[Foundation-l] NPOV as common value?

Wed Apr 22 06:06:09 UTC 2009

Milos Rancic wrote:
> In relation to your Wikiquote example, I think that you were talking
> there about notability, not about NPOV.
>   
To the extent that notability has any value for us at all as a concept, 
it is only because it draws on the principle of a neutral point of view. 
Applying quotability criteria to Wikiquote is an approach to ensuring 
that it's not my point of view about what is a quotation, but instead 
I'm neutrally documenting quotations used by other sources. That's a 
rather straightforward form of neutral point of view, in fact, whereas 
notability has proven much more challenging to define.
> NPOV is a very good starting point for writing an encyclopedia. But,
> it is not any kind of general knowledge which may be implemented
> everywhere. And, if it is treated as such, then it is an ideology.
>
> If the Board is not able to make a general scientific framework for
> projects other than Wikipedia, I think that it should hire some
> scientists to do so.
>   
Scientific? Is there something scientific about neutral point of view as 
a framework for Wikipedia, even? It has some similarities to the 
scientific method, I suppose, but I'm not sure that's what we imagine 
ourselves to be doing. Science is part of the knowledge we are 
compiling, certainly. But neutral point of view is not a kind of 
knowledge itself. Rather, it is an approach to knowledge, one that has 
served us well and, as far as I can tell, runs through the culture of 
all our projects.

--Michael Snow