[WikiEN-l] Re: Proposed policy on biographies: input sought

Mon Dec 19 18:12:50 UTC 2005

> That was it. Initiatives like this seem to think NPOV is 
> optional rather than, say,  the Number One Policy On The 
> Site. And clearly, the creators can say "no no we mean keep 
> within NPOV", but it's obvious that people were going to take 
> it as an opt-out on it.

Attempts at NPOV will never cause more than heated arguments at worst
for any topic in WP except for one area - biographies of living people.
Therefore it seems to me that the statement "we do NPOV everywhere
without exception" may warrant re-examination.  You could have pretty
much any policy in place (even "every article must begin with the words,
<subject> is a paedophile") and you wouldn't get sued, and you wouldn't
cause any major harm (except possibly to students doing last minute
revision for an exam on Queen Victoria) - except for biographies of
living people.

What I'm getting at is that saying "NPOV works everywhere else, it must
work here" is not self evident.  We must be really, really sure that
both the ideal of NPOV and its actual implementation in wikipedia by
real-life, fallible editors, actually work for living bios, now that
wikipedia is becoming big enough and famous enough to actually matter to
the Seigenthalers of the world.

Steve