Peter Mackay wrote:
Accordingly on
other articles, different points of view need
to be included based on their prominence and level of support
in the real world, not just on which happens to be most
popular among the Wikipedia editing community.
That's the problem. In theory, theory and practice are identical. In
practice, they aren't.
WP articles are not written by the general community, they are written by
editors, usually a handful of core contributors. NPOV works out to what
these editors agree it is, simply because nobody else has any significant
input.
Indeed. The point is that those editors
Writing
consistently with NPOV is not 'inflicting your opinion on an article'.
Biasing an article towards your own opinions *is* inflicting your opinion on
an article, is obviously not consistent with NPOV.
Beg pardon, but it is. If (say) a Republican and a Democrat write an
article, each one only writing material that supports and reinforces their
partisan views, but the end result is balanced and consistent with community
support, then that is NPOV.
That is entirely dependent on where you draw the line on what the 'end
result' is. I am perfectly happy with the idea of Wikipedia articles
gradually improving over long amounts of time towards some future goal,
but NPOV is non-negotiable and, regardless of how eventualist your
philosophy is, an article must always be NPOV. Now. Not at some time in
the future. Now. Therefore I'm not happy with the editing process you
suggest above, which implies one editor biasing the article towards one
particular viewpoint then another editor coming along later and biasing
it in a different direction. Every version should always be NPOV.
With all due
respect to you, I think you're slightly
misinterpreting what Jimbo (and I) actually mean. I don't
think either of us are suggesting that editors should be
'opinionless automatons', just that they shouldn't let their
opinions influence the way they write articles.
That's plain bizarre. There's absolutely nothing wrong with editors
inserting their own opinions into articles. It happens every day. So long as
it is done with NPOV in mind it works fine.
Now I think you're deliberately misinterpreting what I mean in order to
throw up an irrelevant straw man (note that this is a discussion tactic
that I have absolutely no 'due respect' for).
Obviously writing an NPOV-compliant article isn't a problem. Unduly
biasing an article towards your own opinions is not compliant with NPOV.
Cheers,
N.
--
Nicholas Boalch
School of Modern Languages & Cultures Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 3456
University of Durham Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 3421
New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK WWW:
http://nick.frejol.org/