.
Some of the cleverer people on this list have already picked up on this
and argued, in a manner than almost convinces me, that certain pictures
are in their view objectionable on esthetic grounds, and linking is simply
an acceptable compromise, a bit of realpolitik in the face of strong
opposition to the deletion of those images. This begs the question of
whether a "horrible" picture (which may however be technically well
composed and of good photographic quality) should be judged unencyclopedic
on the grounds that it is esthetically unpleasing to some viewers. Again
POV rears its ugly head.