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Wikipedia's entry on Muhammad was first published on November 8, 2001. It was eleven sentences long. Over the next few years, several thousand new words were added and edited, but it wasn't until 2005 that an image of Muhammad was attached: A 16th-century painting depicting the Islamic prophet. Two hours later, the painting was pulled down. The next day, the original uploader reinstated the art, along with a note for the editor who'd removed it: "Pls. explain yourself."

Things would go on like that for a while.

Islam traditionally, though by no means universally, frowns on pictorial depictions of its prophet. Since the fatal shooting of 10 cartoonists and two police officers at the Paris offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdowhich had on several occasions published pointedly offensive cartoons of Muhammaddebates about news outlets' responsibilities have raged in editorial meetings and in columns and articles.

But they've got nothing on Wikipedia. "The Free Encyclopedia" has an entire FAQ page dedicated to the issue, complete with detailed instructions on how to block all of the encyclopedia's Muhammad images from appearing in your browser. Over the years, the Muhammad article's "Talk" pagethe public venue where editors discuss how to make a given article adhere more closely to Wikipedia's guidelineshas become so rife with heated arguments that it now comes with a warning: "Important notice....Discussion of images, and of edits regarding images, MUST be posted to the images subpage."

Today, that image-specific subpage is home to 26 pages of discussion, each tens of thousands of words long. In 2008, a letter-writing campaign to Wikipedia about Muhammad depictions merited coverage in the New York Times.

The site's community of editors can be a squabbling, neurotic bunch of nit-pickers and obsessives, and it's tempting to dismiss their spats as inchoate arguing for the sake of arguingmuch of the time, that's exactly what it is. But its outcome is important. Wikipedia is the seventh-most popular website on the internet, and the first source most web-savvy people check when they're catching up on a particular subject or trying to recover some since-forgotten piece of trivia. Even if you don't go directly, you'll usually wind up thereWikipedia pages are at the top of so many Google searches it often feels as though the site is an extension of the search giant, if not vice versa. More than newspapers, or explainer sites, or its leather-bound predecessors, the free encyclopedia is the source people turn to for assimilating new facts about the world around them. Its editors have the keys to one of the world's greatest tools for disseminating knowledge, and despite all that inchoate squabbling, they often do a decent job of handling it.

Reading an argument launched two days after the Charlie Hebdo shooting is a good introduction to the culture of Wikipedia discussionand a window onto a set of arguments about religion and speech that are increasingly finding home on the internet. On one side, a group of editors stands firmly behind using images, citing "Neutral point of view," a central tenet of Wikipedia, as its defense. To censor themselves for the sake of those who find Muhammad images offensive, they argue, would be to sacrifice the neutrality that makes Wikipedia what it is. On the other, a lone dissenter argues that depicting Muhammad isn't "neutral" at all; it's actively anti-Islamic. After several paragraphs of the matter-of-fact rhetoric that is the Wikipedia editor's native tongueneutered, polite, and absolutely convinced of its own correctnesseach group is even more entrenched in its position than it was when it started.

Emin amo, an editor who identifies himself as Muslim, and who appears to have created a Wikipedia account solely to argue about Muhammad pictures after the shooting, raises the issue: Wikipedia shouldn't show the prophet, he says, if not for the sake of sensitivity, then to avoid another Charlie-style attack. This is the same logic several news outlets appeared to use in their Charlie shooting.

It sounds more logical that a website which focuses on making articles from a neutral point should know that having a successful policy requires a certain amount of respect towards religious, social and similar traditions. Also considering that these depictions have caused a lot of riots within the Muslim World, do you not think that this is violent propaganda? Since it ,consciously, is hurting the adherents of Islam. Furthermore, images, unlike links and claims supported by evidence, do not affect the article itself at all, rather I'd say they are useless in this context. Regarding Muhammad though, they're not just useless, they're also offensive. So I think the smart move in the end of the day would just be to remove the pictures. Just a thought.

The rest is here:
Should Wikipedia Depict Muhammad? How Editors Responded to Charlie Hebdo