on 4/13/08 9:30 PM, Philip Sandifer at snowspinner(a)gmail.com wrote: Phil, you're referring to what is, and is not included, in the encyclopedia. I'm talking about having no point of view (spin) on what is entered. Marc

on 4/14/08 9:08 AM, Philip Sandifer at snowspinner(a)gmail.com wrote: You're right, Phil. After all, we all know that Ph.D. stands for "Piled high and Deep" :-). Marc

on 4/13/08 9:02 PM, Ian Woollard at ian.woollard(a)gmail.com wrote: Ian, we're writing an encyclopedia. We're reporting on facts. Something either happened or it didn't. Newton's Principia may have been his point of view, but stating it in an encyclopedia is not. Marc

On 14/04/2008, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: No, we're reporting notable opinions. The *only* 'facts' in the wikipedia should be verifiable, notable opinions. The wikipedia doesn't assume that. The wikipedia is quite happy to have people saying both that Jesus was resurrected as well as not, for example. Careful here, Newton was a very great physicist, and his POV is entirely notable. We can have lots and lots of it in the wikipedia without violating any of the policies or guidelines in any way at all. There's absolutely no prohibition against having POV in the wikipedia; quite the contrary, it's just that it must be *notable* POV and not OR of the editors or anything like that. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

on 4/14/08 9:14 AM, Carl Beckhorn at cbeckhorn(a)fastmail.fm wrote: Exactly! Thank you, Carl. You said it better than I did. Marc Riddell

On 4/13/08, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote: If you read an article about Newton, you will read about "Newton's" point of view. You should not be able to determine the "author's" point of view.

A big part of the point of NPOV is that if you don't agree with postmodernists like Lyotard (quoted below), you can write carefully and clearly, striving for neutrality as best you can manage, and be satisfied that the result is useful. And if you are in agreement with Lyotard, and regard the pursuit of knowledge as a language game, you can still play. "If there are no rules, there is no game"... and the game we are playing is NPOV. Carl Beckhorn wrote:

Carl Beckhorn wrote: Yep.

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:44 AM, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Wittgenstein created the idea of a language game to describe what he called a "form of life," which he never defines, but which is roughly how we see the world around us -- how we use language and its rules to allow us to think and talk about the world. The question is whether there is a universal form of life -- to what extent there is a shared seeing. Is there a way of seeing the world that is shared by all Europeans? By all human beings? By all living beings? Wittgenstein says no: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." In other words, your form of life defines what you can articulate (and vice versa), and what you can see, what you can think about, and what you can know. That might be very limited -- regarding some issues, it might only be people within your own culture who can see certain things. This tells us that the idea of a neutral point of view is impossible. For example, look at our article on [[Girl]]. There is no hint there that throughout history and still, the birth of a girl has not been a cause for celebration; that they are left to die, and sometimes actively killed, or aborted. Now, we could add this to the article -- that culture X does or did this, culture Y this or that. But the tone of the article would never truly reflect that this has been the serious position of many societies. No matter how dominant a position this was within the world, our article would never reflect it. Anyone who tried to create that reflection would be accused of POV pushing. One of my interests is the way we treat and view animals. There would be uproar if I started adding information about the treatment of non-human animals to all relevant articles -- and not only that, but if I were to change the tone of the articles so they were written as if by a Martian who had no preference between the human and the non-human. The way we avoid even the possibility of NPOV is by insisting that the POVs we reflect must have been published by reliable sources, and that NPOV must reflect the proportion of the POVs as reflected by those sources. I support this, because there is no other way to write a reliable encyclopedia. But what it means is that any notion of NPOV is lost, because the sources we respect reflect the dominant POVs of people we regard as educated in our own language, which Wikipedia simply repeats. What we really mean by NPOV is a position that all educated holders of the dominant POVs within the English-speaking world can accept as valid and responsible. It's a wonderful achievement when an article manages to cater to those positions. But it is not neutrality. Sarah

On 4/14/08, Relata Refero <refero.relata(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, but we don't have a talk page for addressing fundamental inaccuracies and flaws that have crept into our entire policy apparatus. Which is why I'm left holding two parallel discussions on WP:V and WP:NOR when, really, what I need is a discussion about why Wikipedia needs to shape up and be more postmodern from which changes to both pages (and NPOV) can be edited according to consensus.:) -Phil