Talk:WikiIslam

Identical citations to 2022, 2023 or 2024 study

The following citations appear to be to identical:

• name="KozaricBrekke2023": Kozaric, Edin; Brekke, Torkel (2024). "The case of WikiIslam: scientification of Islamophobia or legitimate critique of Islam?". Ethnic and Racial Studies: 1–19. doi:10.1080/01419870.2023.2268154. hdl:10852/109661. S2CID 264331620.
• name="Brekke 2024": Kozaric, Edin; Brekke, Torkel. "The case of WikiIslam: scientification of Islamophobia or legitimate critique of Islam?". www.tandfonline.com. 47 (5). doi:10.1080/01419870.2023.2268154?needAccess=true. Retrieved 1 April 2026.

The publication date was 2024, but the date the paper was received by the journal was 22 November 2022, and it was accepted on 4 September 2023. Note that the page numbers were 963–981. Even numbered pages have the page number in top left hand corner; odd numbered pages have it in the top right hand corner. i.e. the "KozaricBrekke2023" has the page numbers wrong. I think that the date in the citation template should be 2024 - the publication date of Volume 47, Issue No. 5. I will fix these problems.

@Doug Weller and Darklightsd: The "Brekke 2024" version of the citation is cited for A 2024 study stated.... Do you think that should be changed to 2022? The study must have been completed in 2022, though the paper was published in a 2024 issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.-- Toddy1 (talk) 09:47, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

“A study published in 2024”, we can only speculate about when it was carried out, if the publication date was late 2024 it could have been carried out the same year. Doug Weller talk 13:18, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Agh, sorry I missed the date of the study. Doug Weller talk 13:20, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I have implemented the wording Doug Weller suggested. -- Toddy1 (talk) 14:23, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

but shouldn't the later pages like 16 be the recent ones? also tbh speculate is really not academic for we really don't know which ones are first. it could be that the later pages are more recent which talk about biasness:

in page 16 it gives another view of it biasness: In a 2023 content analysis, Edin Kozaric of Oslo Metropolitan University and Torkel Brekke of MF Norwegian School of Theology examined WikiIslam using a framework they termed the "scientification of Islamophobia," referring to how prejudice against Muslims can gain credibility through academic-style referencing and terminology. Their overall assessment was that the information WikiIslam presents about Islam is far from neutral:[11]: 16  the site's topic selection is biased, and it continues to have hardly any information presenting Muslims positively or neutrally. Because WikiIslam's articles often present conflicting interpretations, they concluded it would be wrong to characterize WikiIslam as entirely Islamophobic. However, the site does not meet the standards set out in its vision document. Their primary concern was that WikiIslam positions itself as an objective encyclopedia while failing to acknowledge how its content is used elsewhere; their backlink analysis found that far-right websites such as Breitbart regularly cited WikiIslam articles to support anti-Muslim arguments. Darklightsd (talk) 14:07, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

This link states "Published online: 18 Oct 2023." Snuish (talk) 14:47, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

In another place the same paper is cited for In a 2023 content analysis.... Should that be changed to 2024 (publication date), or 2022 the date the paper was received by the journal.-- Toddy1 (talk) 09:57, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

in page 16 it gives another view of it biasness: In a 2023 content analysis, Edin Kozaric of Oslo Metropolitan University and Torkel Brekke of MF Norwegian School of Theology examined WikiIslam using a framework they termed the "scientification of Islamophobia," referring to how prejudice against Muslims can gain credibility through academic-style referencing and terminology. Their overall assessment was that the information WikiIslam presents about Islam is far from neutral:[11]: 16  the site's topic selection is biased, and it continues to have hardly any information presenting Muslims positively or neutrally. Because WikiIslam's articles often present conflicting interpretations, they concluded it would be wrong to characterize WikiIslam as entirely Islamophobic. However, the site does not meet the standards set out in its vision document. Their primary concern was that WikiIslam positions itself as an objective encyclopedia while failing to acknowledge how its content is used elsewhere; their backlink analysis found that far-right websites such as Breitbart regularly cited WikiIslam articles to support anti-Muslim arguments.[11] Darklightsd (talk) 10:14, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I am not sure whether the page numbers in the rp templates should be fixed as well - the currently show the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. page of the article, rather than the page in the journal. I can see great benefit to users in leaving them as they are (easier for people using the URL). The citation template has been changed to show the correct pages of the journal (useful for people with a paper or pdf copy of the issue of the journal); I am sure readers can figure out that where Wikipedia says page 10, it really means page 972 of the journal.-- Toddy1 (talk) 10:05, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

First sentence doesn't state what the site is (MOS:LEAD)

The opening calls WikiIslam "an anti-Muslim and anti-Islam wiki." If you take out the two adjectives then "wiki" is all noun that's described, which carries almost no information. A reader here has to infer its purpose and actual content from the labels, this doesn't give enough context and information about what is on the wiki.

