On 5/5/06, Raphael Wegmann raphael@psi.co.at wrote:
The systemic bias, which stems from the fact that most contributors are living in anglophone countries, where islamist terrorist attacks occured, which resulted in widespread anti-islam bias, is IMHO bad enough. You don't believe me? Well, read it up on [[Islamophobia]] and it's talk page.
I believe you.
I can even agree to the many bans, which have applied on editors, which continuously removed the cartoons without inserting a link to them, on the basis of vandalism. The cartoons, even if they are offensive, are indeed highly relevant material, and removing them without inserting a link can be considered a deliberate attempt to reduce the quality of the encyclopedia.
Hmm, to play devil's advocate, how would you feel if someone deleted a hard-core pornographic image, and didn't replace it with a link? I doubt you would call it vandalism. I believe that most (some?) Muslims find these cartoons extremely offensive, so it's not surprising that they would remove them without replacing them with a link.
As if common anti-islam bias among the editors weren't enough, even administrators, who outed themselves as free speech extremists on the Image-Display talk page, which has been created for this content dispute, abuse their administrator privilege by simply blocking editors they disagree with.
It's a fine line between blocking an editor you disagree with personally, and blocking an editor who behaves in a way inconsistent with the culture-by-default of the project, one that you share.
English Wikipedia is purely and simply, generally sympathetic to an American point of view. The Arabic Wikipedia is probably more sympathetic to a Muslim point of view. I can't read Arabic, so I can't really check, but it seems that the Arabic Wikipedia for example would not have these links. I notice very quickly for example that [[Swimming]] and [[Dancing]] on the English Wikipedia show women with bare arms. The corresponding articles on the Arabic Wikipedia do not.
Obviously I'm drawing big conclusions from very little data, and would appreciate confirmation from anyone familiar with the Arabic Wikipedia.
Steve