\Just some blue sky thinking:
Our neutral point of view policy has aroused a fair bit of
discussion at [[WP:NPOV]]
recently, and this has got me thinking:
We've all seen arguments where people keep arguing that this is
"POV" or someone
is being "POV" where in normal English we'd just call something
an "opinion" and
note that someone has an opinion on something. Indeed, the made-
up term POV
is bandied around usually to mean something along the lines of -
you are wrong,
I am right, and because it is a NPOV issue, the point is non-
negotiable, which isn't
a very good place to start from if the issue is to be resolved.
Plus far too many
people read NPOV as equating to "no point of view" as opposed to
the real requirement, which is to write from a neutral viewpoint.
My blue sky thinking (which I don't claim to be a panacea, just
an interesting thought) is why don't we rename the policy page
[[Wikipedia:Neutral viewpoint]] and make
the shortcut link to it [[WP:NEUVIEW]] (or [[WP:NEUTVIEW]]). It
goes without
saying that the underlying concept behind the policy would remain
completely
unchanged - just the name of the page would change - plus it
would enhance
people's perceptions that it is about requiring a neutral
viewpoint, rather than no
viewpoint, or neutrality more generally: it would help define the
policy in positive terms
and (and perhaps I'm going too far here:) ) may help stop content
disputes escalating
in scale and viciousness.
That might work. On the other hand, that might be about as effective
as changing "Votes for Deletion" to "Articles for Deletion". Renaming
things only serves to disguise problems in a quasi-Orwellian manner--
it doesn't really solve them.
--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch