[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia is already written from a scientific POV

Sat Jul 2 17:53:23 UTC 2005

See the article on [[Evolution poll]] for some depressing statistics. 

It doesn't matter if the majority of the American people think that
the world is flat or not -- this is not a question which is in their
domain of knowledge.

We wouldn't expect the U.S. population as a whole to know how to
calculate the effect of Jupiter on the Earth's orbit, would we? We
would, however, expect astronomers to be able to do it. There are
different domains of knowledge which are relevant to different
questions.

The whole religion/science thing is about these boundaries. Is the
origin of the universe a topic to be answered by science or the bible?
Not an easy question. However it is clear to me, anyway, that the
default, "unmarked" view to be represented in the article [[Big Bang]]
is that of the people who are recognized to be the experts in it --
astrophysicists. That much seems easy.

But what about articles like [[Creationism]]? Now it becomes more
contentious -- statements of "fact" become very questionable. Now
statements like "The earth is thought to have been created X years
ago" start requiring heavy attribution (i.e. to Bishop Ussher) where
they didn't before.

I think the best approach is to attribute anything which would
possibly be a "contested fact" -- any bit of information which someone
might question the origins of. There is not much debate on the height
of the Empire State Building -- there is no need to attribute such a
fact. There is, however, some debate over the age of the universe, and
so such statements should be attributed. And so forth.

But of course this doesn't really answer the question of which way
Wikipedia should "lean" on such questions. I'm not sure there's a way
to solve this from first principles -- it would be best if someone
with authority (cough cough, Jimbo) would put out a decree saying,
"Wikipedia should strive for NPOV as much as possible, but if there
are questions as to which direction to lean in terms of very subtle
unmarked POV, it should lean towards the POV of the relevant
scientific community." At least, that's what I'd like the result to
be, both for my own personal reasons, and because I think it would
make Wikipedia a more reliable resource, but that's obviously up for
objection.

FF

On 7/2/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/2/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> > The scientific view is *not* the prevailing view in American society.
> > Most Americans are Christians and believe in some form of Creationism or
> > other.
> 
> Most?  I would say that the creationists are a significant minority; I
> don't believe that they're a majority, at least not yet.
> 
> Kelly
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
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[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia is *already* written from a scientific POV

[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia is already written from a scientific POV