WikiIslam

WikiIslam aims to provide accurate and accessible information from traditional and critical perspectives on the beliefs, practices, and development of Islam.

About

WikiIslam's goal is to become the most comprehensive and accurate source of information on Islam freely and accessibly available online, drawing from both Islam's primary sources (the Qur'an, hadith and Islamic scholars) as well as from the historical-critical (sometimes called revisionist) analysis of these primary sources by modern historians.

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.

It is an international site with editors and contributors from all over the world, and the site's policies and content reflect this.

History

WikiIslam was created on October 27, 2005, in collaboration with various individuals from Faith Freedom International who provided the site with server space, technical help and exposure. The site remained in a testing phase for about a year and on September 4, 2006, it was opened to the public.

In September 2007, the server that hosted the site was hacked, and due to other server problems, editing was disabled at WikiIslam for almost a year.

In August 2008, the site was moved to a new server and since then it has been operating independently, remaining unaffiliated with or owned by any organization.

In December 2015, the ownership of the website was transferred to Ex-Muslims of North America.^[1]

Reception

Academia

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, WikiIslam remains the same only in name. Nonetheless, even in its primitive form, Larsson admitted that he could not label all the site "Islamophobic" in nature.^[2]

WikiIslam's non-partisan approach to Islam has led to the site being linked to or referenced by various notable sites such as RichardDawkins.net^[3] and GreenProphet.com.^[4] It has also been cited by Prof. Dr. G. Hussein Rassool in his book, Cultural Competence in Caring for Muslim Patients,^[5] Dr. Heather Deegan in her book, Africa Today: Culture, Economics, Religion, Security,^[6] Prof. Carlos Brebbia in his book, Disaster Management and Human Health Risk III: Reducing Risk, Improving Outcomes,^[7] and Dr. Stefan Kirchner in his paper published in the Baltic Journal of Law & Politics.^[8]

Muslim-majority countries, criminals, and polemicists

Due to the focus of the site, the most noticeable reactions from Muslim-majority countries has been negative. Beyond open calls to hack and take down the site^[9][10][11], WikiIslam has been banned in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and many other countries with Sharia-inspired policies.^[12]

Constant vandalism, death-threats, and non-compliance with guidelines by Muslim editors lead first to WikiIslam, like the German Wikipedia, implementing “pending-changes protection”, meaning that while editing remained open to all, including IP users, changes had to be approved before becoming visible to readers. Today, to further secure the non-polemical standing of WikiIslam, persons wishing to edit the site are required to request an account from site admins, who will readily provide such access.

Due to WikiIslam's extensive use of authoritative primary and secondary sources, the site has also received praise from Islamic sources (e.g. its Sex Segregation in Islam^[13] and List of Killings Ordered or Supported by Muhammad^[14] articles, and pages such as List of Fabricated Hadith^[15][16] and Chronological Order of the Qur'an^[17] have been used by Islamic websites as a resource).

Audience

WikiIslam hosts 978 articles. On average, it currently receives over 250,000 visitors a month generating about 500,000 page views. As of September 2014, Alexa.com places it within the top 70,000 most visited websites.^[18]

WikiIslam's audience is not "Eurocentric". A large percentage of its readers are from Eastern or Muslim-majority nations such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Singapore (often accessed through WikiIslam's alternative domains, especially where WikiIslam has been banned).^[19] Likewise, many of the site's administrators and editors are from a Muslim background or are skeptics from Muslim majority nations.

The site is always looking for editors to translate English articles into Indonesian, Urdu, Bengali and Arabic. There are translations from English already available at the site in several languages, including Azerbaijani, French, Turkish and Uzbek. A Russian sub-domain was started in early 2013 and a Bulgarian sub-domain was created in April, 2015.

WikiIslam vs. Wikipedia

WikiIslam's primary focus is on the religion of Islam while Wikipedia is a compendium of general knowledge. These differing goals have led 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, (in addition to secondary scholarly sources) 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".^[20] In regards to Islam, it has meant they accept what "notable/reliable" western commentators say about Islam's religious texts over what the religious text and Muslim authorities actually say themselves. Conversely, WikiIslam accepts what the religious texts and Muslim authorities say over the opinions and interpretations of third-party western commentators.

See Also

• Frequently Asked Questions

Contact Information

To contact WikiIslam with general ideas and suggestions, a message can be left on the relevant Discussions page. For copyright issues, click here. And for other important issues or to request an account, click here.

References