MOS:LEAD says the first sentence should tell a nonspecialist what the subject is through a concise definition. Comparable articles on contested sites do this by leading with function. I.e. Breitbart News opens as "an American far-right news, opinion, and commentary website." This kind of label has a lot of functional nouns. This lead gives the adjectives nothing to modify, which is also the WP:STRUCTURE problem of ordering carrying a POV independent of the sourcing.

Proposed: WikiIslam is an anti-Islam and anti-Muslim wiki that documents Islam critically, drawing on Islamic scripture, hadith, and prophetic biography alongside modern historical-critical scholarship. EdithVane (talk) 02:29, 3 July 2026 (UTC)

"Wiki" could be a more specific genus, but the proposed text adopts WikiIslam's own mission-statement language ("documents Islam critically," "drawing on... historical-critical scholarship"), which is exactly the self-characterization Kozaric and Brekke (2024) found the site fails to live up to. Per WP:WEIGHT, the lead should reflect what independent sources say about the site, not how it describes itself. I don't think the Breitbart comparison supports your position. That article leads with "far-right," not with Breitbart's account of its own journalism. If "wiki" reads as too thin, a neutral fix is to describe it as a wiki focused on criticism of Islam, which the sources support, without importing the site's promotional framing. Snuish (talk) 01:40, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

This is a fair point, and I find myself agreeing with your suggestion at the end. I don't wish to include any promotional framing, of course.

Allow me to give some details to clarify myself.

Right now there is both "anti-Islam" and the phrase "focused on criticism of Islam", but "anti-Islam" is currently piped to Criticism of Islam. So this is an easter egg that serves functionally the same purpose as saying "focused on criticism of Islam". It should be noted here that Anti-Islam leads to a disambiguation page rather than being a wiki-term in its own right, and we should follow Wikipedia's disambiguation here towards Criticism of Islam.

Having something like:

WikiIslam is an anti-Muslim wiki focused on criticism of Islam, published by the Ex-Muslims of North America.

would be less redundant and would remove the easter egg. And this would finally resolve the issue of not having a clear purpose of what WikiIslam is about as per MOS:LEAD.

I think the label "anti-Muslim" in its current state is mostly justified as there some elements of essentialism still being named in recent scholarly works, Kozaric and Brekke write: Muslims are in general explicitly or implicitly linked to a non-rational worldview that is incompatible with a scientific outlook, and there is hardly any information that presents Muslims in a positive or neutral way. (Kozaric & Brekke 2024)

For other considerations I will create a separate topic here.

EdithVane (talk) 12:09, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

I understand your concerns about the Easter egg. I've removed the link to criticism of Islam from "anti-Islam," and I assume that it did not link to the disambiguation page because of MOS:DABLINK. "Anti-Islam" is supported by at least two sources that essentially state that WikiIslam's position and content extend beyond mere critique of Islam. Given that they're two distinct concepts, it wouldn't be appropriate to remove "anti-Islam" in favor of "criticism of Islam." To be clear about what I proposed earlier, I offered "focused on criticism of Islam" as a way to give the first sentence a functional description, not as a substitute for one of the characterizations. Snuish (talk) 15:12, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, that resolves it for me. Concretely I'd propose:

WikiIslam is an anti-Muslim and anti-Islam wiki focused on criticism of Islam, owned since 2015 by the Ex-Muslims of North America. Ali Sina founded the site in 2006, and it was originally maintained by his organization, Faith Freedom International, part of the counter-jihad network. The wiki underwent a major revision in 2020 and now presents itself as a critical encyclopedia of Islam.

Changes: added the functional description, folded the 2015 acquisition into the first sentence (to avoid naming EXMNA twice), switched the founding to active voice, and merged the revision and self-description into one sentence.

