QUOTE(Tarc @ Fri 6th April 2012, 2:45pm)
It is a shit argument borne of desperation.
So, you're basically here just to defend Wikipedia's worst excesses from those who would dare suggest ways of ameliorating those excesses, then.
QUOTE
Is there a drive to rid the project of depictions of, say, Cleopatra, Ghengis Khan, or King Richard the III? No, no one is going on a fucking crusade to remove those on a "how do we know he/she really looked like that?" throughout the project.
So, the whole idea of iconoclasm (and the historical reasons for it) must be meaningless to you... at least in that case, you're not alone - most people don't really understand the underlying historical rationale.
Y'see, back in ancient times, Imperial Roman oppressors used to build huge temples, shrines, and statues to pagan gods, along with elaborate icons and other imagery - and they competed to see who could build the most impressive stuff for centuries, continuing to do it in the Eastern Empire long after the Western Empire crumbled. All of this required a great deal of wealth which they ruthlessly took from the people they conquered, impoverished, and often enslaved. In effect, wealth that should have been used to improve the lives of actual human beings was taken from them and used on religious art, which in turn became a symbol of oppression in itself. That became the root cause of Islam's rejection of idolatry, which continues to this day - and is also found among several other iconoclastic sects throughout that region's history, and even among some heretical Catholic groups that formed in Eastern Europe (and elsewhere) in opposition to the often financially-rapacious central authorities in Rome and Constantinople.
In fact, it's also the reason you'll usually see far less artwork in general (not just fewer images of Jesus) in Protestant churches than in Catholic ones - the Reformation rejected excessive Church decor because it embodied Catholic excesses in general, and those excesses were mostly financial, perpetrated at the expense of the people. But I digress...
Meanwhile, nobody ever really competed to see who could spend the most ill-gotten wealth on depictions of Cleopatra, Genghis Khan, or Richard III. In their cases, imagery was simply a matter of propaganda - depictions of Cleopatra, for example, have always been more suggestive of a European rather than a North African woman, because European historians wanted to "claim" her in such a way as to deny the idea that an African could be a powerful or even an attractive figure. In other words, institutional racism. Genghis Khan, like Attila the Hun, has been demonized by those same historians as a "barbarian" and a "savage" when, in fact, he was personally nothing of the sort (other than his tendency to show no mercy whatsoever to enemies). And Richard III was depicted as a deformed black-clad hunchback by artists of the Tudor dynasty that overthrew him, when in fact he was almost certainly quite normal-looking.
Anyway, long story short, the argument may be "borne of desperation," but it's hardly "shit." Imagery has always been an important means of manipulating popular sentiment, in varying degrees of subtlety. So it's no wonder that Wikipedia is 100-percent on board with using it in the same fashion. That doesn't make it right, however.