[WikiEN-l] A call for moderation

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro at gmail.com
Tue Feb 19 12:50:16 UTC 2008


On 2/19/08, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19/02/2008, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think you miss Jimbos point by a country mile. The status quo on
> > wikipedia is to "continue to dialog about possibilities which would
> > be satisfactory to all sides."
>
> There is absolutely no way that is a legit description of what is
> going on and any attempt to hold such a conversation would need to
> rewrite some fairly core wikipedia policies such as NPOV.
>
> --
> geni

The Core of NPOV is that there is something that is satisfactory
to all sides, or at least equally unpalatable to all.

A further problem with an attempt to invoke NPOV here (which
I think is really not well advised) is that the precise problem is that
to this date, there really are no useful editorial guidelines to apply to
images that are all that fundamental. And I specifically count
NPOV as one guideline that images have by and large quite
openly flauted in most articles without any comment whatsoever.

Many of the questions about what images to use when it is
not a question of a documentary type of an image (a photograph
or at the very least a portrait that was done at a sitting, or from
a sketch or the like), is that we are doing the text equivalent of
using a quotation from a historical fiction novel in the encyclopedia
article. That is, using the imagination of an artist to make our
article a more entertaining read.

In the case of Muhammed, we don't even appear to have the
fig leaf of claiming to display one example of an artistic
convention about what Muhammed looked like, like arguably
in the case of Jesus might obtain (nevermind that that convention
doesn't look remotely like a jew).

The most informative of the images about mohammed that we
have in the article is in my humble opinion the one with the
veil, if this was indeed a customary style of depicting him.
There is at least a smidgen of information imparted there, in
that veiled was a common way of depicting him in some
traditions...


Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]



More information about the WikiEN-l mailing list