Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2007-11-29 Cat Stevens

Who are the involved parties?
BoogaLouie (talk) 22:51, 29 November 2007 (UTC) and Tvoz

What's going on?
BoogaLouie (talk) 22:51, 29 November 2007 (UTC) wants to change the paragraph below in the Salman Rushdie controversy section of the Cat Stevens article :
 * The singer attracted controversy in 1989, during an address to students at London's Kingston University, where he was asked about the fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie. Newspapers quickly interpreted his response as support for the fatwa, but he released a statement the following day clarifying that he had not been supporting vigilantism, and was merely explaining the legal Islamic punishment for blasphemy.[23]

to include what the response by Stevens that "the newspapers quickly interpreted" was


 * The singer attracted controversy in 1989, during an address to students at London's Kingston University, where he was asked about the fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie. Newspapers quickly interpreted his response -- "He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear - if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."  -- as support for the fatwa. Yusuf released a statement the following day clarifying that he had not been supporting vigilantism, and was merely explaining the legal Islamic punishment for blasphemy, while stopping short of coming out against that punishment.

Tvoz thinks the paragraph will become too long if this is added and that the forked-off article Cat Stevens' comments about Salman Rushdie is sufficient to explain what happened.

What would you like to change about that?
I would like to change the text to the slightly longer second paragraph posted above, as it only adds a couple more lines and makes the issue clearer.

discussion from talk page

Mediator notes
Picked up the case; asking those involved. Shell babelfish 03:22, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Only one party agreed to mediation of old issue (Sept 07); nothing to be done. Shell babelfish 01:10, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Discussion
If all parties involved have no objection to me mediating, I'd be happy to try to help sort this out. It'll take about a day for me to go through the article and discussion. In the meantime, if both sides could discuss what they think can be done to work out a compromise, that will help to start move things along. Thanks. Shell babelfish 03:28, 4 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't see anyway around including what "his response" - i.e. Stevens/Islam's response - was. The response is not very long, and without it readers are left wondering what's going on. --BoogaLouie 18:43, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

After some more review and a message on my talkpage, some other questions have come up: Can I ask why you opened a mediation where there has been no discussion of this issue since September? There also seems to be a good deal of previous discussion on the subject (see Rushdie controversy - alleged undue weight and Rusdie controversy on the talk page) -- since the consensus was that enough information existed to devote an entire article to the statements, is there any particular reason you feel more information needs to be added to the main article? Shell babelfish 20:26, 4 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I have no excuse for waiting until now instead of asking for mediation in September except perhaps to take a break from the arguement and work on less controversial wikipedia articles. Yes, it is true that as far as I know only myself and perhaps Arrow740 (he has been absent from the issue for a while but I have asked him to comment) have expressed unhappiness with the lack of a quote of what Stevens said about Rushdie, which doesn't seem particularly surprising since editors of an article on a musician would tend to be people who admire, are fans of, etc. that musician, and consequently not particularly interested in controversies that may put the musician in a less positive light.


 * What reason do I have for thinking more information needs to be added to the main article when there is already an article on the controversy itself?
 * A reader who comes across a paragraph:


 * The singer attracted controversy in 1989, during an address to students at London's Kingston University, where he was asked about the fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie. Newspapers quickly interpreted his response as support for the fatwa, but he released a statement the following day clarifying that he had not been supporting vigilantism, and was merely explaining the legal Islamic punishment for blasphemy.


 * is natually going to wonder what the singer said that was "interpreted as support for the fatwa." We have his statement "clarifying that he had not been supporting vigilantism, and was merely explaining the legal Islamic punishment for blasphemy." Why don't we have a line expalining what he orginally said? Yes, readers can click on the link to the forked-off article, but time being precious and this controversy arguably being the biggest of Steven's career, what good reason is there for not adding that one additional line to the article? --BoogaLouie (talk) 20:10, 6 December 2007 (UTC)


 * You've actually just made a case against inclusion -- the current paragraph covers what is in the controversy article and leads people to want to find out more -- see WP:LEAD for some good ideas on what is suppose to go in leads or these types of paragraphs. Both sides are stated, clearly identifying who said what -- newspapers said a, Stevens said b, so it appears to be written well from an NPOV perspective.  It also appears that prior consensus in several places lead to the current wording.  You say that the incident was the biggest of his career which, I would counter, is why it has its own article.  I'm afraid you need a more compelling reason to use the quote, along with a discussion of how the use of the quote meets Wikipedia's fair-use criteria.


 * Since it appears that this discussion was over in September and none of the previous participants are interested in re-opening it for mediation, I don't believe that anything is going to be resolved in this manner. If you develop a consensus for the inclusion of the quote and other editors resist that consensus, then mediation might be an option again. Shell babelfish 01:07, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
 * It sound like you have come down on the side of Tvoz. I can only say that your contension that in the article: "Both sides are stated, clearly identifying who said what -- newspapers said a, Stevens said b," is not true. In the article the newspapers says B, Stevens says C.... and A - what Stevens orginally said - is left to the readers imagination. --BoogaLouie (talk) 15:45, 7 December 2007 (UTC)