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

Mon Dec 19 18:22:59 UTC 2005

On 12/19/05, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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

NPOV is hard policy.

--
geni