On 25/08/07, Jacky PB <dpotop1(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
To be encyclopedic, wikipedia has to invent the
culture-independent encyclopedic style, which goes
beyond existing nation-centric scholarship (actually,
it's easier for technical fields).
I see "WP:NPOV" and "WP:RS" as good ideological
foundations for this work. But for now, it's like
Communism and Soviet Russia: The ideology sounds good,
but it is not yet here, and we don't know if it is
actually feasible.
I think NPOV is our greatest innovation, much more radical than
letting anyone edit the website. There are fields we're successfully
covering which haven't been covered well in this sort of detail before
we got to it, e.g. Scientology-related topics on en:wp - you had
critics' pages which were full of detail but almost unreadably bitter,
and Church of Scientology pages which were very positive but were
considered to miss a lot of important considerations. Now there's a
serious attempt at neutral overview writing on the subject that really
didn't exist before Wikipedia got to it.
- d.