Wikipedia:Image content guidelines
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. Thus references or links to this page should not describe it as "policy". |
Wikipedia:Image use policy does not go into detail on issues of image content, other than to say: "Do not place shocking or explicit pictures into an article unless they have been approved by a consensus of editors for that article." Wikipedia:Images (the image guideline) has a section on image choice and placement, but this also does not directly address the ethics and morals of the use of controversial or otherwise problematic images. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not has a not censored section, which broadly argues against the exclusion of objectionable material if it is educational and relevant to the context. However, discussions about controversial images can become long and heated. This page, a proposed guideline for image content, is also intended to be a central page for discussing these issues, and to help Wikipedia's readers and editors decide on broad strategies and guidelines for controversial images, and to access previous discussions on these topics. Examples of types of controversial images include:
- Explicit sexual content
- Explicit medical content
- Images of identifiable people
- Images depicting death
- Images depicting violence
- Images depicting religious figures
The need for a project-specific guideline is to cover the non-free images and other images uploaded here on en-Wikipedia, and also to cover which images from Wikimedia Commons (the image repository used by the Wikimedia projects) are suitable for use on Wikipedia. The premise is that some images hosted on Commons will be suitable for use on other Wikimedia projects, but not on Wikipedia.
Please discuss on the talk page.
