On 15/02/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The point is that we are a neutral encyclopaedia and those images have encyclopaedic value
Encyclopaedic just means that they should go in the encyclopaedia somewhere; but not necessarily in the Mohammad article. The censorship policy just says that we don't remove things from the entire wikipedia, not that we don't move it from any particular article.
At present, the wikipedia is far from neutral here; for example, the Muhammad in Encyclopedia Britannica has only a single veiled image in 18 pages, whereas the wikipedia has 4, and most of them are unveiled. I don't think you can find many articles on Muhammad with lots of images in; or nobody has so far.
Since NPOV policy says that the wikipedia is supposed to avoid overemphasis, it can be argued that compared to the EB we significantly overemphasise these images, particularly the unveiled ones.
Towing the line with the EB would help get a lot of more moderate Moslems off the back of the wikipedia, but if the wikipedia is 'taking a stand'- in either direction away from the EB, then we're really making a political statement. But what policy is there that says that the wikipedia should make political statements?