[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

Thu Oct 23 22:57:26 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:

> James Duffy wrote:
>
>> As we have an agreed naming convention, applied to thousands of 
>> articles, by a range of people from professional editors like Zoe and 
>> bookworms like Deb to experts on constitutional history like John 
>> Kenney, any unilateral attempt to abandon what has been agreed 
>> because Mark has a POV he wishes to push, would be a gross abuse of  
>> wiki and grossly insulting to the many people who solved what had 
>> been a glaring problem. Mark may not like titles, but the fact that 
>> they exist. Covering them accurately and factually is NPOV. Trying to 
>> push an agenda that says 'I don't like them, therefore I will remove 
>> them', is pushing a POV, is unencylopic and grossly disrespectiful to 
>> the large numbers of people who debated the issue, made observations 
>> and have spent a year implementing the agreed wikipedia policy in a 
>> professional, encyclopic NPOV manner.
>
>
> I disagree strongly, and your attempt to leverage credentials is both 
> a logical fallacy (look up "appeal to authority", or the equivalent 
> Latin phrase if you prefer) and grossly un-wiki.
>
> The issue is that Wikipedia is endorsing certain titles, and not 
> endorsing others, which is inconsistent and POV.  When we use Sir, 
> Blessed, and so on, and refuse to use His All-Holiness, His 
> Excellency, and The Honorable, this is a POV judgment, and 
> unacceptable in a professional encyclopedia.
>
> If you do wish to use some honorifics, I would like to see some 
> conventions adopted indicating which we should use, and which we 
> should not.  Why should the article on [[Mother Theresa]] start off 
> "Blessed Mother Theresa", while the article on [[Clarence Thomas]] 
> does not start off "The Honorable Clarence Thomas"?  Is there a 
> principle behind this decision?

You're talking about two different issues.  James is talking about 
article titles.  Delirium is talking about personal titles at the 
beginning of the text IN an article. It makes it easier to know what we 
disagree about when when we agree to disagree about the same thing. :-)

POV is unencyclopic when it pokes out one's only good eye.   ;-)   Sorry 
James, but I can't resist the temptation of a good typo.!
Ec