Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-16/Gallery

Discuss this story

Wanted to start out with thanks for a good, thought-provoking, Signpost article. I also felt that your policy review end bit closes it out nicely. I think there are further questions - to what degree are we responsible for what a tiny fraction of the off-wikipedia population might use it for? And what degree do we "weight" those potential harms? Some of these certainly are part of the sum of all human knowledge, do we need to tweak the mission statement? Personally, the off-wiki harm would have to be damn high for me to oppose an encyclopedic image existing in an article, I tend to argue that either the mainpage shouldn't have this stuff at all, or we should ascribe the same balancing test there.

As to the point about the main page removing that context. Well, that's a fair point that was well made. Taking a trip through the mainpage (something I do too rarely), it does feel like six lines could provide enough context about an image to at least mitigate the context issues. Perhaps some possibility to not just use the corresponding article lead, but lines ordered in a way to add in a way to mitigate (though no doubt not remove) issues in as effacacious a way as can be managed? Nosebagbear (talk) 11:39, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Nosebagbear: Let's consider a non-image possibility: The media has largely agreed not to give a mass shooter what he wanted, and has largely censored his name. Should we report it in the article on the shooting, and would that change if that article became a featured article and we quoted the text identifying the shooter on our main page?

I think there are cases where the level exposure matters. For images, let's consider a case where a historical image promotes a nasty, racist conspiracy theory, in the style of an educational infographic, but was notable for being the graphic that really helped propogate the theory. In the context of the article, well down the page, it's after a lot of commentary so our readers are prepared for it. On the main page, we have two paragraphs to debunk a Gish gallop of false claims. People still believe this conspiracy theory.

Further, I'm an image restorationist. Here's an example of my work (on a non-controversial subject):

If a racist image had the best copy on the internet be similar to the left option (and perhaps the most common image might be worse than the best copy), and I carefully restore it, is my work going to be adding to the encyclopedic value on the page over just using the crap version, or is it primarily going to give racists a gift of a much better copy of "their" image to use? If I'm writing an article, I can focus my text to debunk the racism, but when restoring an image, issues with the image's subject can't really be changed and still have it be the same image. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.3% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600^th FP!} 19:51, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Adam Cuerden on your textual example. Let's assume we do have good sources (even if a small subset of the whole media), BLPCRIME's all fine etc etc. I would say yes - I back the no drama point to a tune of it not being a headline but it's clearly a fundamental aspect of reporting the article. The media reduction would probably involve a DUE consideration for placement, but I imagine that it would make it into the FA words, though its placement might vary depending on the facts.

As to the "level exposure" aspect, this is rather an area where if this point is sufficiently true to factor in, it suggests that our current process is already flawed. Namely, currently all the featured things (excepting ITN) are on various qualitative aspects - we don't consider the degree of coverage at all. Normally that's putting things up that don't get much exposure outside of Wikipedia - but that reasoning should also work with the corollary.

Finally, as to the restorationist example, I don't know - I've not given any thought to it, and on reading through, nothing beyond the position I held before i started reading that paragraph has jumped out. That usually suggests I need to think more about it, so I may drop back on that thread. Nosebagbear (talk) 21:04, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say there's a difference between level of exposure of almost certainly non-harmful content and of harmful content. If Creatures of Impulse, a very obscure play, goes on the main page (and it did), there's basically no chance of harm. If Hitler's prophecy went on the main page (and it did), we might have to briefly consider harm, but pretty quickly decide there isn't much chance of harm. But take the image of lynching, with basically no provinence, and probably rearranged after death (why would the hat still be positioned over his face after a lynching?), so low encyclopedic value as an image. Again, maybe this is an argument against it being a featured picture, but I feel its negatives (potentially driving people away from Wikipedia by making them feel uncomfortable and/or threatened) outweigh its positives (puts text from lynching on the main page). That said, I don't think there's a huge number of images these considerations apply to. A look at Wikipedia:Picture_of_the_day/Unused will give you some idea. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.3% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600^th FP!} 22:11, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I mean your explanation of the flaws of the lynching picture seem convincing enough to stop it being a featured picture on criteria well before it reaches a consideration of net positive. Still, we can at least concur a hypothetical better example (or one of the earlier examples from your article for an actual one). Part of the basis of NOTCENSORED is not merely that it's beyond our scope to decide such but that knowledge will ultimately "win out", even if a negative time to time.

In this case, I believe it could be fairly argued that an unpleasant, uncomfortable photo of a topic can be a positive. Sure, we would have individuals who saw it and clicked off. And probably others elsewhere on the web who'd just see/use the photo in an undesirable fashion - the downsides. But we'd likely get more eyes to the articles - more chances for people to read as neutral a explanation of the topic as we can.