Front-loading the current owner seems right to me since the 2015 acquisition isn't recent. This is my succinct take on it, I'm somewhat more ambivalent about the smaller copy editing I made, but it feels overall a bit tighter as a lead.

I have opened a separate thread on some source-to-text points I ran into concerning the body the article. EdithVane (talk) 22:31, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

This LLM-generated text has been collapsed and should be excluded from assessments of consensus.

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. ::Snuish, this is fair pushback. And on reflection I do actually agree the specific phrase I proposed leaned too heavily on WikiIslam's own self-description. I don't want to import promotional language, and I take your WP:WEIGHT point.

I think my original comment stated the actual concern somewhat awkwardly, so let me restate it more clearly. The lead currently collapses two things that should be kept analytically separate, namely what the site's content and function actually are, and how scholars have characterized it. I don't think this always needs to be true, but in this case it is almost confusing to the reader who reads the introduction hoping to find out what can be found on the website itself. I had to visit it myself to get an idea of what I was looking at. MOS:FIRST says the opening should give a concise definition that puts the subject "in context for the nonspecialist," and right now a reader does not get enough information about what WikiIslam actually contains or does. This lead failure is independent of the POV question. Enstedt and Larsson (2013, p. 64), a source already in the article and not a friendly one, write that "WikiIslam was created to become the one-stop source of information critical of Islam."

Which brings me to my next and more important point: the subject itself has materially changed. Kozaric and Brekke, the most recent and most methodologically careful source say the 2020 revision was "a serious effort to re-invent itself as a scientific, neutral, and unbiased website," and write in their conclusion: "Still, it would be wrong to claim that WikiIslam in its entirety is an Islamophobic platform, given that some of the articles do indeed present conflicting views and interpretations of controversial issues, while others simply criticize Islamic beliefs and practices through comparison with contemporary scientific knowledge." It is why I believe that at the very least "anti-Muslim" is a WP:LABEL problem in the first sentence. Naturally, the guideline doesn't say "don't use contentious labels ever," and I concede the label is widely used by reliable sources here; it says that even then such labels take in-text attribution rather than Wikipedia's voice, and in this case the most recent study explicitly declines to apply the label wholesale.

For this reason the pre-2020 characterization belongs prominently in the History section, and the lead should reflect where the balance of more recent sourcing sits and be more carefully attributed, since the scholarly assessment shifted over time. WP:DUE asks us to present the criticism in proportion to its prominence, which here means fully, and yes, prominently, but attributed ("has been described by Larsson, Enstedt, Shukri, etc..."), and with due weight to Kozaric and Brekke's qualified 2024 assessment. In this way we can name it and also show that the scholarly literature itself shifted, which I think is a more honest and accurate representation. I want to be clear that Kozaric and Brekke are no 'endorsement' of WikiIslam as they still name bias.

Lastly, but perhaps more contentiously, "Islamophobic" and "anti-Muslim" are not terms with a single stable scholarly definition, and this is not my observation, it comes from the cited sources. Kozaric and Brekke open their definitional section with "Islamophobia is a highly contentious concept, and we are aware that opinions diverge sharply regarding its usefulness," and then stipulate their own definition, following Bleich's widely-cited 2011 piece: "undifferentiated negative beliefs, attitudes and emotions about Islam and/or Muslims," where "undifferentiated" marks the cases in which Islam and Muslims are treated as one essentialized whole. In applying that definition to the nine most-disseminated articles they find that "only a few articles present Islamic theology or Muslims as a homogenous entity or group of people." Here the different sources we're citing aren't necessarily measuring or naming the same exact thing when they apply the label, and the source that defines it most carefully finds that most of the articles it examined don't meet this bar. This is a case where sources disagree in kind and not merely in degree, which I think is by itself a strong argument for attribution with context rather than a flattened assertion.

My proposal is to keep "wiki" or "wiki-based encyclopedia," but pair it with the functional description above, which can be sourced academically, and move the Islamophobia characterization into an attributed second sentence that acknowledges both the earlier critiques and Kozaric and Brekke's more qualified 2024 assessment. It's more accurately weighting it per WP:DUE and complying with WP:LABEL's attribution guidance, while finally giving nonspecialist readers an actual definition per MOS:FIRST.

