Wikipedia talk:Descriptive image tagging

Sex and nudity

The sex category is way too broad. For a start nudity does not equal sex. There is a big difference the two - the image at Nudism matches the first 5 points but it has nothing to do with sex. It would also result in the image at Speedo (suit style) being tagged as a sex image.
- Even nudity won't do. Is someone wearing only one sock on nude? Strictly, no, but I assume we're looking for a category that would include that too... --fvw* 20:56, 2005 Feb 4 (UTC)
  - I think that people would understand nudity to mean a state of a certain part of the body being unclothed, else we would need to have some contrived title. I agree with 'sex' being inappropriate, as nudity can very easily be non sexual, and for instance a school or library would want to filter all sexual content, without restricting nudity. However, would you consider 'passionate kissing' as being sexual, as I am pretty sure that under some rating schemes it is classified as such. I --Neo 19:40, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    - The goal of this system is to be as objective as possible, and catagorizing "nudity" under "sex" is just a way of making the "nudity" tag easy to find.
      - Classifying "nudity" under "sex" is not objective - indeed it may be very offensive to some. Thryduulf 22:53, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        Is the current title better? --Carnildo 21:06, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        The title is more reflective of its contents, but I still think that sex and nudity should be separate top-level entries. I'm not a fan of the human body descriptor for a category such as this though, as you will get pictures such as that at elbow and ear categorised under that system and censored as a result of a policy that blocks nudity. Thryduulf 23:28, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        I doubt it. Which of the tags in the "Sexuality/Human body" section applies to Image:Ear.jpg? --Carnildo 00:46, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        None. However, if the category is spearate from Sexuality (as imo it should be) I can see people tagging those images as "Human Body". Thryduulf 09:07, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        They won't be tagging the image as "human body". The category headings are not tags. What they will be tagging it as is one or more of "Visible male genitals" "Visible female genitals", "Uncovered buttocks", "Uncovered breasts", "Bare male torso", "Naked male", "Naked female", "Sexual act (humans)", "Sexual act (animals)", "Sex toys", or "Sex toys in use", clearly none of which apply to Image:Ear.jpg. --Carnildo 20:48, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        OK, that makes sense now. However I still think that you should separate nudity and sex. Thryduulf 21:11, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Violence/death/medical

The Violence/death/medical category is also too broad imho, and Blood/gore is just too vague a term. There is difference between a picture of a medical operation, a picture of disease symptoms, and pictures of dead people/animals. The images at Measles, Surgery, Funeral, Blood, and the second picture at Road fauna could all receive the same tag.
If you want to tag religions separately you will need more categories than that. What about Buddism, Hinduism, Bahá'í Faith etc. Christianity may be too broad - Catholocism and Scientology are very different denominations.

Thryduulf 09:52, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The categories are mainly to make selecting the appropriate descriptions easier, so if, for example, the image you're tagging contains only a naked woman, you can skip the "death/violence/medical" group entirely. The "violence", "death", and "medical" groups are combined just because separating them is too difficult -- is a dead body that's been cut open the result of violence, or the result of a medical procedure? The religion tags are just for the religions that I could think of right off-hand that had prohibitions on "graven images".

As for specific examples:

Image:H9991083.jpg would be tagged as "disease symptom, photo"
Image:Brewster dr splatt2.jpg would be tagged as "dead animal, photo"
Image:Redbloodcells.jpg would not be tagged
Image:20000 graveyard.jpg would probably not be tagged, as no dead body is actually visible. If it was, it would be "dead human, painting".
Image:Surgery pd.jpg would probably not be tagged, as just about everything is obscured.
Image:goatse screenshot.jpg would be tagged "visible male genitals, uncovered buttocks, bare male torso, photo"

--Carnildo 18:08, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Best idea so far