With that, I could grant that a great photo of this type on a distinctly poor article wouldn't be good - I don't know what the average standard is, but like you said, photos of this type are rare - requiring B-class articles for them wouldn't be a harsh addition. Nosebagbear (talk) 22:27, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. I think we need to think about these issues, but I think most cases are going to ally with WP:NOTCENSORED, but not necessarily all. And then there's the case of restoration: Like acting a role, you need to be spending a lot of time with an image, and are going to be attached to it afterwards. That's a big commitment for some images. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.3% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600^th FP!} 23:17, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much for your introduction to the problem! Sometimes I think that we mostly discuss about text, but images are an important topic by themselves. Ziko (talk) 18:09, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Ziko, I agree with you, but this also has two different sides. Using the image of the Hitler citation does not proliferate the wording. It is not machine-readable, so it is not to be found by searching machines. If I had to choose I'd rather use the image than typing the text into an article's source text. Which will be found by Google and Co. On the other hand using images of texts means you set uo a barrier. For some users the content would not be accessible. Making it accessible means proliferating it on the other hand. Matthiasb (talk) 18:06, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Generally I don't think it's worth worrying "how will the most bad-intentioned actors misuse this?" with regards to photos or, well, facts (at least the kind Wikipedia deals with). You can lead a horse to ethics, but you can't make it think. Otherwise we'd have to get rid of free re-use licenses. As for "offensive images", I have a little bit of a story. Paul Carlson was an American medical missionary who was killed by Congolese rebels in 1964. For a while the only public domain photo I had found of him was his dead body (or rather a headshot photograph of his lifeless face, think like the photos they used to take of killed outlaws in the Wild West). Perhaps somewhat callously, I put it into the infobox, since it was the only image we had of him. Fairly soon thereafter a new user identifying themselves as a descendent objected, saying it was offensive. I explained NOTCENSORED and said that while this was by no means the best photo for the purposes of identifying Carlson, it was the only one we had. The family member responded by uploading a very nice family photo of Carlson, alive and smiling, which we still use to this day. -Indy beetle (talk) 05:13, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Indy beetle: That's quite the interesting story. I know that Wikipedia has a pretty explicit image-use police for biographies of living persons but it gets iffy when that's no longer the case. For example, the Manual of Style talks about types of image that would normally require consent. "Dead shots", for lack of a better term, definitionally can't be taken with consent for... obvious reasons. I wonder, then, if more explicit image-use guidelines for deceased individuals should be drawn up. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 23:28, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think its something better resolved by common sense than rules. For example, do we really need to spare Benito Mussolini's dignity? -Indy beetle (talk) 23:35, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Anything can be abused or become controversial later. Generally I think NOTCENSORED is enough, but we should certainly try to explain why an image may be racist or controversial or such in a caption (but that judgement should be based on reliable sources). Some items have to be discussed case by case, and it's possibly our consensus will change, as our views one ethnics and such evolve. But in general, I'd stick to NOTCENSORED. Ending thought: Depictions of Muhammad can be offensive to some; in 2008 there was a petition to delete all of them from Wikipedia covered in major media ([1]), just recently a professor got fired in US over showing them [2]... But we made the right decision in 2008, and I don't see much of a difference here. Those images should be preserved, kept, and shown when they are useful to illustrate some points (again, with proper captions explaining context and controversies, as necessary). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:43, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm glad someone is thinking deeply about this. While I generally agree with the final sentiments and that we should not generally kowtow to the potential for misuse by bad actors, I also think that, as one of the highest traffic websites on the internet, we have some responsibility not to hand loaded guns to people who might use them. Axem Titanium (talk) 23:38, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For an instance of this I have personally dealt with, see the article I developed on Eduard Pernkopf, the Austrian anatomist whose color atlas of the human body was a standard medical educational text for decades after World War II ... but the specimens the artists used probably in many cases came from executed political prisoners who most certainly did not consent to this use of their tissue post mortem. And Pernkopf and the artists were all ardent Nazis, too ... one of the artists even worked a swastika into his signature!
The article has these images, controversial as they are. I decided I needed to have them, and there is plenty of accompanying text discussing not only the techniques by which they were created (they had to specially treat the paper to hold more detail than watercolor usually did). And at the end I included a long section on the debate over the continued ethics of their use, which of course I considered relevant to their use in the article at hand. The quote from South African bioethicist Pieter Carstens at the end of the article is pretty much my justification, as well, for using the images there. Daniel Case (talk) 04:17, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]