Negotiating Neutrality on Collaborative Knowledge Platforms: Discursive Strategies and Ideological Bias in Wikipedia’s Portrayal of Prophet Muhammad

Abstract

This study examines how the English Wikipedia article on Prophet Muhammad negotiates neutrality and epistemic authority. Using a single-case design, it analyzes an archived revision through Critical Discourse Analysis, drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework, Entman’s framing theory, and Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model. The analysis was organized around six categories: foregrounding of controversy, backgrounding of spirituality, epistemic distancing, agency allocation, source hierarchy, and naming and editorial governance. The findings reveal recurrent, though not uniform, asymmetries in the treatment of contested episodes, religious claims, and source authority. Political and disputed events receive elaboration, whereas prophetic and spiritual dimensions are more often attributed, qualified, or positioned within Islamic belief. Modern academic historiography tends to function as the principal evaluative framework for classical Islamic accounts. However, positive representations, Islamic perspectives, and scholarly disagreement remain present. The study therefore supports a qualified interpretation of negotiated epistemic hierarchy rather than complete exclusion or consistently hostile representation, and demonstrates how collaborative digital knowledge platforms can reproduce culturally situated assumptions through apparently neutral editorial practices.