[WikiEN-l] My views on policies and debates over content

Wed Jun 8 14:16:24 UTC 2005

<rant>

There's been much talk about content, and sources, and whatnot. I
think alot of this debate has been caused by confusion over some of
WP's fundamental policies, particularly WP:NPOV, WP:V and WP:NOR.

Firstly, I'd like to point out that WP:NPOV has *always* had a
threshold to it. People are getting all worked up about a content
cabal over nothing. Exclusion of minority opinions has always been
policy. Not every theory can get in just because someone published a
paper on it. Scroll down to the second heading and read the quote from
Jimbo:

"If a viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to
substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts;
If a viewpoint is held by a significant minority, then it should be
easy to name prominent adherents; If a viewpoint is held by an
extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it doesn't belong in
Wikipedia (except perhaps in some ancillary article) regardless of
whether it's true or not; and regardless of whether you can prove it
or not."

If, out of a collection of say 100 scholarly articles, less than 5 of
them represented a particular POV, that POV does not deserve
inclusion. Of course people will quibble over what "minority" means,
but we can always have a vote on the talk page to see whether people
consider a source to be a minority source.

Many of the examples discussed here are trivial and not the kind of
disputes which actually happen. Re trains: it's ok to cite some not
particularly well known train-related archive, as long as train buffs
know about it. WP:V says:

"In general, consider the sorts of people who are likely to edit the
article in question: the article should be verifiable by these people.
Therefore, an article on a sociology topic might include content that
can only be verified by a sociologist."

The problem articles are generally not the ones with little
information available about them. Generally, they aren't contentious,
and if they are, they probably fall under WP:V or WP:NOR, in which
case they can be dealt with quite easily.

No, the problem articles are the ones where one large body of people
coming from one POV are confronting another large body coming from
another POV. But of course it is not WP's role to solve these
disputes, merely discuss them. Some people seem to forget this. If the
process of WP:NPOV (weed out the minority sources) cannot arrive at a
consensus set of facts, then that's fine. If we can't, then the real
world probably can't either. We just present the opinions and move on.

All that is necessary for POV to prevail is for good Wikipedians not
to read/enforce WP:NPOV properly.

Now it's late and I'm going to bed. Apologies for taking up so much inbox space.

</rant>

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com