I was looking up the meaning of "Gravida 2, Para 1" on the internet yesterday. Wikipedia's article on Pregnancy came up, and I found the answer there almost immediately.

But to get there, I had to scroll down the first screen and view a NSFW photo of a naked pregnant woman. I was at "W". Fortunately nobody saw it, but I felt uncomfortable.

It's not as if I were searching for information about a sexually explicit subject (the classic example is "autofellatio"). We're talking about a very common, ordinary phenomenon. For crying out loud, Wikipedian nerds, can you have the decency to show a pregnant woman with her clothes on?

Speak for yourself, bub!

...as demonstrated by the couple of pictures lower down with a lady in a bikini.

I would say that the photograph in that context was in good taste and the sort of photograph that you might expect to get in some publications on pregnancy.

Essentially, for me this is a good example of the need for versioning. There are plenty of people who on that photograph going through the work filter would be called into the manager's office to explain why they had broken house IT rules.

With all the usability studies and discussions on school versions of Wikipedia and so on, you would have hoped that someone at WMF would have twigged that such a feature would be a good thing which could make the Wikipedia product more attractive as well as solving readers' problems.

Note to self: must remember that the Wikipedia readership are of no interest to the WMF except at donation time. Silly me.

Look, I'm not saying that a picture of a naked pregnant woman (or even a naked non-pregnant woman) has no educational value. Just use discretion. It really should not appear on the first screen of an article that many people will expect to read without seeing any skin at all. My ideas for images on "pregnancy" would be (1) women with clothes on, and (2) cartoon drawings.

Can I chime in to say that a grossly pregnant woman in a bikini may be just as shocking as a tastefully-posed naked one, in a shower? It's certainly more unnatural! I was trying to figure out why I preferred the pic this article starts with, to the ones further down, and that's what I came up with, anyway.

You should schedule a psychiatric evaluation. I think Ottava could use a car-pool buddy.


Yep.

Granted, computer policy in the places I've worked has fallen into one of three categories:
A) Use your own discretion but get your work done in a timely fashion.
B) Use the internet only for purposes related to company business.
C) Bring some books because we don't fucking have internet.


Then we'd be arguing about your perceived age of the expectant mother.

How exactly would cartoon drawings make any difference? They'd still show the same thing, but not as accurately as a photograph.

And besides, I'm tired of all these people who insist breasts are sexual organs. They're for babies for goodness sake. Their sexual connotation is as much the same as, say, feet (which many are turned on by, just like breasts).

If you in your workplace are required to look up terms related to pregnancy, it should be no surprise to the employer that you might come across a naked lady at some point.

Look, where do you want today's youth to learn about this kind of stuff? Sooner or later, naked women pop up in people's lives -- let's use Wikipedia to indoctrinate kids, thus having them ready when this happens.



I once saw a poster that parodied the "Peanuts" cartoons - it had a very pregnant Lucy yelling, "Damn you, Charlie Brown!" That would be hilarious for the pregnancy article, eh?

Well, here we disagree. Breasts in a non-pregnant woman ARE sexual organs. Some women have no more breasts when they aren't nursing than a dog or cat has. But these women are able to provide just as much milk when needed (this has actually been studied). That means that a breast for a woman who is not nursing, or preparing to, is NOT for babies. It's not needed.

So whence all that extra fatty tissue, which clearly isn't functional, occuring in some women with large breasts, who aren't pregnant or nursing? Well, they're secondary sexual characteristics, as, ermm, "advertised."

As is that glorious hair of a woman, which is of better quality usually than a man's. A fact recognized by some Muslim cultures, who require that it be covered up.

These things are mild stimulants, and are soon ignorable if you see them enough, like woman's bare ankles. But I'm pretty sure that nature hardwires some things to be more intrinsically stimulating visually than others. That female figure, for example. All the secondary characteristics that appear at puberty.

That's odd, I would have thought that this image would be the natural choice of Wikipedians to illustrate pregnancy...

It's not that the picture is inappropriate, it's just gratuitous. Images should strike the right balance between informative value and cultural acceptability. If you decrease the acceptability of the presentation, you effectively decrease the informative value because you deter some people from reading the article. If an image is shocking, or just even causes you to raise an eyebrow, it probably shouldn't be prominently featured.

Yes. Well, you have your finger on the problem. The bikini swimsuit sends a mild message, as does any bit of clothing which is skimpier than the local cultural circumstances suggest as "neutral." Remember why the bikini was named-- it was supposed to be explosive, and at the time, it was. There was a song that went "She wore an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini..." But I can't recall any that went "she stepped out of shower nude."

So how exactly are you going to illustrate pregnancy without sending any extra messages that you didn't intend, ala the photo you so helpfully linked above?

Horsey likes where this conversation is going!



Didn't the Beatles have a song that went, "She came in through the bathroom window, and stepped out of the shower nude"?

Sheesh, they don't even have any coverage of male pregnancy.

