[WikiEN-l] My views on policies and debates over content

Sun Jun 12 03:32:00 UTC 2005

>From: "James D. Forrester" <james at jdforrester.org>
>
>The identity of 'the God', 'a god', or 'the gods' is one that a great 
>number
>of people have differing views upon. A sub-example of this is the concept 
>of
>the rôle of 'the God' - a large number of people consider the Palestinian
>Jew "Jesus" to have been this figure. Other religions and traditions have
>different views - "Rastafarians believe that Haile Selassie is both God the
>Father and God the Son", to quote our article [[God]]. Yet further ones
>insist that he is yet to come forth, but will do at some point - Jews, for
>instance (IIRC).

This is getting a bit off topic, but Jews are not waiting for God to come 
forth, since they already believe they have received a great deal of 
revelation from him. Rather, they are waiting for the Messiah.  Your 
confusion probably arises from the fact that Christianity equates the two.

>All of these are opinions held by (at least) millions of
>people, and we would (and do) given them time in an article on the subject
>(we would probably go through them in rough descending order of believers,
>by past memory - this gives more prominence to widely-held opinions without
>prejudicing the readers' opinions of or promoting some judgement on them).
>OTOH, [[Sollog]] believes himself to be the son of God (AIUI, or God
>himself, or something), and there are very few, perhaps no, people who hold
>this opinions of him; thus, we would not mention his claim in the article,
>as it is inappropriately giving time and hence credence to a cause that 
>does
>not warrant it. This, indeed, is exactly what we do do. Common sense seems
>to have triumphed. :-)

Exactly; those who claim that every single thing that everyone has said on a 
subject must be included in an article on that subject, so long as the 
statement can be cited, are trying to build some soft of general 
knowledge/trivia repository, not an encyclopedia.

> > > 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.
>
>So? It's not our job to trumpet minor views "just in case" they turn out to
>be correct all along. Yes, we're "treating truth as a numbers game": it's
>called showing editorial judgement.

Exactly.

Jay.