I realize you're just trying to show your anti-Muslim credentials here, but why would anyone think that argument was "ignorant"? And obviously it's someone else's argument - it's a common-enough position to take on the issue, since it is, in fact, true. Or are you saying that if he doesn't have a brand-spanking-new reason to oppose inclusion of these images, he should just shut up? If so, then I'd have to say that's not very nice.

Speaking of which, the only reason anyone even bothers to bring up additional arguments in the first place is because Wikipedians have already rejected the sanest, most rational, and most logical argument there is, which is that including the images is inherently insulting to vast numbers of people, and insulting people is not nice. If you're a legitimate "encyclopedia," you take key cultural sensitivities into account when and if you can. Since there's no requirement that Wikipedia include these images in order to properly cover the subjects of Islam and Mohammed's life, they most certainly can in this case.

Of course, they're not a legitimate encyclopedia, so they don't take those sensitivities into account, and people end up having to make these otherwise-unnecessary (but hardly "ignorant") arguments. And that's just how they like it, because hey, moar drama! More attention for us! Wheeeeee! It's the very definition of "internet trolling," and Wikipedia does it routinely.

No you don't, because sooner or later what was once 'an inch thick' soon becomes a pamphlet.

To avoid this you put in what is encyclopaedic and show an even hand across the board. Pictures of Jesus goi in? Then pics of Mo go in too.

After all people are notoriously fickle about what they deem to be sensitive.

If moslems want to dictate terms then they should start their own Wiki, Qu'raniWiki perhaps?

That's a bit short-sighted, isn't it? Why alienate a billion people when you don't have to? (Unless you're running the Wikipedia Review, in which case I guess you want to alienate as many people as possible.)

Obviously there's no danger of Wikipedia turning into a "pamphlet," though it would probably be an improvement if it did, and as for images of Jesus or of any other religious figure whose adherents don't mind their existence (putting aside the whole "graven images" thing), what is it they say about "a foolish consistency" again...?

Mind you, I'm not a Muslim, in fact I don't even know any Muslims near where I live these days. I'd just like to know why so many people seem hell-bent on pissing them off for no good reason.

But apparently it's fine for them to piss us off ad infinitum?

But no, it isn't my intention to piss them off, merely to demonstrate that they don't dictate their cultural ideals to us.

For example should they start their own wiki then I wouldn't dream of dictating anything to them, so why should they dictate their POV on a western-centric (please don't quote NPOV, there's no way in hell it'll ever be NPOV) encyclopaedia.

How about, for example, a team of moslem writers come to the 9/11 article and started entering information from the Islamic side of things? Other than MONGO having a meltdown of course, what do you think would happen to NPOV then. What if they demand that certain Islamic beliefs should be upheld in the article?

And no, I'm not anti-moslem, at least no more than I am anti-christian. What I am against is stupidity. And to demand that archival imagery shouldn't be included in a Wikipedia article is, in my personal view, stupidity personified.

Why don't they just dig up Muhammed's skull and get one of those reconstructive scientists to do their magic on it with their pegs and clay and resurrect the guy in all his glory? Then take a picture of it and pop it into the public domain and stuff so Wikipedia can use it. Result: something that's both informative and respectful to the religionists and their culture, and all that. Or maybe not, but the idea still stands, probably.

You're an internet atheist with Aspergers who rants against religion. I don't recall any book encyclopedias having portraits of Muhammad, because there's simply no strong reason to have it. Again, you either wind up with "here's a medieval portrayal by Christians of Muhammad burning in hell" or something, or "here's an Islamic depiction of Muhammad with his face veiled." Since there's apparently no portrayal of Muhammad based on what his contemporaries actually described his facial features and such as (although there would probably be people willing to make half-assed svg images to get around that), the best bet you could go for would be the aforementioned veiled images. But then that isn't supposed to happen because that means we give in to the dreaded Islamofascists or whatever (most of whom at any rate would prefer no portrayals whatsoever), so instead the article has random portrayals of Muhammad which tend to exist solely for the benefit of showing how "not censored" (read: "TAKE THAT TOTALITARIAN MOSLEM SWINE") Wikipedia is.

With Jesus there's an overwhelming portrayal in the world of him as a "WASP" character (to the extent that modern derivative portrayals outside of Europe tend to just be "him" with a slightly darker skin color), no matter the portrait.

I'm not sure what my Asperger's has to do with it, and I certainly wasn't ranting, merely stating an opinion. Your diatribe appeared to be much more a rant than mine.

