[WikiEN-l] NPOV and Reverting all edits (was: Odd)

Wed Jul 13 14:34:45 UTC 2005

On 7/13/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
...cut...
> Take for example, the Jerusalem article. A friend of mine who is a
> PhD-holding religious scholar told me that it was riddled with subtle
> digs, and thinly veiled (supposedly neutral) "historical" observations,
> and language style, all meant to make some person's case or another,
> over historical right to the land, specific religious sites and so
> forth.
> 
> It's the same with countless other articles. I stopped even trying to
> list them, long ago. It's like indexing a book. If there's only a few
> references, you list them by page number. When something's mentioned all
> throughout, you just say "passim".
> 
> So many times I get frustrated with the bias in the articles. I'm
> especially frustrated because the problem could be solved so easily.
> Simply adopt the following policy:
> 
> * Any addition to an article, which 1 or more users label as an "NPOV
> violation", may be moved from the article into the text page.
> * It must not be replaced, until there is sufficient agreement that an
> accurate description of the dispute has been crafted.
> 
> Forget 3RR. It's mechanical and therefore (nearly) senseless. Let's
> start using our judgment. We are all smart enough to do that.
> 
> Ed Poor

If the [[Jerusalem]] article is so full of little NPOV issues and
needling attacks, why haven't you applied the {{POV}} template to it? 
You can think of the templates only as editors' tools, or you can take
the broader view, and see that they also serve as warning posts to
potential readers.

Readers deserve to know when they are reading an article subject to
POV manipulation.  If you wouldn't trust a naive fifteen year old to
at least know about the POV issues contained, then you should apply
the POV template.

I also posted a message to the [[Template talk:POV]] page requesting
that we reference the article's history in the POV template in the
same way we reference the talk page.  Since it is up to the reader to
determine the "correct" POV for them, we should make the availability
of our articles' histories more clear when there are POV
uncertainties, as other POVs are usually contained there as well as
the talk pages.

-- 
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused