[WikiEN-l] Categories and NPOV

Sun Jun 26 19:56:53 UTC 2005

[[Category:Pseudoscience]] is one which gets objections at fairly
regular intervals. The reasons for the objections are pretty
straightforward -- the users making such objections are almost always
either Creationists or Eugenicists or other people who believe in
bodies of thought labeled as "pseudoscience" -- and the response is
generally pretty straightforward as well: Wikipedia is not claiming
these so-labeled articles are actually "pseudoscience", but rather
that they are labeled *by the mainstream scientific community* as
"pseudoscience".

And the text of the category page and the [[Pseudoscience]] article
spell this out pretty clearly, in my mind. The article itself goes to
much length to talk about how the notion itself is seen as somewhat
dubious even in circles of people not labeled as such -- philosophers
and historians of science, for example, have at times gone to lengths
to argue that the boundaries between what is a "science" and what is
not are exceedingly difficult to lay down. Feyerabend, for example,
made a large point out of showing that many things today considered
canonical distinctions between "science" and other modes of thought
did not apply to many of the "fathers" of science (i.e. Galileo,
Newton, etc.) and others have made similar observations both in
historical and current science. After a century of thought on it, the
demarcation problem has still not been convincingly solved.

Okay. So we have a nice NPOV article on the subject itself. But what
about the category? Does that nuance and care get lost when articles
just say "Pseudoscience" at the bottom of the page? Can we trust the
user to click it and read our little explanation/disclaimer?

Let's assume that we can, for a moment. 

What if we had an article on [[Satanic lies]], which explains that
followers of certain religion sects view a number of modern practices
and beliefs as lies of the Devil. It also notes that quite a few other
religion sects don't believe in this, and that mainstream philosophers
and scientists find this a pretty poor model of thought. After ten
centuries of thought, the problem of knowing what is a Satanic lie or
not has still not been convincingly solved. A nice, NPOV article.

Would we accept a placement of [[Category:Satanic lie]] onto pages
about Evolution? Sure, the category page itself would not, "Now, this
is only believed by a certain group."

Would we allow it? If not, why not? Do we accept it if we lean towards
the mainstream opinion in categorization efforts, or do we see this as
a NPOV problem?

I've been defending the presence of [[Category:Pseudoscience]] for
some time now as a sociological category, but it occurred to me today
that one could imagine all sorts of circumstances in which it would
seem hopelessly POV to have category labels of this sort (one could
include things like [[Category:Hoaxes]] or [[Category:Conspiracies]]
or whatever in this, if those categories exist), even if their actual
articles (and even category pages) were written in perfect NPOV. Does
the brevity of category labels make this impossible? I'm beginning to
think they might, and that these sorts of categories should be
converted wholly into lists. I wouldn't mind a [[List of Satanic
lies]] which clearly noted who thought they were and included
[[Evolution]] on the list. But I would mind having [[Category:Satanic
lie]] put onto the Evolution page.

Any input on this would be appreciated as I mull this over. 

FF