[Foundation-l] Wikimania and the Muhammad pix

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Feb 19, 2008 3:23 PM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe it's the latter, and I too wonder what repercussions there might
> be for our Iranian Wikipedians.

Perhaps I'm a little naive here, but it would seem to me that the
percentage of Farsi speakers who are also Muslim would be
significantly higher then the percentage of English speakers who are.
It would seem then (and again, this might be little more then naive
speculation) that speakers of Farsi would be more motivated to
restrict these images then members of the English project would be.
The fact that the images are not blocked on the Farsi project leads me
to one of two conclusions:

1) Not enough people in the Islamic world are even aware of the Farsi
WP project's existence, or
2) The ban on images of Muhammad is not so wide spread in Islam as
some people claim.

I would be very interested to learn what is the status of images in
other regional languages, such as Arabic. I would also be interested
to hear whether some form of compromise could be reached, such as
removing images from the Muhammad page itself, but allowing them to be
included in a subpage, or in an alternate page. In short, is it wrong
to depict him at all, or is it only offensive when a Muslim views
those images?

--Andrew Whitworth