--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote:
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.
They don't want to write their own textbook. I
agree
with you in principle, though.
Done well, gender neutral
language is
invisible. Only poor writers make it seem clumsy.
You're right. A wiki would make for good
gender-neutral language. And it gets pretty bad when
extremists say you can reffer to ''his''tory or
''her''etic. This is not a pun, it is real.
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.
I think gender neutral language can be OK, but since
it means the same thing, what's the difference,
really? I guess if it pleases people like you it's
fine to use it.
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. :-)
Again, you bring up the "reasonable" conservatives.
Like many said after you mentioned the reasonable
creationists (most creationists are conservatives),
reasonable conservatives using your view are few and
far bewteen and are disliked by many other
conservatives.
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.
But they say the representation itself is, well not
POV (sorry about that usage of POV), but against their
religion and therefore violates freedom of religion.
This works more often than not.
--Jimbo
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