--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote:
My own view is that NPOV itself provides a sort of
self-censorship
that is hopefully not as heavy handed as what a
proprietary
development process comes up with.
NPOV is designed to be maximally acceptable to a
wide range of people.
A feminist and a pastor of very different political
and ethical
frameworks ought to be able to read any NPOV article
or book and agree
that it's fair.
With a proprietary development process, the only way
to achieve
consensus is to simply omit or water down material
that might offend.
With the many-minds creativity of the wiki process,
there's usually a
way to present the material in such a way that
everyone can agree on
it.
I wish I could agree with you, but I can't. Although
NPOV is the epitomy of nonbias, it's just not enough
for some people. Feminists, if they looked at
Wikipedia for a school, might say that we don't use
gender-neutral pronouns all the time and that
hypothetical people (eg. "Each person has his own
variation on language, called an ideolect") aren't
either female or reffered to with the clumsy "him or
her" (although that's being replaced again with "her
or him"). The conservatives would complain that we
report on certain topics like Wiccans and fantasy
novels. It's minutae like that that are driving most
of the censorship, slowly blanding all textbooks until
they're nothing. There was a really good anecdote for
this in that book (The Language Police) but I forgot
exactly what it was.
LDan
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