"...as for taking Britannica or the OED's word for it; well, if we are to just take the OED's or any other mainstream, establishment encyclopedia's word on things ... why are we wasting our time working on the Wikipedia? ... the main reason I associate myself with the Wikipedia is that I consider it a chance to receive and present a more complete picture of the world than I grew up having to read."
The motto of the AIW is conservata veritate, which translates to "with the preserved truth".
This motto reflects the inclusionist desire to change Wikipedia only when no knowledge would be lost as a result.
The following pages, I believe, should be restored, not just because they deserve it, but because if the Wikipedia is going to be live up to its promise of much less institutional bias towards Western issues and topics (which is why I choose to engage with and believe in this encyclopedia), it needs to help people learn about topics that help them understand the world they live in.
"...as for taking the OED's word for it; well, if we are to just take the OED's or any other mainstream, establishment encyclopedia's word on things ... why are we wasting our time working on the Wikipedia? ... the main reason I associate myself with the Wikipedia is that I consider it a chance to receive and present a more complete picture of the world than I grew up having to read."
The job of an encyclopedia is to provide the context and background on topics that people might, conceivably want to know about. At a time when
Pakistan and what's happening in it is regularly headline news everywhere in the world, we need to document the people, the voices, and events related to it properly. Rather than arguing what NOT to document, we should we trying to cover the Pakistani experience better. Does it make any sense that there is no Wikipedia article on
Beena Sarwar, that the article on
Ardeshir Cowasjee is rudimentary?[1]
My current self-description—the one I use on social media—runs as follows:
Communicator—Citizen—Fakir // Pakistani-American. Californian. Karachiite. Awadhi by culture. Nigerian by birth. //
@BayContent for technical/business enquiries
Starting out on the journey of self-discovery, (when I was young, and, well, cornier--cornier than this, you might ask ;)), I came up with the following characterization for myself:
I recently had reason to say the following in a discussion on an article:
...the main reason I associate myself with the Wikipedia is that I consider it a chance to receive and present a more complete picture of the world than I grew up having to read. (
Source; for the curious.)
...and in another discussion:
Let me say the following up front by way of disclaimer: I am a Muslim and sympathise with Islam. And I also am not sympathetic to inflexible and/or extreme rationalist "devotees" of any ideology—be it Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Communism, Capitalism, Progressive philosophies or any other.
And I am also a strong believer in the importance of strict NPOV policies for an encyclopedia to really live up to its name. See, for example, what I am trying to do at
Template talk:Timeline of Islamist militancy.
I have just finally got to publishing my thoughts and translations on Urdu poetry, Sufism and related topics. For now, it will be mainly on the following page:
My personal bias (excuse the pun) is that bias is something that exists in every person—it's basically a function of our being human and being shaped by our own experiences and background. The High Road, IMHO, is to understand what one's own bias is and work from there—identify opinion as opinion and try to work with others to achieve objectivity and completeness is a priority, as it is for projects like Wikipedia. (And yes, I have worked as a journalist and do
have a blog.) The way I do this on Wikipedia is to place an honest statement of my background and an attempt at describing my own bias on my
user page. I know this will make me an easy target for people that want to discredit me or my contributions based on their perception of "people like me". So be it; it is the price of honesty.
Just discovered something while reading
User:DigiBullet). As that user puts it, "Im among the Top 1000 users of Wikipedia by edits or something, despite me reducing my usage of the site. I dont know if this is an honor or an indicator of something else.
The List".
—
iFaqeer(Talk to me!) 02:21, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)
The very nature of the medium makes it difficult to list things like pages I have made a significant contribution to. And of course, on Wikipedia and in the wider Wikiworld, there is no such thing as owning a page, let alone a whole Wiki. Even pages one starts are communal property and contributed to by others, often extensively. And often that's the desired result. And things happen fast. The lists below are provided only to give you a small sampling and an idea of what I am interested and engaged in. They are, by definition, rather sketchy and out-of-date. You can check a list of my contributions to see what I have been up to lately.
The Wikipedia re-ignited the hope in my heart and mind to try and work on a dream project of mine; to collect and overlay genealogies, sufi initiation chains and other information, starting in South Asia and work outwards to document people and other topics around the world. After discussions on
Wikipedia:Help, I was able to make a case for its being hosted at
Wikia, then WikiCities. Of course, like all Wikia projects and all true Wikis, it is a community resource that I just have the honour being the founder of:
I have the honor of being the founder of Wiki Pakistan! Or "The Pakistan Wiki", PakWiki, or WikiPak, call it what you will.(You may want to avoid "Paki Wiki", since in some parts of the world, that first word is seldom used in affection.) It is at:
The basic idea is a national project. A "Pakistan Information" database to which everybody can and does contribute...You can read more at
that wiki's About page.
Lists of Maraji, which I started when mention of
Ayatollah Sistani started to make it to mainstream media after the
2nd Gulf War and I realized that even non-
ShiaMuslims could name only one, maybe two. It is now broken into two separate pages, one for living and one for deceased
Maraji with the original one just listing the other two.
The usual reason a page is listed here is that reading it will provides an insight that, in my humble opinion, is important in helping us all better understand (and be more understanding of) the universe around us.