Some of this is compounded by the fact that the article spends a lot of space on the question whether the site is Islamophobic or biased, but less on the site's actual contents and its broader context, including its place in the ex-Muslim and New Atheist critique-of-religion milieu,and this is a connection Enstedt and Larsson also already make. Everything added together makes the article feel less well-rounded, flattened and less informative than it could be, though I'm happy to leave that for a separate discussion.

I'm happy to make these (small and easily revertible) changes if there is some consensus that this better reflects the current sourcing and would improve the article's overall quality. EdithVane (talk) 22:22, 29 July 2026 (UTC)

Overlapping citations and a few sourcing points

I found a couple of notable things when I went into the sources.

Shukri (2019) is a literature review about Islamophobia among Indonesian youths, in her work she restates Larsson 2007 ("Larsson (2007) did a research on Islamophobia on the Internet, specifically the anti-Islam portal WikiIslam"). What is relevant here is that there was no independent analysis of WikiIslam in her work, and right now it's being cited here as if there were. Moreover, Both Enstedt and Larsson 2013 and Larsson 2018 points his readers back to his own 2007 works of the analysis of WikiIslam than rather reassessing in the newer work (which footnote (c) already points out correctly). Enstedt and Larsson 2013 says the site is often perceived as being anti-Muslim, if not Islamophobic, cited to (Larsson 2007).

So the conundrum here is that several of these trace to that the 2007 study. Together that makes it look like independent corroboration and investigation, which unfortunately it is not. I feel like we're running into a slight woozle here, though the here woozling is happening here instead of an author doing it. But restating a secondary source as a primary source is of course not best practice.

Also, Enstedt and Larsson 2013 is a rhetorical and genre analysis of six apostasy testimonies on the WikiIslam of 2013. They describe those up front as illustrations of anti-Islamic polemics by means of 'personal' testimony (p. 64). Their finding is that the narratives present Islam in a negative and biased way. That isn't in the article at all right now, which I think it most likely should be. Though WikiIslam claims it removed them after the revamp (as Kozarić and Brekke point here to WikiIslam:Renovations). Right now it's cited for a general characterisation of the site, and I do agree it characterises a part of, but it is a bit flattened in the body. Their main conclusion on p. 88 is that the stories arm people who want to express anti-Muslim feeling, and for that reason can easily be turned into an Islamophobic worldview. The main thesis here being that these testimonies start from the narrator's own experience as a former Muslim and then to varying degrees generalise into claims about Islam.

This is a lot of words to say that for the post-2020 site, Kozarić and Brekke is the only source that actually looks at it methodically. Kamal (2022) and Uddin (2019) postdate the overhauls and are certainly more than relevant, but are passing mentions in larger works.

Kozaric and Brekke conclusion is that the site is far from neutral, the topic is selection biased, and hardly any material presenting Muslims positively etc. Also, they adopt a the formal definition for Islamophobia of Bleich (2011) as: "undifferentiated negative beliefs, attitudes and emotions about Islam and/or Muslims". Applying that they find "only a few articles present Islamic theology or Muslims as a homogenous entity or group of people" (which is why they refuse to call the site Islamophobic in its entirety). They even state plainly that it is "legitimate, even necessary, to criticize Islam, or any other religion". Their main worry is critique that treats Islam and Muslims as one uniform thing (ignoring that Muslims disagree among themselves).

All in all, when read together, these sources say something narrower and more careful than the article currently reflects.

My proposals roughly in order of how uncontroversial I think they are:

1. Drop Shukri (2019) from the "anti-Muslim" footnote, or cite Larsson 2007 directly
2. Add the Enstedt and Larsson finding on the apostasy narratives (negative and biased), attributed to the six testimonies they examined, and note WikiIslam's claim to have removed them.
3. Attribute the site-level characterisations in the Reception section to the scholars making them (rather than aggregating them into a single footnote bundle that reads as broader corroboration than it is, normally I'd go more towards WP:CITEBUNDLE, but I don't see a way around this since the claims diverge too much).
4. Bring Kozarić and Brekke's qualifications up from the bottom of Reception into the same paragraph as their conclusions, including their definition and finding
5. A separate history section covering the founding, the 2015 EXMNA acquisition, the 2018 overhaul and the 2020 relaunch, so the reader can see which assessment applies to which version of the site. (I think this would solve a lot of this).

I can do these as small and easily revertible edits per WP:BOLD EdithVane (talk) 00:48, 4 August 2026 (UTC)