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

[Ian Woollard]

On 15/02/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> The point is that we are a neutral encyclopaedia and those images have
>  encyclopaedic value

Encyclopaedic just means that they should go in the encyclopaedia
somewhere; but not necessarily in the Mohammad article. The censorship
policy just says that we don't remove things from the entire
wikipedia, not that we don't move it from any particular article.

At present, the wikipedia is far from neutral here; for example, the
Muhammad in Encyclopedia Britannica has only a single veiled image in
18 pages, whereas the wikipedia has 4, and most of them are unveiled.
I don't think you can find many articles on Muhammad with lots of
images in; or nobody has so far.

Since NPOV policy says that the wikipedia is supposed to avoid
overemphasis, it can be argued that compared to the EB we
significantly overemphasise these images, particularly the unveiled
ones.

Towing the line with the EB would help get a lot of more moderate
Moslems off the back of the wikipedia, but if the wikipedia is 'taking
a stand'- in either direction away from the EB, then we're really
making a political statement. But what policy is there that says that
the wikipedia should make political statements?

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.