[WikiEN-l] Ed's POV != NPOV

Dante- No, he hasn't gone insane, he just sometimes does things like that out of frustration. Please remember that Ed is a member of a cult group called the Unification Church, led by convicted tax criminal Sun Myung Moon. His opinions are mostly identical to the positions of his Church, this includes - the belief that scientific theories which attribute global warming to industry emissions are "junk science" at best and environmentalist naivete at worst - the belief that acting upon homosexual urges is highly immoral - the belief that deceased major religious and cultural leaders, including Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, Muhammad, Lenin, Stalin and lots of other folks met in heaven in 2002 to declare Sun Myung Moon the Messiah (see [[Clouds of Witnesses]]). In case people weren't convinced yet, God himself added a letter to the same effect. I'm not writing this to attack Ed. Let's just be clear that even though he normally is the friendly, helpful "Uncle Ed", he has strong beliefs on various subjects. Most of us do. For a religious fundamentalist, the secular notion that there is no soul, no God, no afterlife, no supernatural seems equally ridiculous as theological discussions about the conception of "Virgin" Mary seem to an atheist reader. I am not a relativist -- I believe there are fundamental differences between these beliefs and their origins -- but for the purpose of this discussion, they are equivalent. There is no such thing as a "neutral opinion". If it is neutral, it is not an opinion. And it will often be the most knowledgeable people who have the strongest feelings associated with their opinions -- they spent more time developing them, and they had a strong motivation to do so in the first place. I object to excluding these people from working on articles about these subjects as long as they follow Wikiquette and NPOV. But because of these very obvious facts, mediation and arbitration are best done by people without a direct stake in the matter, and by groups and not by individuals. I would be appalled if Ed used his sysop or developer privileges to enforce his views on global warming. I am a principled person, so I would be similarly appalled if a secular humanist did the same with his (and my) point of view on, say, church/state separation. This is, obviously, no way to build an encyclopedia, and it is not going to happen. Ed knows that, and I hope that after some brooding, he will come back calm and reasonable (which he was in the cases where I worked with him). While I agree with everything Sheldon wrote, this takes us in the direction of a flamewar between Ed and Sheldon. Let's try to avoid that and strive for peaceful cooperation instead. We can all agree that this matter is really one for the respective talk pages, to be resolved in the usual wiki process without any use of authority except by unconcerned third parties as an emergency measure in case of edit "wars". Regards, Erik