WikiIslam
WikiIslam is a community edited website which focuses on the critique of Islam, whilst also allowing pro-Islamic responses in separate articles. It is run on the same software that Wikipedia and other similar sites use.
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[edit] About
WikiIslam's goal is to become the one-stop source of information critical of Islam. This information is based primarily on its own sources, the Qur'an, hadith and Islamic scholars. It accepts the theory of evolution as a scientific fact and is notable for dealing extensively with false propaganda and Islamic pseudoscience.
However, the site aims to remain neutral towards other religions, world views, and issues of a political nature, such as immigration, multiculturalism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and also to stay away from extremist, sensationalist or emotional commentary by simply letting the facts speak for themselves.
Contrary to what is sometimes claimed,[1] the site exhorts editors to use non-polemic and scholarly secondary sources, and to attribute statements wherever possible. It makes copious use of authoritative primary and secondary pro-Islamic sources, such as the Compendium of Muslim Texts, The History of al-Tabari and fatwas from some of the most popular mainstream Islamic sites on the net.
[edit] History
WikiIslam was created on October 27, 2005, in collaboration with Ali Sina and Faith Freedom International. The site was in a testing phase for about a year and on September 4, 2006, it was opened to the public.
In September 2007, the FFI server was hacked and was down for almost a month, and due to server problems, editing was disabled at WikiIslam for almost a year.
In August 2008, the site was moved out of FFI's server and since then it has been operating independently, remaining unaffiliated with or owned by any organization.
[edit] Reception
In December 2006, Göran Larsson presented a paper on WikiIslam at a conference in Sweden. At that point in time, the site was barely out of its infancy, only having been open to the public for three months, and Larsson was very critical. Today, with its new policies, new guidelines, thousands of more pages and the inclusion of pro-Islamic content aimed at presenting a positive image of Islam, WikiIslam remains the same only in name. But even back then in its primitive form, Larsson admitted that he could not label all the site "Islamophobic" in nature.[2]
Contrary to what is sometimes claimed,[1] WikiIslam has not received any attention from news agencies such as the Associated Press (AP), however, its non-partisan approach to criticism has led to the site being linked to or referenced by various notable sites such as RichardDawkins.net[3] and GreenProphet.com.[4]
Due to the focus of the site (namely; criticism of Islam), the most noticeable reactions from Muslims has been negative.[1] It has been banned in Saudi Arabia on the country's pornography blacklist, even though the site contains nothing of a pornographic nature.
Constant vandalism, death-threats, and non-compliance with guidelines by Muslim editors has lead to the implementation of “pending-changes protection”, meaning that editing still remains open to all, including IP users, but changes have to be approved before becoming visible to readers.
However, due to WikiIslam's extensive use of authoritative primary and secondary pro-Islamic sources, the site has also received praise from Muslims, e.g. for its Sex Segregation in Islam article,[5] and pages such as List of Fabricated Hadith and Chronological Order of the Qur'an have been used by Muslims as a resource.
[edit] Audience
WikiIslam hosts 2,350 articles and has had 10,653,410 page views. On average, it currently receive over 100,000 visitors a month generating approximately 200,000 page views.
Unlike many other sites critical of Islam, WikiIslam's audience is not "Eurocentric". The majority of its readers are from Eastern and Muslim-majority nations such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Singapore.[6]
The site is currently looking for editors to translate some of their English articles into Indonesian, Urdu, Bengali and Arabic. There are several translations from English already available at the site in French and Russian, and they also host many press articles and fatwas from the Islamic world translated into English from the original Arabic.
[edit] Wikipedia
WikiIslam's primary focus is on the religion of Islam while Wikipedia is a compendium of general knowledge. These differing goals have lead to different policies and guidelines.
Wikipedia discourages the use of primary and what they term as "non-notable/reliable" sources. WikiIslam, on the other hand, encourages the use of authentic primary religious text and the rulings of authoritative Muslim scholars who may not be notable to people outside of the Muslim world but who are giants from within.
Wikipedia focuses on "verifiability, not truth".[7] In regards to Islam, it has meant they accept what "notable/reliable" Western commentators say about its religious text and Muslims over what the religious text and Muslims actually say themselves. Conversely, WikiIslam accepts what the religious text and Muslims say over the opinions and interpretations of third-party Western commentators.
[edit] See Also
[edit] References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 For responses to various criticisms of WikiIslam, visit the Criticism of WikiIslam section of the IslamoCriticism blog.
- ↑ Göran Larsson - Cyber-Islamophobia? The case of WikiIslam - Contemporary Islam: Volume 1, Number 1, 53-67, DOI: 10.1007/s11562-007-0002-2
- ↑ About/ Links - RichardDawkins.net, accessed February 7, 2012
- ↑ Tafline Laylin - Muslim President Calls for Rain Prayers on Sunny Friday - Green Prophet, December 28, 2011
- ↑ "I usually wouldn't endorse a site like this, but in this case all of the sources were referenced in great detail." - Women: Traveling and free-mixing in Islam …, Abdul-Malik Merchant, Student at Umm al-Qura University, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, July 13, 2011
- ↑ Wikiislam.net/ Audience - Alexa.com, accessed November 28, 2011
- ↑ Verifiability, not truth - Wikipedia, accessed February 10, 2012
