[Foundation-l] problem page on the ar: wikipedia

[Mohamed Ibrahim]

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%AA
3.
http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%B1%D8%A8_%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%A8
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%A3%D9%8A_%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%B1

On 11/21/06, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at free.fr> wrote:
>
> The Foundation has received a complaint about the page on homosexuality
> on the Wikipedia in Arabic. According to the person who complained, as
> well as to people who ran the article through translators, the article
> contains heavily jugmental assertions.
>
> This is not the first time that we received complaints about such kind
> of judgmental content based on cultural or religious norms ; I think we
> also got similar complaints about the Yiddish Wikipedia.
>
> In these cases, there are common traits :
> * The bias expressed arises from the dominant culture of the people who
> speak the language and thus get on the wiki. (Arabic tends to be spoken
> in Muslim countries ; Yiddish tends to be spoken in Orthodox Askhenazi
> Jew communities ; both of these religions condemn homosexuality.)
> * The wiki communities are small.
> * Very few people, or even none, at the Foundation or on OTRS (the email
> processing system) read the said languages.
>
> We also seem to have similar issues with e.g. regional languages or
> languages from small countries with strong nationalism issue.
>
> Your suggestions? It's hard to fix an article whose language we don't
> speak.
>
> -- DM
>
>
> The URL is:
> http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%AB%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A9
>
> The article, or parts of the article clearly mentions that homosexuality
> causes AIDS, and causes many more medical problems.
> It also mentions that psychologists in the "Western World" found a cure
> homosexuality, which I take as hint to homosexuality being a disease.
>
> The article goes even further as to mention what Islam's view on
> homosexuality is and mentions that Homosexuals should be killed
> according to
> the Islam Prophet.
> The rest of the article is full of wrong definitions and incorrect
> information but on a more acceptable level.
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