On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 1:13 AM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > On foundation-l we are divided between moderates and libertarians. The > libertarians are more strident in their views, so the debate can seem > one-sided at times, but there is a substantial moderate contingent, > and I count myself among them. Conservatives have no direct voice > here, but they are conceptually represented by Fox News and its audience.
There are some people here who exactly fit your description of conservatives, such as me. But we're forced by the overwhelming libertarian majority to play the part of moderates as a compromise. Regardless, more people than just religious conservatives would prefer not to see naked people without warning. At the very least, few people would be happy in unexpected nudity showing up while they're browsing at work, with children watching them, etc. -- it's embarrassing. You're probably correct that this is *historically* due to religious conservatism, but the preference remains even for completely irreligious people. On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 11:44 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hundreds of millions of viewers a month visit Wikipedia, many of them > religious conservatives. But our structure is not one that produces > articles on sexuality or religion (and sometimes on politics, and > science...) that are found to be acceptable by, at least, the most > hard-line among them. Sure, and that's inevitable. You aren't going to please people who have ideological problems with Wikipedia's entire premise. But leaving aside people who think nudity is morally wrong on principle, we are still left with a very large number of people who would simply prefer not to see it. Or would at least *sometimes* prefer not to see it (at work, when kids are around, etc.). If these people want to look at even totally innocuous articles like [[Human]], they will be forced to look at images they don't want to see, with no warning. This is completely unnecessary. First of all, the images rarely add much value. If anyone has *not* often seen a naked person or erect penis or whatever before, it is almost certainly because they have gone out of their way not to and don't want to see it right now, so including it doesn't help them get what they want. If they have seen it often before, then they gain no real information from the image. At best it serves as decoration, and decoration that a lot of people don't want to see is counterproductive. Sure, fine, there are going to be some people who want to find some high-quality freely-licensed nude photographs for whatever reason. But they'll be a small minority of visitors to an article like [[Human]]. If you discount people who are reading Wikipedia for titillation rather than information (and we should -- our goal is not to provide titillation), then likely only a minority of visitors even to [[Penis]] are interested in a photograph. If you want information about penises, you're looking for biological facts, not a simple photo. You've seen photos plenty of times before, if not the real thing. A photo just distracts from genuinely informative content like a diagram or prose. The obvious solution is not to display images by default that a large number of viewers would prefer not to view. Instead, provide links, or maybe have them blurred out and allow a click to unblur them. You don't hide any information from people who actually want it (you require an extra click at most), and you don't force people to view images that they don't want to view. This allows as many people as possible to get what they want: people who want to see the images can see them, and those who don't can choose not to. The status quo forces people to view the images whether or not they want to. And a lot of people don't want to look at naked people without warning, for whatever reason. The standard objection here is "But then we have to hide Muhammad images too!" This is, of course, a non sequitur. A large percentage of English speakers prefer not to see nude images without warning, but only a tiny percentage prefer not to see pictures of Muhammad, so the English Wikipedia should cater to the former group but not the latter. The Arabic Wikipedia might also cater to the latter group -- indeed, I see no pictures of Muhammad at <http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/محمد>. But we only need to look at large groups of viewers, not small minorities. If the minority is small enough, their benefit from not having to see the images is outweighed by the majority's benefit in the aesthetic appeal of the images. It's not like the English Wikipedia isn't making judgments calls exactly like this already. [[Daniel Pearl]] does not contain an image of him being beheaded (although it's what he's famous for), and [[Goatse.cx]] does not contain an image of its subject matter. Why? Because enwiki editors prefer not to see those images without warning, so they don't show them without warning. ([[Goatse.cx]] does indeed contain an external link to its subject matter, as I suggest. I get the impression there's been edit-warring about [[Daniel Pearl]], but probably out of respect for his family, not because the video is gruesome.) It's really very easy to determine where to draw the line. There are a multitude of English-language informative publications (encyclopedias, newspapers, news shows, etc.) published by many independent companies, and the major ones all follow quite similar standards on what sorts of images they publish. Since news reporting, for instance, is very competitive, we can surmise that they avoid showing images only because their viewers don't want to see them. Or if it's because of regulations, those are instituted democratically, so a similar conclusion follows. The solution is very simple. Keep all the images if you like. Determine, by policy, what sorts of images should not be shown by default, based on the policies of major publications in the relevant language. If an image is informative but falls afoul of the policy, then include it as a link, or a blurred-out version, or something like that. This way people can see the images only if they actually want to see them, and not be forced to see them regardless. It would hardly be any great burden when compared to the innumerable byzantine policies that already encumber everything on Wikipedia. The reason that this isn't the status quo has nothing to do with libertarianism. As I argue above, the properly libertarian solution would be to give people a choice of which images they view if there's doubt whether they'd like to view them. Rather, quite simply, we have sexual images in articles without warning because Wikipedia editors tend to be sexually liberal as a matter of demographics, and have a lot more tolerance for nudity than the average person. With no effective means of gathering input from non-editors, they decide on an image policy that's much more liberal than what their viewers would actually like. This is a gratuitous disservice to Wikipedia's viewers, and should be rectified. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l