[WikiEN-l] Biased "current events" stories

Sun Sep 19 00:10:43 UTC 2004

Erik Moeller wrote:

>I strongly suspect, however, that sooner or later all articles on biology  
>will end up with a "creationist disclaimer". That would seal Wikipedia's  
>fate as a serious encyclopedia.
>
>Now, reasonable people can differ on whether an article such as [[human]]  
>deserves to be treated as a strictly biological topic. In general,  
>however, the creationist claims are discussed at length in the articles on  
>[[creationism]], and that is where they belong.
>  
>
I do agree with that... I'm not sure if it'll solve all the problems, 
but it seems that positioning articles within disciplines might serve to 
avoid at least some of them.  If we say something like "In 
[[evolutionary biology]], blah blah...", then it can serve as a 
pseudo-disclaimer that this article is being written according to what 
evolutionary biologists have to say on the matter, and the reader can 
decide whatever they want about that.  I do agree we shouldn't have 
disclaimers everywhere: the big "worldview differences" sorts of things 
should be discussed in one place, not hashed out on every single article 
relating to them.  But then we need to properly position the articles 
that don't discuss them within one of the worldviews.  Surely even 
creationists would agree that a statement "evolutionary biologists say 
[blah]" is a neutral one?

Alternately, perhaps on some issues splitting things would be best?  For 
example, [[human (biology)]] could be a strictly biological discussion 
of the subject, while [[human]] would be a more general article.  We 
already have a few such splits due to differing frameworks in 
less-controversial fields, such as a few of the physics articles which 
have multiple versions giving alternate treatments of the subject that 
happen to each be favored by different folks.

I suspect part of the problem is that Wikipedia is trying to neutrally 
report human knowledge, while even the terminology one uses to report 
human knowledge (and how one organizes it) requires some presuppositions.

-Mark