Muslims to Wikipedia: get rid of Mohammad pics!

Too many people take their religion too damn seriously. It’s one thing to be deeply grounded in your faith and let it be a definer of whom you are, to actually practice the tenets in your faith without intruding upon others…

But killing someone else because they don’t believe as you do? C’mon.

This is where the Middle East fails to be progressive. They seem to be unable to detach their religion from their governments, and it results in oppression.

Maxwell Smart: You’re stuttering.

Very good. I was grasping for something like that myself, but couldn’t see that one.

I did manage to come up with jihadr - a new web 2.0 social networking site where holy war could be automatically declared on the offending submission with the most votes.

I find petitions offensive to world peace. Remove them immediately, or die!

Do you suppose they would object if I posted that image on *my *blog?

I wonder if there are people assigned to crawl the web, searching for stuff like this. So many things to be offended by…it would surely be a full-time job.

Doesn’t it burn, getting all that irony in your eyes like that? Since, you know, they moved this thread to the place where you could make that other comment which I didn’t quote here. Had the thread been left in its original location, you would have been undisguisedly censored, there.

This is brilliant and will be promptly cross stitched for prosperity.

Thank you.

Doesn’t it burn, getting all that illogic in your eyes like that? The thread was moved here without any comment remotely like that being made? Something merely negative about fanatical Muslims being pre-emptively moved to the Pit?

Ah, the ol’ goalpost shift after being called out. A classic move.

You weren’t whining about that. Your whine, specifically, was that the move was “undisguised censorship” – in fact, let’s go to the replay:

Yep. “Undisguised censorship” by a move to the Pit. Which is, of course, the place on the board where you’re more free to say whatever you want, not less.

Ergo, not censorship.

Of course, as we all know, the Mods are free to move stuff to the Pit when they think the discussion will become too heated or out-of-control. Which – as I already pointed out – you immediately did in the same post. Again, the replay:

Looks like the Mods made the right call in moving this thread to the Pit, as you so ably proved.

Now, you could have made the argument that the Pit is not conducive to rigorous discussion. Actually you probably should have made that argument in your rebuttal (word used loosely) to me. No one else in the thread was actually trying for such a thing, but so it goes. Nonetheless, it’s not too late:

Please provide a cite that “Mohammed rapes 9-year-old girls.” Demonstrate that this thread does not belong in the Pit.

If he’s on the latter, then perhaps we should not speak of Armageddon, but “The Great Flushing”? :eek:

As official policy, Wikipedia is not censored. However, Wikipedia is also meant to be an encyclopedia and therefore maintain an encyclopedic tone at all times in the articles, as opposed to talk pages and policy pages. So there is some censorship in that the Shock site page does not contain any images from the sites, but instead describes them in a neutral tone. Otherwise, images are encouraged as a means to add information to articles. In the case of Muhammad, the information being added is what a group of Muslims in a specific place and time thought he looked like. This is, as it must be, a case-by-case decision guided by consensus, not voting and certainly not petitions.

For some people that is following the core tenets of their faith.

Just browsing the comments on that petition again, they’re really quite disturbing when you read enough to get a handle on the general feeling. It’s fairly clear that some of the comments are probably just pasted in from emails in circulation inviting people to join the petition (because there are runs of very similarly-worded comments).

It’s the whole idea of “In order for me to observe my religion, it is necessary for you to do X” - many of the comments imply this, or state it more or less outright. It’s just scary in the understated threat of it all.

Not exactly. Wikipedia encourages the use of free images and only sanctions the use of non-free images under certain limited circumstances. Per the official policy Non-free content criteria, copyrighted images (I assume the content of the various shock sites is copyrighted) may be used if they meet ten usage criteria, the most salient to the shock site articles being “only if its presence would significantly increase readers’ understanding of the topic, and its omission would be detrimental to that understanding.” Since the content of a shock site can be described adequately and linked to in the article, screen shots from them would fail this policy.

I haven’t looked at the various Muhammed articles or images under consideration but presumably high-profile images like the cartoons and what-not would have been screened against the fair use policies and guidelines.

I would think so - in any case, the controversial cartoons may be subject to copyright restrictions. The images in discussion here are 15th (or something like that) century religious paintings, painted by Muslims (who presumably didn’t have the same reservations about graven images).

They’re quite relevant to an article in the subject of Islam, and their deliberate omission would indeed be detrimental to the content value of the article. They exist and have done so for a considerable period of time, therefore they need to be documented as history.

What’s particularly interesting is that several comments on the petition include phrases like “In Islam picture of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and other Humans are not allowed.”

Other humans? - I mean, seriously, if you can’t abide depictions of human beings, full stop, then the internet just really isn’t the place for you.

Well that’s the thing, hardline Muslims are very offended by our busty blonde women, and the Internet is just full of pictures of women. So is it really viable for Muslims to surf the Internet if they’re so damn offended by this stuff?

Or are they just starting on the low-hanging-fruit - images of Muhammad, intending to stamp out the busty blonde pictures later?

Then they are free images out of any possible copyright and not subject to any fair-use restrictions.

That’s just the thing. The concept of which graven images are and aren’t acceptable has varied widely between nations, cultural contexts and Muslim sects, which makes the contention that we have to remove the images in deference to the One True God even sillier. (FTR, the prohibition against graven images itself, in the Torah and IIUC in the Koran, is against graven images of anybody. Which means that all Muslims and Orthodox Jews, if they took the time to read their books, should be up in arms against every single cartoon or picture depicting anyone.)