[WikiEN-l] "I want to at least kill the responsible person."

Wily D wilydoppelganger at gmail.com
Mon Feb 4 20:40:24 UTC 2008


If you possess a technical solution or are aware of how to construct
one, please feel free to suggest it.  If it's viable and doesn't
present a significant problem to our attempts to be a quality, neutral
encyclopaedia, maybe we can <s>railroad the discussion to push it
through</s> develop a solid consensus so we can deal with the actual
article, which is lousy.

Cheers
WilyD

On Feb 4, 2008 2:06 PM, Ben Yates <ben.louis.yates at gmail.com> wrote:
> I grew up jewish, so I was exposed early to the concept of a *totally
> forbidden depiction* -- in judaism's case, it's the name of god, not
> the figure.  I'm not religious, but seeing the concept at age seven
> lets you understand it sort of intuitively.  I remember reading a
> study showing that insulting language activates the same neural paths
> as when someone is physically harmed; for a religious muslim, seeing
> an image of muhammad probably feels something like that.
>
> I think we have to take at face value a lot of the plaintive comments
> in the petition -- "we are people too", etc.  Whoever *started* the
> petition was probably trying to rouse a crowd, but the *signatories*
> seem mostly to think that the depiction of mohammad is a deliberate
> insult aimed at them.  The least we can do, really, is to make sure
> that nobody sees a muhammad picture who doesn't want to; if we do that
> properly, the interface will make it self-evident that we actually
> care what religious muslims think (at least in terms of not trying to
> offend them any more than we'd try to offend anyone else), which is
> partly what this seems to be about.
>
>
> On Feb 4, 2008 5:05 AM, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Feb 4, 2008 10:53 AM, Ben Yates <ben.louis.yates at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > We should provide an alternate "Mohammad" page without any images on
> > > it.  Telling people to edit their javascript is silly; most people
> > > aren't nearly tech savvy enough to understand what that even means
> > > (for example, they have to first understand that a web page can be
> > > displayed differently for different users).
> >
> > There is a rather fundamental flaw in this proposal (actually, in
> > both): They don't want a page where they can look at without having to
> > see an image that is said to be that of its founder, they want the
> > picture removed completely. The javascript/css-option is only meant as
> > an alibi, without any chance to actually appease those who prefer
> > censorship over content they don't agree with. The more complicated
> > the option is, the longer it might serve as a diversion. A better
> > choice would be a patch the firefox sources that disables rendering of
> > images that contain "muhammad" (in different spellings) that needs
> > recompilation of firefox.
> >
> > Mathias
> >
> >
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>
>
>
> --
> Ben Yates
> Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com
>
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