You were right about me being anti-religion (but not anti-personal-belief). And living one's life to the dictates from a work of fiction, whether it be the Qu'ran or the bible, is simply something I can't get my head around. It's akin to being lead by the beliefs and values of JK Rowling.

The other thing I can't get my head around is the argument that none of these pictures are a true likeness of Mo. If that's the case, then why is the argument there that they don't won't pics of Mo appearing, when everyone says they aren't actually Mo.

You'll be telling me next that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead.

Because they're in an article about "Mo" and they're listed as portrayals of Muhammad?

I am currently shaking my head from side to side.

At first I was like



but then



Somey, you ignorant prat. I was targeted by the Jayjg Cabal and held up as one of the "anti-Jew" editors for years because I dared to protest various Muslim and Palestine-related articles form becoming mouthpieces for Zionist propaganda. And now I have you who think I'm "anti-Muslim" because I do not want the Wikipedia to bend to their religious sensibilities? What lulz.

I think they're all a bunch of prehistoric knuckle-draggers, honestly. "Oh no, no one can work on Sunday!", "oh no, I can't stand anyone to look at my prophet!"

Fuck em all.

Having images of some dude hanging all over every church, school, and hospital is lame. I'll bet Muhammed made the rule just to avoid that.

Well, that's one way of defining "anti-Muslim," I suppose, and nobody is saying you can't be both anti-Zionist and anti-Muslim, or anti-whatever-you-want, all at the same time. (I personally lost count of all the things I'm against, years ago!)

All I am saying is, the argument that "these images aren't actually likenesses of Muhammad" is perfectly valid in this context, and far from "ignorant" in any case - and if anything, someone who reflexively supports the idea that people should just do whatever the hell they want no matter who gets offended, or no matter how inappropriate and/or wrong a particular set of images is, is more likely to be "ignorant."

I will say, however, that if it were totally up to me, nobody would be allowed to effectively quash free expression solely on the basis of a religious dictat that, given the technological era we now live in, has become nearly impossible for anyone to deal with. But Wikipedia isn't really a bastion of "free expression," it's a bastion of we're-gonna-do-whatever-the-hell-we-want - and while some people might (reflexively) believe otherwise, that just isn't the same thing.


Well, he was a smart guy - he fully understood that the beards, robes and turbans would someday go out of fashion, in favor of 6-inch platform shoes, metallic-brocade jackets, and Lady Gaga fright-wigs.

I'm anti-asshole, mainly, especially those who seek to ram their beliefs down the throats of non-believers. I don't think they're assholes because they are Muslim or Jewish, that is the difference that seems to be eluding you.



It is a shit argument borne of desperation. Is there a drive to rid the project of depictions of, say, Cleopatra, Ghengis Khan, or King Richard the III? No, no one is going on a fucking crusade to remove those on a "how do we know he/she really looked like that?" throughout the project. They are trying (and failing, miserably) to do it for the Muhammad article solely because of the religious reasons regarding imagery.

Well the portrait for King Richard III (at least the one that greets you upon looking at the article) was only painted around 35 years after he died and was, presumably, based on how he actually looked like.

Why is it wrong to not have portrayals in an article directly about Muhammad when his actually adherents would find said portrayals offensive? "Wikipedia is not censored" doesn't apply, no one is getting arrested for putting them up, the FBI isn't calling on Wikipedia to take them down.

After giving this most difficult of subjects considerable thought, I've decided that perhaps South Park worked out the best system for handling Muhammed after all.
(1) Blocking his person completely, or
(2) Make him wear a big bear suit.

I like the big bear suit.

There are several 5th century BCE Greek philosophers with multiple extant 2-D and 3-D depictions which are similar enough that it's safe to say most people would agree they look like the same person. Not Anaxagoras, though. For some reason he looks different in every depiction.

I agree that the Jesus article shouldn't have depictions either. At least Jesus gets a series of very lengthy articles contemplating every possible aspect of his historicity, historical reliability, mythology, and comparative mythology. Muhammad, Moses, Noah, Abraham, Buddha, et al. don't have anything like that.

So, you're basically here just to defend Wikipedia's worst excesses from those who would dare suggest ways of ameliorating those excesses, then.


So, the whole idea of iconoclasm (and the historical reasons for it) must be meaningless to you... at least in that case, you're not alone - most people don't really understand the underlying historical rationale.

