On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 8:27 AM, Peter Jacobi peter_jacobi@gmx.net wrote:
There are only a few things, that accumulate faster in our articles than "Trivia"-sections: categories, weblinks, and flag icons come to mind.
But the offender I want to concentrate on (yep, driven by the Muhammad controversy) is the useless or misleading image. As this has become a "customer driven (not-quite-)encyclopedia", the attitude of the majority of our customers, to prefer pictures over textual content will always be a good argument for adding just another image.
So, we have pictures of [[Paul the Apostle]] of which only can be said the the species of portrayed living being is almost surely correct. Or the portraits of the victims of [[Jack the Ripper]] which add nothing to an encyclopedia, only give a strange feeling of the darker parts of a wax museum. My favorite oddity is the "artistic impression", as promoted by NASA, of e.g. [[90377 Sedna]] or a [[Black hole]]. NASA needs funding and everything that gets public attention helps this, so I understand their rationale for using these misleading and pointless pictures, but what is our?
Anyway, and back to the religious part of this. It's obviously OK that there are pictures of Jesus and crosses and saints and whatsnot in many Christianity-related articles, as Christianity did (almost) always rely on these visual impressions. It's just documenting an important aspect of this religion. But Islam just works the other way around. Providing artistic impressions of Muhammad in the Muhammad article itself doesn't serve to actually show him, nor does it serve to show the Islam's picture of Mohammad.
Regards, Peter [[User:Pjacobi]]
wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
NASA's artistic impressions are actually usually pretty good, with a few exceptions. While not identically correct, they're often reasonably representative - explaining a black hole accretion disk to someone with no knowledge of physics or astronomy simply isn't going to happen without some representative images, even if they're not completely correct. At scientific talks, given by astronomers (or astrophysicists, if I'm not interested in talking to you about my work ;) ) to astronomers, these artists representations are actually used with some regularity, because they're valuable instructional aids, even if they may not be flawless representations of the subject (of course, neither are photographs).
Even if one can imagine that all our information on a subject can be conveyed via text, any pedagogical studies will show we communicate more information more effectively when we present it in a variety of fashions. Diagrammes, plots, visualisations, what have you all compliment text in a way that increases our readers understandings. While this may not be logically necessary, it seems to be the case that humans are not flawlessly logical learners. Nor are we equiped with perfect visualisation machines. Nor can we seemlessly convert text descriptions into visual descriptions, and we don't understand those two in the same way. Quite simply, text and images do not serve the same function. They're not competiters - if you're choosing one over the other, you're doing it wrong - you need to chose both.
Cheers, WilyD