Hello all, I've been reading this mailing list for some time now but this's my first message actually. About the issue we have here, I've reviewed the article now and it does has some biased statements. the "cure of Homosexuality" section is added directly from an Arabic site where someone saying he is a homosexual and asking for help to stop homosexuality, then a doctor replies with what's written in the Wikipedia page section about a research done (no references to that research) showing some statistics about this topic, a template has been added now to put more references to this particular part. The "homosexuality in Islam" section was saying that "homosexuality causes AIDS as all other kinds of sexual activities do", I removed this part as it's not appropriate here, needs a seperate section about medical and biological effects of homosexuality the whole section now is rephrased and included in "homosexuality in religions" section, and it should be fine by now. I wish that the complainer to the foundation begin editing to improve the article. I see the problem is the same as in larger wikipedias, but in larger ones there're alot of people who edit the article and there're much more possibity of NPOV than in smaller ones like Arabic. active people are really few and you don't expect that all the articles are good ones in current time, on the other hand we do have excellent neutral articles written about "hot topics" in Muslim and Arabic communities like "Atheism[1], Holocaust[2], War on terrorism[3], Freemasonry[4], Freedom of speech[5]" and many more. what I'm trying to say that taking into consideration the number of people working on the project, I think we've done a good job since we've started back in 2003. You can't judge the whole thing through some biased articles, the wiki culture is not yet well-known through the Arab world and when someone comes to write in Wikipedia, they think it's some kind of a forum and writes his own opinion, but I'm optimistic about the future, we're growing in the number of "active" wikipedians. Also here in Egypt specifically we're trying to build-up Egyptian Wiki community which began actions since the bid for Wikimania Alexandria 2007, and then now preparing other events to organize. Best Regards, Mido, sysop on Arabic Wikipedia 1. http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A5%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%A7%D8%AF 2. http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%87%D9%88%D9%84%D9%88%D9%83%D9%88%D8%B3%D8%… 3. http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%B1%D8%A8_%D8%B9%D9%84%D9… 4. http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%88%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9 5. http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D8… On 11/21/06, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux(a)free.fr> wrote:

Right, as Anthere says I was not implying that the Arabic Wikipedia was overly bad. :-) It's just my general feeling that the smaller the community is on a Wiki, the larger the chances are that some articles will be written from a specific point of view (often some point of view dominant in the community). There's no critical mass to neutralize them.