[WikiEN-l] Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia

Mon Feb 7 16:07:44 UTC 2005

John Lee wrote:

> The problem is, groups like Stormfront have a whole different 
> definition of what is NPOV.

Not to get too relativistic, but to some extent, so do all cultures and 
subcultures.  I'm not sure it's been explicitly mentioned anywhere, but 
IMO Wikipedia is in essence defining "NPOV" to mean "neutral according 
to what a sampling of reasonably objective liberal intellectuals would 
think", perhaps even with the caveat "liberal intellectuals in the 
Western rationalist tradition" (where liberal is used in the 
non-political sense).  We believe that everything ought to be discussed 
(no censorship), including taboo and/or sensitive issues; that rigorous 
academic-style inquiry is in general the right way to discover facts; 
and so on.

The relationship this has to majority is an interesting one.  In many 
countries, both Western and non-Western, it's not the majority one (I'd 
argue this would be true of both the United States, and of many Muslim 
nations, for different reasons).  If we held a population-wide vote on 
some of our decisions, we'd end up with some significantly different 
ones.  Of course, that does lead to a bit of a problem---perhaps we can 
use majority votes, but only of people who subscribe to the basic tenets 
to begin with.  If 500 people register who think that all criticism of 
[(religious figure) or (national hero)] is inappropriate for an 
encyclopedia, then we'll simply have to discount their votes and keep 
it.  Now who decides when that's the case is an interesting question...

-Mark