An article about the Prophet Muhammad in the English-language Wikipedia has become the subject of an online protest in the last few weeks because of its representations of Muhammad, taken from medieval manuscripts.
In addition to numerous e-mail messages sent to Wikipedia.org, an online petition cites a prohibition in Islam on images of people.
The petition has more than 80,000 “signatures,” though many who submitted them to ThePetitionSite.com, remained anonymous.
“We have been noticing a lot more similar sounding, similar looking e-mails beginning mid-January,” said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, which administers the various online encyclopedias in more than 250 languages.
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This is a great example of
This is a great example of the results of such feckless publishing. Now Wikipedia will have a nightmare on their hands for some time. I side with Muslim people who find this offensive. It’s like showing a picture Christ kissing Mary Magdalene. And the popular press will pounce on Muslims who always come off as extremists. It’s an unrealistic and demonizing portrayal of a large group of people.
For example, when the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published the now infamous cartoons of Muhammad in 2005 The press reacted in high self righteousness. It was all about freedom of speech and the right of one artist over the sensibilities of millions. It was an unmitigated disaster. This was because Westerners are self-centered like most people. They assume their values are the norm world wide. The absolute is the consciousness of a culture within its own history. Truth has nothing to do with it. Shared values have more to do with geography than truth. This is a mess for Wikipedia.
wiki vs. the almighty
How big a punk is your God that He gets His celestial panties in a twist over nerds writing things on websites?
It’s not really about God it’s about the insecurity of His followers.
Your viewpoint is downright infantile
No, it was not. It was about the hypersensitivity of a few hundred members of a theo-political power elite against the freedom of billions. And the freedom of such fools to be raving lunatics does not carry more weight than my freedom to deride them or their bloody-handed misinterpretations of the so-called holy book of their choice. Nor does my deriding them for their stupidity constitute an attack on any religion. I’m not attacking their religion, I’m attacking their way of practicising it.
Save the easily offended: ban everything.
so you support when religions impose their views on others?
yes? then everyone stop dancing!