On 6/9/05, Poor, Edmund W
<Edmund.W.Poor(a)abc.com> wrote:
The other
point was that WP is (or wants to be) an
encyclopaedia, and that some POVs have to be excluded. The
way we do that is by assessing how much (academic) support
they have, in terms of the context and subject matter.
There's no need for content committees, as long as consensus
decisions on WP:NPOV can be acheieved (mediation) and
enforced (arbitration).
--
Stephen Bain
If the decision on excluded POVs is made on the basis of how much
support they have, we will quickly turn toward a regime of censorhip of
unpopular views.
* We won't even be able to MENTION that a minority of
scientists contacted by the UN's climate panel (IPCC)
disagree with the "consensus" that anthropogenic emissions
are causing excessive atmospheric warming.
That's not what I meant. I'll quote Jimbo again (as appearing on WP:NPOV):
* 1 If a viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to
substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts;
* If a viewpoint is held by a significant minority, then it should be
easy to name prominent adherents;
* If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited)
minority, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia (except perhaps in some
ancillary article) regardless of whether it's true or not; and
regardless of whether you can prove it or not.
So using your example, the majority of the IPCC adivsers say
anthropogenic emissions cause global warming, and they come under #1.
The minority who disagree come under #2, as long as you can name them,
and for practical purposes, perhaps cite a source in which they made
this claim. If just one scientist came out and said that that global
warming is caused by aliens, for example, then that would fall under
#3, since one scientist is a vastly limited minority.
So who is claiming that it is caused by aliens? It's easy to invent an
argument that is supported by no-one and use that as an argument that
the position is not verifiable.
I've never said that only one POV should be
represented, only that
extreme minority POVs shouldn't be.
This is still treating truth as a numbers game. Sometimes great
scientific discoveries have come from people who stubbornly maintained
their opinions on a discovery. Verifiability is a more important
criterion than being the position of a small minority. Some people who
held the ridiculous minority notion that the earth went around the sun
were severely persecuted at one time.
Ec
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