--- On Wed, 4/22/09, Ting Chen <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de> wrote:
From: Ting Chen <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] NPOV as common value? (was Re: Board statement regarding
biographies of living people)
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 6:11 AM
Hallo Brianna,
NPOV is mainly a principle of Wikipedia, later also used by
Wikibooks
and Wikinews. There is at least one project (Wikiversity)
which
explicitely allow participants not to follow NPOV, but the
Disclosure of
Point of Views in Wikiversity follow in principle the ideal
of NPOV: It
tells the reader and participants that the content has a
point of view
and thus gives the reader and participants to be aware of
this and
accordingly to adjust their judgement in reading and
writing the content.
The question here is about projects like Commons or
Wikisource. Mainly
they collect free content and serve as a shared repository
for other
projects so that these other projects can use these
content. The content
themselves may have POV, that's for sure, and we don't make
edits or
comments in these sources to make them NPOV. But we do
category them.
And at least here we do make sort of comment in the source.
Let me take
an example that actually happend on Commons. It makes a
diffrence if we
categorize a caricature of an israeli bus in form of a
coffin to the
very neutral Category:Bus or to more commentary category
Category:Political caricature or to the very strong
commentary category
Category:Anti-israeli caricature. It makes very big
difference how
Commons categorize such images. And I am in these cases
more for the
implementation of a similar policy like Wikiversity's
Disclosure of
Point of View: A source with a very strong bias of point of
view should
be accordingly categorized. With that we do nothing else as
to hold our
principle ideal of NPOV on projects like commons.
I don't think of NPOV as being a common value, but rather I think NPOV as being
Wikipedia's answer to the common value of avoiding editorial bias. Wikipedia has much
more fine-grained editorial input than Wikisource or Commons. Wikisource and Commons must
avoid editorial bias in the presentation of the works we host, rather than within the
works themselves. Wikisource for example does not allow excerpts of published works (as
opposed to published excerpts). While we host biased material, we aim to avoid biased
presentations of material. So far it seems to have been successful, even where there have
been initial accusations of bias or inaccuracy to be worked out.
I think the people who are saying NPOV is a common value, are just using this acronym as
shorthand. If you really examine how NPOV is defined; it simply doesn't hold up for
other projects. The real value behind this issue if the "sum of all human
knowledge". Bias in the form that excludes other information or interpretations is
taboo, yet bias itself is not excluded.
Birgitte SB