Y'see, back in ancient times, Imperial Roman oppressors used to build huge temples, shrines, and statues to pagan gods, along with elaborate icons and other imagery - and they competed to see who could build the most impressive stuff for centuries, continuing to do it in the Eastern Empire long after the Western Empire crumbled. All of this required a great deal of wealth which they ruthlessly took from the people they conquered, impoverished, and often enslaved. In effect, wealth that should have been used to improve the lives of actual human beings was taken from them and used on religious art, which in turn became a symbol of oppression in itself. That became the root cause of Islam's rejection of idolatry, which continues to this day - and is also found among several other iconoclastic sects throughout that region's history, and even among some heretical Catholic groups that formed in Eastern Europe (and elsewhere) in opposition to the often financially-rapacious central authorities in Rome and Constantinople.

In fact, it's also the reason you'll usually see far less artwork in general (not just fewer images of Jesus) in Protestant churches than in Catholic ones - the Reformation rejected excessive Church decor because it embodied Catholic excesses in general, and those excesses were mostly financial, perpetrated at the expense of the people. But I digress...

Meanwhile, nobody ever really competed to see who could spend the most ill-gotten wealth on depictions of Cleopatra, Genghis Khan, or Richard III. In their cases, imagery was simply a matter of propaganda - depictions of Cleopatra, for example, have always been more suggestive of a European rather than a North African woman, because European historians wanted to "claim" her in such a way as to deny the idea that an African could be a powerful or even an attractive figure. In other words, institutional racism. Genghis Khan, like Attila the Hun, has been demonized by those same historians as a "barbarian" and a "savage" when, in fact, he was personally nothing of the sort (other than his tendency to show no mercy whatsoever to enemies). And Richard III was depicted as a deformed black-clad hunchback by artists of the Tudor dynasty that overthrew him, when in fact he was almost certainly quite normal-looking.

Anyway, long story short, the argument may be "borne of desperation," but it's hardly "shit." Imagery has always been an important means of manipulating popular sentiment, in varying degrees of subtlety. So it's no wonder that Wikipedia is 100-percent on board with using it in the same fashion. That doesn't make it right, however.

Yes. Classical Greece was well into realistic depictions of the human form in general, and famous philosophers in particular. Sixth-century (and, indeed, most of the following centuries too) Arabia wasn't. Thus there aren't any contemporary portraits of Muhammed. Or of anyone, really. I think a "duh" is in order.

As Somey says, no contradiction at all.

Who's saying that? The Jews or the Muslims?

Hey hey hey don't blame the Romans. They picked that stuff up from the Egyptians and other Middle Eastern crazies. If anything the Romans should be given credit for often constructing useful stuff like roads and aqueducts. They always admired Sparta which had the right idea regarding monuments.

You're making sense though, and it is one thing to like about Islam, even if they often take it too far.

Such a fucking crusade seems quite reasonable in light of these facts. I'm sure I would just get banned again if I put any effort into it, though.

Except it's all basically made-up. Meaningful ideological reasons for the prohibition are all backdated. No one is depicted from this period. Nothing. They just didn't do this in the Hejaz. What they did do was poetry.

Rule 11, Somey. Rule 11.

The way you want this situation to resolve simply isn't going to happen. No amount of bleeding-heart, butthurt faggotry will change that. The images will remain.

You misunderstand - I don't want this situation to "resolve" at all; I want for Wikipedia to continue to make stupid, idiotic, and yes, "faggoty" decisions like this until they collapse under the weight of their own insufferable arrogance, stupidity, and short-sightedness. I'm well aware that the images will remain, and putting aside the feelings of a million Muslims, I couldn't really care less.

However, you're right in that my butt does hurt at the moment, but that's only because I just dropped a deuce after a big meal last night. I should be OK in about 20 minutes or so, though.

The reason is because they are fringe images and there is lots of other more typical Muhammad imagery that should be used in preference.

I picked Gruber's brain about this --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...from_Christiane

but really nobody gives a shit what an actual world-renowned scholar of Muhammad images says about this. Why would a Wikipedian, when they can spout off their own ignorant claptrap, which is after all what half of them are there for.

Yes, you do. Don't word-parse m'boy, it isn't your forté.



Unfortunately, it isn't any of those things.