If there is going to be a sitewide policy on such images, this is probably the best idea I've seen. Maurreen 05:06, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Looks good to me, on a first look. I'd hope that inline image 'guidelines' can be relaxed if this is implemented, though it looks like a decent idea even if that isn't done. I guess one way to approach it is to think of any image that a decent number of POV people might consider offensive, and find a tag to NPOV describe it. Which is probably what's being done. --SPUI (talk) 00:51, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Alcohol

We might also want an 'alcohol' category under 'other'. --SPUI (talk) 00:56, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

What sort of "alcohol" category would you recommend? Remember, it needs to be something that is an objective description of image contents. --Carnildo 01:05, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Alcohol bottles? I'm just thinking along the lines of what a school might want to censor. Same for drugs (not just 'drug apparatus'). We'd have to define which drugs. --SPUI (talk) 11:38, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

with the alcohol you have the potential difficulty in language. In the UK cider is what Americans term hard cider - in the UK the distinction between differen types of apple juice is not made. Similarly to the drugs issue below, Absinthe is legal in the UK but illegal in the USA (its more complicated than this, but see the article for details). Thryduulf 12:31, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

re drugs, an organisation might want to treat aspirin, viagra, cannabis, nicotine and Rohypnol differently. I don't know how we'd categorise these. Legal vs illegal wont do as cannabis is legal in The Netherlands but illegal in the UK. Thryduulf 12:31, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

How about the following tags:

Recreational drugs
Medicinal drugs
Cannabis/marijuana
Tobacco
Alcohol

where the distinction between medicinal and recreational is whether the drug is approved for treating a non-drug-related medical condition. --Carnildo 18:08, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

As quite a few drugs can be medicinal and recreational, perhaps we could specify that medicinal drugs are in a government (which government is irrelevant assuming it approves drugs - for instance the FDA) approved container, or are explicitaly the contents of such a container (for instance the highly recognisable viagra tablets, although any self-certified image would be adequat). --Neo 12:15, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

We should make it clear that the categorisation relates to current useage, not historical, as the status of some has changed hugely over the years. (e.g. laudanum) Thryduulf 13:29, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I think this is a great idea

I think this is a great idea. Basically, different people have differnet boundaries about what kinds of images they find acceptable, either for themselves or for their children. For example, someone at work may wish to deactivate all images of nudity, drugs, and overt violence. Another person, say a horny 14-year-old, may wish to see only pictures of female full nudity. Descriptive image tagging allows one to see or not see the images they want to see, allowing people to set their own boundaries, instead of having Wikipedia set up boundaries, something which will be inheritly POV and will be an endless edit war where consensus will never be reached. Samboy 07:20, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Is there really a problem? Recent consensus says, "no"

In the recent poll at Wikipedia:Graphic and potentially disturbing images, the majority (by a pretty wide margin) agreed to the statement, "do nothing now, as there's not really a problem now."

In that debate, I took a look at actual examples (and you can see a verbose attempt at tagging in my write-up). (See [1]) I would support a neutral scheme like that you suggest, except that it appears to be overkill. The most elegant solution (and current consensus) appears to be to leave this alone. --Chris vLS 22:22, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I oppose tagging for content

As it stands, I belive that nudity tagging may be used by opressive governments to identify people who viewing nude images. Thus, any tag which can be read in the Wikipedia data flow may be used to opress people who view the images. This is not to say that I oppose some way for users to avoid disgusting images, but tagging doesn't seem to be safe for this. Can someone suggest a way of tagging where nobody could detect whether the tags were actually sent to the end user? How can we ensure that tags aren't used for censorship between Wikipedia and the end user? How can we ensure that the tags can never be collected and used by censorship organisations? Mozzerati 22:31, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)

That's the advantage of this system. Because the tags are Wikipedia-internal, it is possible to set up filtering in the Wikipedia software, so images are filtered without the actual tags ever leaving the Wikipedia servers. --Carnildo 22:57, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The choice to turn on or off a particular tag will still be in the data stream. In particular, if a user finds an image blocked and unblockes it by changing a preference, that will be possible to see. I've started gathering the risks to try to do a proper analysis and then (later) see what can be done about each of these threats. Any other suggestions welcome Mozzerati 21:50, 2005 Feb 20 (UTC)

