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

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.

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: Shields attended many reunions and was voted in as a member of the Stonewall Brigade at a reunion in Staunton, Virginia. He was buried with a military grave marker that reads "Jefferson Shields, Pvt. Co. H 27th Va. Inf., Stonewall Brigade, Confederate States Army" at Evergeen Cemetery, Lexington, Virginia.

Jefferson Shields was not enlisted in the Confederate Army. The Sons of Confederate Veterans awarded him the honorary rank of Private decades after his death. The Confederate Army did not allow slaves to enlist. His image, along with other "black Confederates", helped to reinforce the stereotype of the "happy slave" narrative, according to historian Kevin M. Levin.

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.

, 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:

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
Offensive material and WP:NOTCENSORED provide some advice. The first is perhaps most relevant here: Wikipedia's encyclopedic mission encompasses the inclusion of material that may offend. Wikipedia is not censored. However, offensive words and offensive images should not be included unless they are treated in an encyclopedic manner. Material that would be considered vulgar or obscene by typical Wikipedia readers should be used if and only if its omission would cause the article to be less informative, relevant, or accurate, and no equally suitable alternative is available.

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.