On 2/19/08, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 19/02/2008, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
I think you miss Jimbos point by a country mile. The status quo on wikipedia is to "continue to dialog about possibilities which would be satisfactory to all sides."
There is absolutely no way that is a legit description of what is going on and any attempt to hold such a conversation would need to rewrite some fairly core wikipedia policies such as NPOV.
-- geni
The Core of NPOV is that there is something that is satisfactory to all sides, or at least equally unpalatable to all.
A further problem with an attempt to invoke NPOV here (which I think is really not well advised) is that the precise problem is that to this date, there really are no useful editorial guidelines to apply to images that are all that fundamental. And I specifically count NPOV as one guideline that images have by and large quite openly flauted in most articles without any comment whatsoever.
Many of the questions about what images to use when it is not a question of a documentary type of an image (a photograph or at the very least a portrait that was done at a sitting, or from a sketch or the like), is that we are doing the text equivalent of using a quotation from a historical fiction novel in the encyclopedia article. That is, using the imagination of an artist to make our article a more entertaining read.
In the case of Muhammed, we don't even appear to have the fig leaf of claiming to display one example of an artistic convention about what Muhammed looked like, like arguably in the case of Jesus might obtain (nevermind that that convention doesn't look remotely like a jew).
The most informative of the images about mohammed that we have in the article is in my humble opinion the one with the veil, if this was indeed a customary style of depicting him. There is at least a smidgen of information imparted there, in that veiled was a common way of depicting him in some traditions...
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]