Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
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").
Then they should edit it. Done well, gender neutral language is
invisible. Only poor writers make it seem clumsy.
I have been an advocate of gender neutral language for many years, and
I think I'm pretty successful at it. To my knowledge, no one really
notices it in my writing, because I avoid clumsy constructions.
There is no question, of course, that at any given point in time,
there *might* be something POV about an article, including using
gendered pronouns inappropriately. But NPOV, which is a social
process, not a final result, is very useful.
The conservatives would complain that we report on
certain topics
like Wiccans and fantasy novels.
I don't think reasonable conservatives would complain that we *report
on* such things. After all, *they* report on such things all the
time. :-)
It is of course true that it's always possible to find some lunatic
for whom any mention of hot-button topic X must include a thorough
denunciation of X. We can't please those people. But even some
pretty hardcore partisans who are not lunatics can agree on a
presentation of X that's NPOV.
This works more often than not.
--Jimbo