On Wed, 31 Dec 2008, CrustyBush wrote:
If I'm right, Phil is complaining that NOR
contradicts NPOV because someone
won't necessarily be able to defend themselves in their article because what
they say (eg through a letter) will be OR, and therefore the article won't
have NPOV?
It has to do with a specific phrase that was inserted in NOR:
Without a secondary source, a primary source may be used only to make
descriptive claims, the accuracy of which is easily verifiable by any
reasonable, educated person without specialist knowledge.
The phrase that's the problem is "without specialist knowledge".
The problem is that there are topics where it pretty much takes specialist
knowledge to summarize them at all. This leads to the scenario where
B publishes a criticism of A, and A replies. The criticism published by B
isn't a primary source, and may be summarized. The reply by A is a primary
source, and may not be summarized.
And then there's the discussion about whether the
subject of an article can
request the permanent deletion of that article? But then of course we'll
have the scenario where only generally positive articles remain. Can't we
just have it so that they insist that Wikipedia correct factual errors about
themselves?
People can be hurt by things which are factually accurate, especially if
they're the #1 hit on Google for that person (as we are).
And what's all this about spoiler warnings? Has
there been a recent policy
change? Where does one find out about these things?
It's not recent. I pointed out that one of the abuses that was possible
here (taking advantage of the fact that without consensus we go with the
status quo) also happened when spoiler warnings were taken out.