Moar butthurt. The Western world is not obligated to be subservient to a religion's prehistoric beliefs. As I have noted elsewhere, I find it peculiar that those progressive folk who seek to drive Christianity form the place it has long held in the public consciousness (i.e. separation of church and state) on the one hand seem so eager to be ingratiating to Islam on the other. Why is that?



Sometimes us Randys in Boise do have it right, y'know, rather than the ivory tower dwellers.

Is this the Monty Python Argument Clinic, now? One person tries to make a series of logical points and the other person just continually says "no it isn't," i.e., the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes? That appears to be your "forté."

I'm aware of the arguments in favor of having religiously inflammatory images on Wikimedia sites, and many of them are valid arguments. I agree that Muslims should be less sensitive to things like this, and that in the modern era it's counterproductive to try to impose censorship on other societies by boycotts and threats of violence and the like. It would be nice if religions and their adherents could better adapt to changing times. I don't say the arguments themselves are non-valid; I merely say they're outweighed by the opposing arguments in this case. Wikipedia is not "art" or "science" or even an "encyclopedia." The needs of Wikipedia are not the needs of humanity in general. It's just a website, and the sooner you yourself stop being butthurt about that, the better for you, no?

Backdated how...? Just because there was relatively little excessive temple-building and expensive religious art produced in Western Arabia during the Roman Imperial period doesn't mean they didn't know anything about it - they might not have had the internet back then, but they weren't living in a bubble, either.

And as for depictions, it doesn't matter if it represents a real person, a god-figure, a giant serpent, or a banana... does it? The point is that pagan idol-worshipers, and to some extent their Christian successors, spent money on religious art and architecture (including tombs) that could, and no doubt should, have been spent feeding people, curing the sick, educating children, etc. (Though it's true that the Romans should be credited for building so many roads and aqueducts - sorry I didn't note that earlier.)

Generally speaking, the early Muslims rejected many forms of ostentation and adornment too, not just religious idolatry. I'll grant that it's not as ascetic now as it was, but it's still more so than a lot of other religions.

Perhaps they should take some PR advice from the American Evangelists?

Perhaps if that person had actually made a logical argument, your point would be sound. All the anti-image proponents argument boils down to is "it offends" and "consider the Muslim sensibilities".

People don't have a right to be free of offense. They are free to remove themselves from situations where things or ideas are present that they may not like. Or they may stay and kindly shut the fuck up.

Whilst I agree with that sentiment totally, unfortunately in the brave new world of ours too many people are deliberately looking to be offended just so that they can complain. I think it's a case of the little, unimportant voice wanting to be heard.

That's some solid binary thinking there, Mr. Tarc! Since people don't have a right to be free of offense, then surely we simply must offend them, as surely no other course of action would be logical or appropriate.

And if they "remove themselves from the situation," that's even better, because then we can offend them even more - this time without even having to listen to them complain!

Allowing people to express their opinions, giving a voice to minority groups, acting as if the term "consensus" is actually meaningful - those inconveniences can now just be swept away like the anachronistic bits of silliness they really are.

It's win-win!

A shame, I thought you were smarter than that.

But no, you presume that people insist on keeping images in the article for the sole purpose that it offends Muslims, as if we were all a bunch of Koran-burning pastors from Florida.

If you think that nobody has such a motivation, I venture to suggest that you are perhaps rather naive.

I don't presume that Wikipedia users in general insist on it for that reason, though it does seem fairly clear that you insist on it for that reason.

Like I've already said, Wikipedia users in general probably insist on it for the same reason they insist on everything else - "We're anonymous, we're on the internet, we don't care who gets hurt, nobody can tell us what to do, we're not going to let anybody tell us what to do." In the process, they happily ignore the fact that Wikipedia is supposed to be a global operation (not just a US/UK operation), it's supposed to operate on the basis of "consensus," it's supposed to be a "charity," and so on. As usual, they're making a hypocritical mockery of their so-called "mission," which as it turns out once again, is simply to do whatever they want, no matter the consequences.

For good or ill, real charities don't start riots and armed revolutions, Mr. Tarc - not even by accident.

I'd ask "how can you not see this," but the fact is, you do see it, and you either don't care either, or you're getting some sort of big erection out of it and you don't want that to go away just yet. And if anything, your reasons for wanting to keep the images there are actually more honest and well-thought-out than the bogus rationale used by most WP users.

I can live with that.



Damn right. How dare they be offended by proxy.



Why is it automatically assumed that the minority 'voice' should take precedence over the majority voice? And it's not as if the Muslims are that much of a minority, if indeed they are a minority at all!



