On 0, Rolf Lampa rolf.lampa@rilnet.com scribbled:
Hi all,
I have a friend, Mats Molén, a creationist and a part time teacher in (public) school in Sweden, and also working in his own creation museum (and no, not the size of the creation museum in the US). My errand is about an "invective" picture of Mats Molén (there's an article about Mats Molén in the Swedish WP since he's a well known author of a "classical" book (well, in Sweden) about the natural sciences which is critical about the evolution paradigm. Guess if Mats Molén is liked by all geologists and evolutionists in Sweden?!
Mats has a very kind and compassionate personality though, but such doesn't "count" in all contexts... =). Mats actually taught evolution before writing the book. Not after, though.
However, it seems like a young student found it being a great idea to take a not-so-perfect-photo of my otherwise not-so-bad-looking friend: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Mol_n.jpg
From the picture it looks like the picture is taken in a classroom in a school in Umeå, Sweden (link to map) http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=sv&q=Ume%C3%A5,+Sweden&ie=UTF8&ll=71.357067,3.164063&spn=37.915819,105.644531&z=3&om=1. This picture was once added to an article about MM in the Swedish WP as a, say, "complement" to the original picture in the article. May I suggest that this very picture isn't very "Informative"? Obviously the picture was added in order to make Mats look silly.
I talked to the administrators of the Swedish Wikipedia about removing the picture from the article (this was now a while ago), and they did. Except for some misunderstanding of my intents they also found the reasons for publishing the picture in the article being... um, questionable.
So, at last the picture was removed from the article. But long before that I had already requested that someone remove the picture from the archive, but I might have done something wrong in the request process (all those templates to create & confirm), because it hasn't been removed yet. The picture is still in the archive: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Mol_n.jpg
(And yes, of course I can't resist mocking him for this silly picture! =)
Mats Molén wrote to me today and was a bit sad (again) about this picture. It's still there, and it starts to feel kind of "sticky". I know that Mats sees no problem with being criticized for his views and claims, and he's of the kind of people which is prepared to publicly try to answer concrete criticism of his views and claims, simply because that's what he expects from others making bold claims.
Both I and Mats Molén actually do appreciate Wikipedia, although not entirely without reservations (this may surprise some since we are what many of you would call fundamentalist Christians). We really do think that WP is in part useful. We don't like everything we see in it when browsing the articles, but we also see value in it.
Now I ask of you in this group to help making the value in WP to appear better. It is not a good thing if biographies and media repositories in WP are used in hate campaigns against individuals. What makes WP unique in this respect is of course that people tend to perceive info in an encyclopedia as "facts". It really "clashes" with stupid pictures like the one at hand. So, for WP's sake, and for my friend's sake, can you please assist me in removing the nonsense-picture* of Mats Molén from Wikimedia commons?
Best regards,
// Rolf Lampa, Sweden
And you don't think http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Mats_Molen.jpg isn't even more risible? When I went to the Swedish Wikipedia's article http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mats_Mol%C3%A9n, I had to stifle a snicker because he looked like a Nazi 'Sieg Heil!'ing. Honestly, the one you're complaining about looks better if only because he seems like a nice schoolteacher and not some sort of fascist geologist (or something like that).
-- Gwern Inquiring minds want to know.