[WikiEN-l] The Censorship Lie

Thu Feb 17 23:18:06 UTC 2005

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 09:25:16 +0000, Christiaan Briggs
<christiaan at 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.