[Wikipedia-l] Re: Showing causation among articles

Tue Jul 13 23:21:20 UTC 2004

Abe wrote:

> First, Hemanshu brings up a potential POV problem: "do we want endless
> arguments over whether America influenced the Taliban; George Bush
> influenced oil markets; oil influenced Gulf war.... to name a few?"
> 
> To avoid this, there is one rule: an influence must already be present in
> the article to be made an "influence link".  This way, only assertions
> that have already passed the wiki test are admissible.

That doesn't work. If people disagree on whether X influenced Y, our 
NPOV policy dictates that the article should state, "People in group ABC 
tend to believe that X influenced Y, but other people tend to disagree". 
Your "influence links" can't do that: They are either there (asserting a 
definite influence) or not (asserting a definite lack of influence).

Timwi