[Wikipedia-l] recipes

Thu Jan 20 05:21:50 UTC 2005

> NPOV is a technique to cope with intractable disputes, not some
> kind of weirdo Wikipedian-only quasi-religion. :-)

No, NPOV applies whether or not something is disputed. People have
argued about what NPOV is meant to accomplish, but it most definitely
applies to _every single thing_ in the article namespaces.

So while you may be hard-pressed to find somebody who says that the
death of 300 innocent people from a bridge crashing is not
unfortunate, we don't say "Unfortunately" or "Tragic event" or
"unfortunate event" or "tragedy" because that is passing judgement
and, more importantly, it is not NPOV.

Ultimately there is always somebody who argues "Well, since nobody
actually disagrees with it, it isn't POV". The response to that is: "I
disagree with it strongly". Then the other party will most likely take
one of two actions, saying "OK, you're right, it's POV" or they will
go on to throw insults and profanity at you for having a viewpoint
(for example, if I say "I strongly disagree with the assertion that
murder is wrong", the other party involved might say "What kind of
crazy idiot are you?").

However NPOV policy doesn't apply to the whole world (although if
you're a Wikipediholic, you may have had the experience of hearing
somebody say something POV in real life and wanting to click the
"edit" button). It may or may not apply outside of the article
namespace. Some people say it doesn't apply to the mainpage, some
people say it doesn't apply to Wikipedia: pages, some people say it
*does* apply to User: pages, although nobody argues it applies to
talkpages (after all, that's what talkpages are for, aren't they?
expression of an individual's POV?). There are differing viewpoints -
I for one believe it applies to everything on every Wikipedia,
including the interface, with the exception of talkpages, userpages,
and other pages specifically intended to be safe harbors for POV on
Wikipedia (for example, on WP:RfA, I can say "____ isn't a good
editor" even though it isn't a talkpage or a userpage, nobody would
disagree with that most likely), but it seems to me the majority
opinion is that it only really applies to articles and article titles,
and thus it's OK to put on our logo "I don't care what your mama says,
Christmas is number o-one, I don't care what your papa says, Christmas
is really fu-un" or write in a UI message "If you don't click 'ok',
you are an idiot and must not be my religion". But those are extreme
cases not likely to happen, so really they don't work well.

Mark