You would. But a pregnant outline sends very mixed signals to men, since the breasts are larger, but the girlish figure is definitely gone. So you'll see a "sexual" response, but not anything like pure lust (which is why you don't see gravid women at strip joints). Instead it tends to sexual-maternal-protective. The emotion we call "galantry" isn't generally thought to be a primary one, but pray tell me, of which other "primary emotions" would it be composed? An extravigantly pregnant woman provokes this feeling in men.

No, I think the Beatles song is a prophetic homage to G.W. Bush, ala Ann Richards.

They did have one about a guy who crawled off to sleep in the bath, and then later committed arson. That's what you get for teasing John Lennon.

I'm generally opposed to the gratuitous use of nudity on WP, but in this instance I don't find the image gratuitous at all. This image is in context and is not overtly eroticized (although that is really up to the mind of the beholder).

That said, I don't understand why so many people on WP are so vehemently opposed to some kind of tagging system that would enable users to block content (something like a placeholder that says "this image contains nudity - click here to display it" or some such).

Actually, I guess you missed the unusual stage directions above the first paragraph:

Michigan J. Frog! I love that little guy.

I think there's a strong assumption that viewers who find boobs offensive will find dozens of other things offensive as well.

In fact it's probably true in most cases.

All in the eye of the beholder.

That's true, of course. I think the range of acceptability should be defined somewhat conservatively. "Use any relevant image, regardless of cultural acceptability" has the benefit of being unambiguous, but there are big drawbacks that many Wikipedians don't seem to acknowledge or accept.

So is NPOV, RS and other matters. All in the beholder. If you can choose to exercise those policies -- because you expect your "beholders" to demand them -- then so you can for other policies these "beholders" may desire.

This discussion is going off track. At home, when I'm alone, the image of the nude pregnant woman side-on, from the waist up, is not offensive. (My Jewish tradition states that viewing such images for pleasure is forbidden, but this is one of the few areas where I do not practice strict adherence to the written laws.)

There's a flip-side to "Wikipedia is not censored". That is: Wikipedia reaches a very wide audience. The page view statistics for the Pregnancy article show 7,000 pageviews every day, or about 5 pageviews per minute. More than two million people will see that image it stays on the site. Among that mass of humanity, there will be some people who feel not mildly uncomfortable, but really upset - and most of them won't say anything about it on the talk page. This is the kind of decision that the readership won't make. The writers on Wikipedia, and I no longer number among them, must consider what will least offend in the most-viewed pages. On less-viewed pages (another classic example: goatse.cx) a more liberal approach may be reasonable, on the grounds of "what did you expect to see?" Even there, Kelly Martin once advised that pressing the "Random article" button might be hazardous because you might land on a NSFW page.

Ah, Grasshopper, you are not of the faith. Wikipedia defines that anyone who chooses to be offended by information of the world must be the one with an erroneous mindset.

The reality is that there are a myriad of ways in which an article can break a local law or a code of someone's beliefs.

Wikipedia is a place of black and white - because it is not easy to define a rule that allows the reader to define a set of criteria of which to display, it is deemed that it cannot be done.

In reality it would be quite practical to define a set of criteria to mark pictures or text as fitting certain criteria. However, to provide this for the reader would be an unfair imposition on our Glorious Writers (who have enough to do in citing their contributions) and would lead to the possibility of intermediaries using such criteria for censorship, so such a suggestion simply could not be countenanced as the poor dusty child in Africa might be denied his educational porn site.

Why?

I'm not sure I agree with their choice in this case, but "must consider what will least offend" is quite over the top.



I must say I cracked up when I read that. "I make very few exceptions to living a completely pious life, but porn is one of them!"

Frankly, I don't see how this information is relevant (or why you'd even think to mention your religious beliefs) unless you were in fact viewing this image and article for pleasure.

P. S. I should know better than to ask how you feel about graven images.

Because if people are offended by such images, they will not read Wikipedia. If few people read Wikipedia, then the donations will decrease. Eventually, Wikipedia will die when all it had to do was find some less-controversial images to replace the -kind of images.

Wikipedians purposely find the most controversial images to put in articles solely so they can yell "WP:NOTCENSORED" every time someone suggests politely (or orders violently) for a less-provocative image that is freely available. I am sure there are plenty of heavily pregnant Wikipedians willing to put a picture of themselves more moderately dressed on Wikipedia.

Just because there is a mountain there does not mean one has to climb it.

Did the naked woman on the article give written and legal permission for her image to be on Wikipedia and released into the GFDL/CC or whatever to the Wikimedia Foundation?

So the problem solves itself!



Whoa now. How did you get from *some* of the 2 million people will be offended to few of the 2 million people won't be offended?



I'm not defending that. As I said "I'm not sure I agree with their choice in this case, but 'must consider what will least offend' is quite over the top."

When I looked at the image, it took me a few seconds before I even noticed what the fuss was about. Oh, nipples, okay...

