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