Why should letting the other side have a win be a bonus? I never realised, Somey, that you were so uncompetitive.

Forget it, Somey. It's Wikipedia.

I am unclear what majority we talk about here. But if say 10% have strong views one way, 1% the other way and 89% have no strong views, why should the 1% prevail? They will, of course, as they are in charge.

Absurd! Of course they are a minority. There are far more Christians than Muslims.

Practising Christians compared to practising Muslims? It would be interesting to see the figures for the comparison.

Um, no, I have never been a proponent for that reason. Ever. I believe that an encyclopedia is crippled if it defers to any religious or ideological dogma, and that an article is enhanced by images if they are relevant to the text.

By the way, I generally only read the first line of your responses. Save yourself some time and just stop there.

Which is why Wikipedianism must be crushed.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that asking random Muslims – or even necessarily organized ones, what should be written about Muhammad is the answer – the result would be a ludicrously anti-naturalistic and decidedly uneducational mess. But that's exactly what Wikipedia does now under the dogma of open editing and crowdsourcing. Add asking random non-Muslims to the mix and you have the mess that is. It's not as if Wikipedia is free of Islamic proselytization, any more than it's free of anti-Islamic provocation. Both motives are in much greater supply than scholarly interest – a.k.a. curiosity – and the articles are more or less the result of their interplay. According to Wikipedia dogma, this adversarial system promotes high-quality output. Now we can see with our eyes that this isn't true.

Finally, cogent arguments! Bravo!

However, the second of those two is not really in dispute, and as for the first... I'm afraid that particular slippery-slope goes in two directions. Who gets to decide what is "religious or ideological dogma" and what is... what, fact? Conventional wisdom? Commonly-held opinion? And if we prohibit religious people from trying to influence WP with their "dogma" today, does it stop there, or do we start prohibiting people who hold other forms of belief, like, say, "all races are equal" or "slavery is bad" from trying to influence it too?

The fact is, Wikipedia deletes and removes stuff all the time, for all sorts of reasons, and to say it's "crippled" if it does this or that is like saying you can't take a quadriplegic's sunglasses away from him because it will inhibit his ability to play golf.



Also, I made an exception for Mr. Proabivouac's post above by approving it myself, rather than waiting for Selina to do it... ehh, mostly because I liked it.

Well said.

People could try to follow the principle that was, as I recall, part of the governing rules of the FidoNet BBS network back in the '80s and '90s: "Thou shalt not unnecessarily give offence; and thou shalt not be too easily offended." (Or something like that.) The idea is that it's impolite to go out of your way to try to offend people, and you should avoid this, but it's also bad behavior to go out of your way to find and take offense at things.

Ooh, a blast from the past.

250/151

I have been making that argument for years, not my fault that you're late to the game.

A shame too that the Kohsocracy just blitzed our burgeoning discussion over there, as the last point I made was really the heart of the matter. All you can do on this matter is talk talk talk, you lack the ability to actually do.

Pity.

"blitzed our burgeoning discussion"? What does that mean?

zoloft tar-pitted (or whatever their equivalent is) our Muhammad discussion over at the other forum.

Late to what game? You hadn't made those arguments here, and I'll be damned if I'm going to go through dozens of talk-page archives to help support a contrary position.


By "do," in italics no less, I assume you mean get on Wikipedia and convince large numbers of people that they're being short-sighted and fighting the wrong battle? Just because I don't want to doesn't mean I lack the ability, though I suppose it's pretty much academic at this point.

What you posted on the-forum-that-must-not-be-named was this (hopefully I'm not breaking any laws by posting this):

And Mr. Hersch replied the same way I might have, though less diplomatically:

The fact is, the "Western world," which Wikipedia actually does not represent other than to reflect its worst elements, bows to "prehistoric" religious precepts all the time - at least when it suits people to do so. Christianity predates Islam, after all, and Judaism predates almost everything. But if you'd said "the Western world shouldn't bow to an Islamic religious precept," what you would have gained in accuracy you would have lost in sympathy.

I do agree that endlessly talking about this is pointless, but as long as I'm in a semi-authoritative position here, I don't feel that we can let this type of argument go unchallenged. (That's not to say I won't die in a car accident tomorrow.) All you have to do is admit that it's the Islamic aspect of this issue that makes it impossible for WP to compromise, irrespective of your own feelings in the matter, and we'd be in complete agreement with no need for further jawing on it.