Huh?

Not to resurrect a dead topic or anything, but this issue has reached somewhat of a boiling point, with a shouting match at Talk:Pregnancy, a couple loud RFCs, and other such fun.

My opinion is that having the picture as the lead is indeed uncalled for (I don't think it's inappropriate later in the article), but I haven't had the, um, pleasure of voicing my opinion on the great Wikipedia.

We also have User:Ludwigs2 (T-H-L-K-D), attempting to link the issue of the preggers image with the issue of certain groups not liking to see images of Muhammad.

My first notion when looking at that nude pregnancy picture is, "Couldn't she have done something to fix up her hair?!"

Engaging this discussion on Wikipedian terms with Wikipedians is not going to be productive or even interesting. Once it was established that Wikipedian are incapable of addressing the interests of people outside the project it is just a lot of your usual middle school "I'm so fucking free" nonsense. Some Wikipedians using the matter for some other narrowly Wikipedian issue without even having the Muslim participants present completely misses the point. 500,000 people from across the globe requested in a dignified manner that Wikipedia address a concern they shared. They were not even given a place at the table. A bunch of Wikipedian bigots, trolls and pimply faced adolescents "decided" the matter in a shabby user discussion.

Please go be free someplace else.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...969#entry286969

The per-project image filter polls statistics support everything GlassBeadGame just said. Wikipedians (at least the Western-most ones) don't care about any beliefs, ideas, or values other than their own, and Wikipedians believe that their beliefs and such are the "neutral", "objective" ones. The German Wikipedia community is basically threatening to secede (by forking) if things don't go their way.

Lulz, gimme some more of that bleeding-heart liberalism, AssBeadGame. Your tears sustain me.

It is the height of intellectual dishonesty to claim that you're presenting information to the world on one hand, but then censoring some information because of religious extremism on the other.

I think that is the view most sensible editors have endorsed.

There is now a nice melee about Muhammad on Jimbo's talk page as well – not Ludwigs2's fault, but mine, because I think he is basically right.

Give that man a cigar! He finally gets it!

As I just got done telling Dogbiscuit on another thread, Wikipedia is not "all human" anything.
It is an autistic "encyclopedia" device-or-community. It is arrogant beyond all reason or
meaning and has great contempt for the rest of humanity and their human needs.

Every time someone uses it for "serious educational purposes", the world becomes a little
more Balkanized and degraded.

Well, I think you're basically an idiot.

You, Luddy, and a handful of gadflies all up in arms over the plight of the poor Muslims and their butthurt religulous shtick. Fucking pathetic. No one sgould have to cater to the whims and demands of fundie whackjobs, whether they are Muslim or Christian or Jew or whatever.

Bleeding hearts might thing we all have a natural-born right to waltz through life un-offended, but we don't.

Quite right! We should never give in to fundamentalists other than Wikipedians shouting WP:Notcensored (although of course it is) and WP:NPOV (although it isn't).

The article on Jesus is consistent with how Jesus is portrayed in Christian art, while the article on Muhammad is inconsistent with the way Muhammad is portrayed in Islamic art. How is that a good thing?

More importantly, has Wikipedia accurately represented their penises?

Are you saying there is some sort of correlation between the fact that we have 1000 images of white penises in Commons, but no black ones, and the fact that every last figurative image of Muhammad available on the Internet seems to have been uploaded to Commons, while there is a notable dearth of mainstream Islamic calligraphy representing Muhammad?

Are you saying that Muhammad was black?

Prove it!

Religious sensibilities are irrelevant. It cannot be made any clearer than that.

Well, is the Christian art portrayal of Jesus more accurate than the Islamic art portrayal of Muhammad?

Yes, in my view, because the Islamic art shown is not as representative. While Christians would have no trouble identifying with the imagery shown in the Jesus article, the same is not true for muslims looking at the Muhammad article.

If you look at the Arabic Muhammad article, it features a lot of relevant iconic imagery that the English one, with its focus on figurative depictions, neglected. Unlike churches, mosques are overwhelmingly decorated with calligraphy and abstract art, not figurative images.

Some editors have pointed out that the Farsi article also contains miniatures of Muhammad. That's true, but then many of these miniatures are Persian. Iran is a Shiite country. Even nowadays, despite being an Islamic Republic, Iran has no problem with images of Muhammad, to the extent that you can buy Muhammad postcards there. See for example the story on the Muhammad "poster boy" image that's also shown in the Farsi article.

It's interesting to compare Iran, as an Islamic Republic, to Turkey in that regard. The Turkish article does not contain any images of Muhammad, even though Turkey is a truly secular country. But religiously, its population is predominantly Sunni. There are no Muhammad images in the Indonesian article either; again, Indonesia is a multicultural and multireligious state, but the overwhelming majority are Sunnis. Sunnis vastly outnumber Shiites worldwide.

That's the Malay wikiipedia. id is for Indonesia. The articles are very similar though.