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