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<p style="margin-bottom: 1cm; margin-top: 0pt; direction: ltr;">Nate
suggested that I forward this discussion to the mailing list, so
here goes... (My reply precedes Nate's original message)</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1cm; margin-top: 0pt; direction: ltr;">----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1cm; margin-top: 0pt; direction: ltr;">Hi,</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1cm; margin-top: 0pt; direction: ltr;">For
the time being I read only the paragraph dealing with the
depictions of Muhammad. I should congratulate you for making the
effort to go over a long, often tedious, Wikipedia talk page and
extract such an interesting dialog from it. I often get frustrated
just by seeing the number of pages, sub-pages, archives and
strange acronyms included in such a debate.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1cm; margin-top: 0pt; direction: ltr;">One
remark which is somewhat trivial - Basem3wad might might be
unacquainted with Wikipedia, but the nick he chose for himself
indicates some knowledge of the "Internet language". He uses
spelling known among Arabic-speakers as "chat Arabic".This
Latin-based transcription is popular among Arabic-speaking youths
in text messages (SMS), Internet chats and for short messages in
forums/FaceBook/Twitter. It is not used for long texts. In such
cases, the writer takes the effort to switch his keyboard to AR
and cater for the right-to-left parameters. The digit 3 represents
the Arabic letter ع (Ayn), so the name is probably "Bassem Awad".
Either it is his real name, or perhaps he chose a common Arab name
as an alias (like "John Smith" in English). In any case he
probably knows how to work his way through the cyberspace.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1cm; margin-top: 0pt; direction: ltr;">Wikipedia
is afraid of controversies. The idea of reaching consensus is
wrongly interpreted as "avoid controversy at all costs". The fear
of edit war is second only to the fear of global nuclear war. And
yet controversies are part of our knowledge. The fact that a
consensus cannot be reached, not only among the scholars from whom
we extract the information for the article, but also among the
people who wish to write about the subject, is part of what we
know about the issue. The traditional sources of information often
hide these controversies, and I remember the feeling of
"revelation" when I started my academic studies and found out that
many things I had learned from traditional textbooks and
encyclopedia are, in fact, highly controversial. Wikipedia has the
advantage of having "talk pages" (a.k.a "discussion pages") and
"history", but it still works persistently to strangle any
controversy on its "display windows".</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1cm; margin-top: 0pt; direction: ltr;">Most
people who complained about the historical depictions of Muhammad
were not acting in good faith, to the best of my judgment. I
believe most of them were indeed trying to impose a certain
radical view of Islam, and did not care too much about "scientific
honesty". However, in the discussion you've brought, Basem3wad has
a point. Wikipedia is not neutral, and worse than that - it does
not have a consistent line of editing. When I read Time Magazine,
for example, I know what to expect, more or less, and how to judge
the material published. On Wikipedia, I often don't know how to
interpret certain words, because I can't know for sure under which
terms I should read the text (and the problem gets even worse if I
read Wikipedia in more than one language). Since there is no
consistent line of editing, it is indeed unclear how this Persian
or Turkish depiction of Muhammad is relevant to the article. It is
highly unlikely that it shows a genuine portrait of Muhammad, but
in the articles about Aristotle or Josephus Flavius, Wikipedia has
images of protomes that are likely to be genuine depictions of
these people's faces. Since it is probably not Muhammad who is
depicted there, how should the reader interpret their presentation
on the article? Is it meant to show what people thought of
Muhammad? Is it meant to show that Muslims were not apprehended in
the past by physical depictions of Muhammad? Is it a call for
Muslim to abandon the ban on such depiction? All of these
interpretations are valid when there is no consistent line of
edit.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1cm; margin-top: 0pt; direction: ltr;">Dror
K </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1cm; margin-top: 0pt; direction: ltr;">בתאריך
13/10/10 07:43, ציטוט nathaniel tkacz:<br>
</p>
<blockquote style="direction: ltr;"
cite="mid:AANLkTimVOT4bxDX+WygafFG_1PdUzffvq-X1QZhZrCte@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">hi all - i have recently published an article on the
politics of mass collaboration that uses a wikipedia entry as a
case study. the article is primarily about collaboration, and the
section on wikipedia is quite elementary, but it might be of
interest anyhow. my basic argument is that we need to develop a
theory of collaboration that can also speak to the conflicts and
political realities of open projects.<br>
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/v2i2_tkacz.html">http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/v2i2_tkacz.html</a><br>
<br>
<br>
abstract:<br>
<br>
<em>Working together to produce socio-technological objects, based
on emergent platforms of economic production, is of great
importance in the task of political transformation and the
creation of new subjectivities. Increasingly, “collaboration”
has become a veritable buzzword used to describe the human
associations that create such new media objects. In the language
of “Web 2.0”, “participatory culture”, “user-generated content”,
“peer production” and the “produser”, first and foremost we are
all collaborators. In this paper I investigate recent literature
that stresses the collaborative nature of Web 2.0, and in
particular, works that address the nascent processes of peer
production. I contend that this material positions such projects
as what Chantal Mouffe has described as the “post-political”; a
fictitious space far divorced from the clamour of the everyday.
I analyse one Wikipedia entry to demonstrate the distance
between this post-political discourse of collaboration and the
realities it describes, and finish by arguing for a more
politicised notion of collaboration.</em><br>
<br>
<br clear="all">
Nate Tkacz <br>
<br>
School of Culture and Communication<br>
University of Melbourne<br>
<br>
Twitter: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://twitter.com/__nate__" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/__nate__</a><br>
<br>
Current project: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/about-2/"
target="_blank">http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/about-2/</a><br>
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