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What is our responsibility when it comes to images?

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By Adam Cuerden

Specifically, I'm referring to images that may be valuable, but which need loads of context – and how we should treat them at featured pictures, picture of the day, and other places where that context might end up getting stripped. And I should warn: This might get pretty uncomfortable. The examples I've chosen largely relate to racism and racial violence, and, while I haven't shown the worst image discussed, there are dead people on this page.

Let's start with the least disturbing examples (at least visually), because I would rather that people reading this know what's coming before the worst images are on their screen.

"If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." This is Hitler's prophecy in a poster from 1941 that was displayed at Nazi Party offices. Given the claims the German populace didn't know about the Holocaust, this is actually rather good evidence to counter falsehoods. But it's also a literal quotation from Hitler, in a visually attractive form. This one was actually up for featured picture, but was rejected. I'm not sure if we made the right choice or not, because since then it's found a use – countering propaganda in various other articles.

This is Jefferson Shields, who's described as the "personal servant" – which may well be a euphemism for "slave" – of Colonel James Kerr Edmondson of the 27th Virginia Infantry Regiment. He did nothing wrong. However, let's look at our article, Military history of African Americans in the American Civil War:

So, if I were to restore this image and get it to the main page, would this help open a conversation about how, in the 1970s, as the Civil Rights Movement was fighting for African American rights, groups in the South tried to make the case that everything was fine before the American Civil War, and were rewriting the past to do so? Or would it just give a nice image to racists who can strip out all this context and use it to promote their views?

Lynching images

File:Lynching2.jpg is a featured picture, and it has never – and likely will never – appear on the main page. In fact, it can't even appear in this article unless I get this page whitelisted, because images of lynching were used for vandalism. There's a lot of problems with this type of image: first of all, the original publications often came with captions describing who the people supposedly were, and these were inevitably based on the accusations of the racist mob who lynched the person. So, not only are they images of a murder victim, they're also connected to claims that said murder victim raped a white woman, or murdered a white man, or other such claims meant to incite hatred against them. There is no evidence that any of that's true: this was a common lie used to justify random murders. And there are racists who would be very, very excited to see photographs of dead black people.

In a discussion in May 2022, it was pretty much universally agreed that this image was exploitative, poorly documented, and more shocking than encyclopedic.

I do have a sort of solution to this one:

These are illustrations of, respectively, the 1906 Atlanta race riot from Le Petit Journal, and the Rock Springs massacre from Harper's Weekly. There are advantages, sometimes, to not using photographs: it preserves the victims' dignity, as opposed to just showing corpses posed sensationally.

Of course, that does lead to the question of why I'm fine with this picture of the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, by Alexander Gardner. But then, I don't think there are easy solutions to any of this, and I also don't think that one person should decide policy all by themselves. Give your own opinions in the comments, and I'll continue with my policy of trying to alert the community to anything controversial coming up on Picture of the Day.

The policy view

Wikipedia:Offensive material and WP:NOTCENSORED provide some advice. The first is perhaps most relevant here:

And that's great advice when it comes to articles. Other than the lynching image (which has issues of being especially poorly documented: We don't even know where it was taken), all of the above add a lot to their respective articles. But once we begin looking at featured pictures or putting them on the Main Page as part of Picture of the Day, we start to strip the context, begin to move them away from that encyclopedic context that moves us from simply offensive or upsetting. We also draw much more attention to them, and draw attention in places where people won't be expecting such images. People coming to our articles on battles, tragedies, racial violence and suchlike can reasonably expect there might be some challenging material. Pictures of lynchings aren't entirely unexpected in our article on lynching. Pictures of dead soldiers aren't entirely unexpected in articles on wars and battles.

But we also have to consider, even if only briefly, what it means when that image gets released into the wild. Will it primarily serve to educate, or is it more likely to be spread around by racists as propaganda for their views, or to intimidate groups of people away? I think we need to consider just how educational the image is, and weigh that against the potential harms, and the acceptable balance between those two is going to change when we move away from the context of an article into the much more limited context of the main page.

As I said, I don't think these are easy questions, but they're ones we should at least consider. I think the potential good should outweigh the potential harms, at least once you consider the chances of each.

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  • 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 600th 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 600th 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 600th 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]


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