Monday, February 04, 2008

Wikipedia stands firm - Will not remove pictures of Mohammed from their online encyclopedia. Europe gasps, says "they did what now?"

1 comment:

Mathias Schindler said...

Hi Eric,

I am a Wikipedian from Germany. In the last day, we had some interesting debates with people complaining about these images from muslim artists from the 14th century that they consider to be offensive. In short, we do not take part in this inner-islamic debate. Wikipedia does also not take side in such a debate, however, if a religion has iconophobic or iconoclastic tendencies, we try to describe it as accurate as possible within the corresponding article. People are invited to contribute to the article, while asked to follow our guidelines, such as the neutral point of view. The display of art and historic sources within an encyclopedia should remain an editorial decision, not a religious one. As such, we decided to display some of the portraits of Muhammad from the last couple of centuries.