[WikiEN-l] NPOV and category-based image filtering

Thu Feb 24 00:09:34 UTC 2005

Of course, the advantage to a Wiki is that we can change our content
to match the mores of the times, unlike a print object. If this was
1972 we could link to the image, and then in 1990 we could inline it.
No content lost. Nobody too confused. Maybe a few people upset that we
would be ashamed at showing a human body inline. People who will find
errors in any policy.

I'm not sure I see the advantages of trying to really parse out a
hardline approach to defining "objectionable," but the lack of any
easily quantifiable approach is itself not evidence that no policy
should be created.

It has always seemed to me that a number of policies were "community
judgment calls" (NPOV, VfD, etc.). I'm not sure why this should be any
different. In the question of what is "objectionable" (which will of
course will have as many opinions as there are people giving them), I
think that a reasonable solution would be that in the event of a lack
of clear consensus (which is not the same thing as majority), we ought
to defer on the side of caution (linking to the content rather than
inlining it).

The potential benefits though seem to be about equal to the potential
harm in either case—what is respectable in one mind becomes offensive
censorship/content in the other. When in doubt, though, perhaps we
ought opt to not "surprise" anyone with something that a sizeable
percentage of people find extremely unpleasant.

Just one opinion on it, just to clog up your inboxes...

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:06:59 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Fred Bauder said:
> > Although many of our potential readers might object to these
> > images they are unobjectionable.
> 
> Well the Pioneer plaque was controversial in its day.  The Philadelphia
> Inquirer apparently retouched the copy of the image to hide the male
> genitals and the female nipples.  The Chicago Sun Times at first published
> an unaltered picture and then successively airbrushed out features with
> each later edition.  The LA Times carried the picture on its front page,
> and received angry letters about tax-payers' money being used to "spread
> this filth, even beyond our solar system", and decrying the lapse of the
> newspaper's standards in depicting "sexual exploitation" on its front
> page.  The two figures are shown standing side by side, some distance
> apart, facing the viewer.  The man's hand is raised in greeting.  Some
> feminists objected to the "passivity" and "submissiveness" of the female
> figure.  One man insisted that the man's hand was raised in a nazi salute,
> and proposed that another spacecraft be sent out to destroy Pioneer 10
> along with this symbol of fascism.  Frank Drake, the ETI researcher who
> along with Carl Sagan had designed the plaque, later remarked that the
> image had turned out to be "a cleverly disguised Rorschach test." (The
> Depths of Space, Mark Wolverton.)
> As well as the mission (it was Pioneer, not Voyager) I got the author of
> the plaque wrong. It was not Sagan's third and last wife Ann Druyan but
> his second, Linda Salzman, who drew the nekkid people.  John Naugle,
> NASA's associate administrator for space science, approved the drawings
> after erasing the single line representing the woman's vulva.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>