Offensive content

MediaWiki feature request and bug report discussion

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Note: This feature request follows a heated discussion on #wikipedia today about what content should be displayed inline in articles.

Since people on this planet can generally never sit down and agree about anything we have quite a large number of people who disagree about such things like whether the Bikini article should feature a woman showing some flesh and whether the Clitoris should actually show a picture of the body part, and more contriversial wheher the image of Nick Berg should show his severed head.

Now, since wikipedia is a multilingular, multinational project with everybody having their own opinion on what is offencive and what should be shown inline in articles people tend to disagree alot, this problem can only get bigger as more nations with more diverse rules about cencorship of he various material start contributing more, for example someone from a middle eastern country might think the bikini article is highly offencive while someone spain might not, leading to a potentially very nasty edit war between these two nationalities.

Instead of doing nothing about this other than removing content "everybody agrees on" from articles ( which i think is highly against our NPOV policy but thats another issue ) i propose a more technical solution to the problem, keep all contriversial content in the article but apply special metadata to it so that people wishing not to see for example moderate nudity could either hide it completely or have images render as external links instead of inline, in that way people who do not favor any kind of censorship or re-arranging of content due to a subject being taboo would not suffer due to popular opinion of what is inappropriate material and people wishing to filter out such undersired content could do so at will.

I have no proposal on how this should be carried out, such as what rating system should be used or if we should create our own, i think it's more important to consider if we want do do this in the first place, then we can implement the technical specifics of it. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:18, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

This makes a lot of sense as a longer-term solution to the problem. I might suggest that, as a default for non-logged in users, offensive images be only links, and if someone wants to sign in and have them inline, they have to choose to do so (with their Preferences). I shudder at the thought of a third grader in her school computer lab stumbling onto the decapitated head of Nick Berg (which is currently linked to from the en Main Page). -- Seth Ilys 20:52, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

agree with you on that one, it should probably not be default for some content, we could have catagories for mild semi-nudity like the bikini article which could be shown by default. However the encyclopedia should not be turned into some shock site --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:15, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Excellent. I agree that it is a long-erm solution, but having content options for users is a great idea. Of course we'll need a default for unregistered users. --154.20.6.193 21:19, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree w pretty much all of the above, and doubt there are any substantial objections other than implementation. Philip Marlowe 23:19, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

What they said, but as with most things the devil is in the details. (how do we determine what is and is not offensive, how do we flag potentially offensive images so that the filter can identify them, how do we handle those images already uploaded, how would the filter-on version of an article differ visually from its filter-off version, etc.) But then, that's why we have this page, right? :) - jredmond 23:31, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

I think it's quite obvious that any system we come up with will not be perfect since what is offencive is always someones point of views, and people have different points of view, however i think it would be far better then what we currently have which is flat out removal or external linking of some material which not everybody agrees on, for example in the Clitoris article i would like to have a picture of a clitoris for the simple reason that i like to always have pictures of what i'm reading about, i think it adds to an article of any subject to have good pictures of it regardless of how taboo it might be, however i wont be happy knowing that i am imposing my views on anyone and neither will i be knowing that someone else is imposing their views on me, therefore i think such a system is the golden middle ground; if people want to view such content fine, but if they dont thats fine also, and no stepping on anyones toes.

However since you asked about the specifics of the implementation i think that rather than start tagging each and every image which would be a very large task and totally not worth the effort since 90% ( made up percentage ) of our pictures and media are things like flowers and mountains, nothing anyone is likely to make a fuss about. Rather i think that if such a issue comes up for example in the case of Nick Berg a vote be held on wheter the content should be market as explict, there would of course be different catagories for this, perhaps a positive integer from 1-5 with 1 being mild nudity, 2 being something like full frontal, 3 none-erotic nakedness 4 erotic material or closeup pictures of genitalia and 5 something like killing of people, genocide or a sewered head. Those catagories are of course subject to change if anyone has a better suggestion but i think it's important to keep it simple.

This would then be implemented by placing a special tag on media like we place align tags now for example [Image:sewered_head.jpeg|thumb|200px|right|rating5|Alt text]. Users would then set options in their user preferences for material such as this, they could choose to view all media of rating5 inline, as an external link which would then be made up of the alt text with the caption below if the image has a caption or choose not to view the image at all in which case it would either not be rendered in the html or hidden in css with display: none; --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 12:17, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

This is not a new proposal. People have suggested using the ICRA schema. Personally, I think that all these categorizations are inherently subjective and arbitrary, involve unacceptable editorial decisionmaking, will lead to edit wars, and will ultimately solve nothing, not to mention the tacit approval of the POV that information in and of itself can be "bad" or "harmful". Nevertheless, I can see the handwriting on the wall, and it's clear to me that these sort of categorizations are coming, so what the hell can I do about it. --Dante Alighieri 16:45, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

I am aware of the ICRA schema, it but as can be seen on here it's very subjective, making a difference between female genitalia and male genitalia. Regardless, the ICRA schema is way too complex for what most people want which is simply to be able to set in a simple way in Special:Preferences the ability to filted based on some simple standards, i don't think we should loose ourselves in complexity here Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:00, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Proposals

Here is a gathering of proposals for the solution of this problem, please not that the Support/Objections are not votes on implementation, simply a place to state what is well done in each proposal or could be done better. If consensus is reached a vote will hopefully be held later. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:12, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

CSS classes

Overview

An idea is to use css classes to mark certain elements. A simple

.violence { display: none }

would be enough to hide violent things for example. Works already in 1.3 if you add that class to your user stylesheet. Could be used for things like 'spoiler', 'nudism' etc as well, multiple classes are possible like this:

<div class="nudism spoiler">Some content</div>

A small javascript function could even offer to un-hide things with one click if desired.

I intend to move as many prefs as possible to generated css/js for 1.4 to improve performance, this is kind of a schoolbook example where this is particulary easy. -- Gwicke 16:54, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Support

Thank you for your imput Gwicke, i think thats much better than my proposal since it does not involve any changed to the Image code and can be used for arbitery things like certain text such as spoilers or just about anything. Also in 1.3 as you said it is trivial to remove or add things you do not want to see simply based on your user stylesheet or a commonly maintained stylesheet such as kid-safe stylesheet or uncensored stylesheet. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:05, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Keywords

Note: the idea is not mine and i do not know who came up with it originally, if you feel confident it's yours please put s <s> around this text and add your name here. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:29, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

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Keyword tagging is a slightly more complex idea than the one descibed before but it does not replace CSS tagging, in fact the CSS .violance display {none;} or other CSS tags could be generated from the keywords.

Wikipedia already has keyword support, what is lacking is the ability to generate the html output based on them. Lets take an example, John Doe lives in a country we'll call X which does not allow fair-use, he could then decide to block all images which do not have {{msg:GFDL}} or {{msg:PD}} on their respective media pages. Instead of manually inserting things like <div class="violance">[[Image:violance.jpeg]] they keyword mechanism could instead generate that HTML around all media that has {{msg:violance}} on it's Image: page.

The good thing about this is that it would have no arbitery limits, people could block content under certain licences, with any keywords they could think of or just about anything. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:31, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Objections

I object. Part of the elegance of the ICRA scheme (which I object to as well, but it seems to be the least of all evils) is that it provides for a context for the information. Just having a tag for "nudity" is bad hoodod. There is no way to distinguish between an image like that on clitoris and a picture of Michelangelo's David. This is too important an issue to hide behind "keep it simple". If it must be done, "do it well", and that requires complexity. --Dante Alighieri 17:33, 13 May 2004 (UTC)