So what you're asking for is a miracle or a telepathic input device attached to the Wikipedia servers? If this is a serious risk, then we could use encrypted https for setting preferences, but I think a government willing to go to the level of effort needed to tap and interpret even an unencrypted preferences change is more likely to be doing searches of hard drives or spot-checks of image downloads. If we want to go to that level of censorship paranoia, then our best bet is to offer secure http access to Wikipedia. --Carnildo 22:23, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

nope, what I'm saying is that there are a bunch of associated risks. I guess that these are too complex to be worth handling. More importantly, I am guessing that the people who do the implementation will be more concerned with getting it done and working than handling these. I'd like to see each one analysed and agreement made to handle it. If it turns out not to have been handled, then the whole project should be reversed.

HTTPS access to preferences is one thing (and a good answer; it should be a requirement; this could be quite low cost and effective), but another thing is how do we protect the database of preferences which now has to be stored on a central server. I bet it can be used to work out the list of "muslims who like pictures of naked men" which could be used for blackmail. There are a whole bunch of these risks which need to be listed and mitigated. Where we can't mitigate them sufficiently then we have to abandon the project. The fact that supporters of the proposal don't seem willing to do so forces me to point blank opposition.

My opposition is bad since I have become convinced that there is "encyclopedic" material which I would like to block myself. I really have no need to see the goatse picture ever again and yet I might be interested to see the article to find out what happened to the domain registration. Mozzerati 20:46, 2005 Feb 21 (UTC)

I favor image tagging

A weakness of Wikipedia is that society at large has standards of, er, decency. The no-holds-barred editorial policy of Wikipedia's formative years must eventually acknowledge the needs of the wider body of encyclopedia consumers. For every Wikipedian who feels free to edit occasionally (or incessantly!), there are dozens and possibly hundreds who do nothing more than view pages. We're also thinking of issuing a print edition.

Any system must reconcile two interests which (at first glance) are at odds.

Writers and artists want their works to be included and made available world wide. Similarly, readers all over the world want access to the unvarnished truth.
Some parties, such as parents of small children or ideology-based governments, evince a need to "protect" some or all from immoral, subversive, shocking, etc. things.

I am confident that a suitable system of tags can be proposed and implemented which satisfies both groups.

I myself would like to be able to click on an image once, and then never see it again. Whether this means I get a browser cookie, or the database adds a record in a table is immaterial. Either option is technically feasible, and has no effect on others.

Also, a prominent body might want to establish a "we think this is best omitted" tag, kind of like the MPAA's system of rating films: (G, PG-13, R, NC-17). We already have the ability to add category tags to articles about films. Why not give users an option to hide articles which are in a certain category?

Some users may disdain the "tame" films which are rated G: Yuch! Who wants to see Barney and Power Rangers"
Some users may be unable to stomach NC-17 films like Basic Instinct; or even might want to skip all the R-rated films.

Imagine being able to filter out ALL links to objectionable material - stuff YOU have indicated that you want hidden from yourself. No images of Muhammed or Jesus (for devout Muslims who regard such things as sinful). No graphically violent or "excessively sexy" images for us, er, prudes.

Meanwhile, everyone else could see it without even being aware of the tags! -- Uncle Ed (talk) 15:51, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

Well, this page is pretty dead; but I think that was nicely put, Ed. +sj +

Agreed. Take a look at the Actual Examples section of Wikipedia:Graphic and potentially disturbing images. It shows three things: 1) decent tags aren't that hard to come up with, 2) industry standard tags are very pov, 3) the problem just isn't that big. There just aren't that many examples that makes this worth a lot of effort (at least in the opinion of the consensus). Chris vLS 22:46, 12 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]