On 19/02/2008, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
With respect, I think the background information you
provide is interesting
and topical but not directly relevant. Whether and how groups of Muslims are
offended is not at issue - it is clear that some are, and that removing the
images is the way to solve their dissatisfaction. Of course there are many
ways of removing or obscuring the images - we could even have a link to a
subpage only of images and descriptions, separated from the main body of the
article. The question we have not answered is still the most important
question: Do we modify content on Wikipedia in response to the offense taken
by a subset of our audience? My answer would be no. If there are other,
editorial reasons for removing the content - fine. Even if the proposed
reason was that not having the images, or having blank images, was more
educational and provided a stronger message than the images themselves -
fine. That isn't what is proposed, however, and editorial concerns are not
the reason. Until that changes, a compromise seems unlikely.
It doesn't seem very NPOV to modify the way content is presented
because of the concerns of internal editors but not for the concerns
of what is a much larger group of external users. Kind of plants
wikipedia in the stuck up category.
Peter