On 3/12/07, Piotr Derbeth Kubowicz derbeth@wp.pl wrote:
The problem with essays is that you can find many people having different opinions on the same topic and therefore able to write different essays covering this topic. These essays can contradict themselves. Wikimedia projects were created to provide readers with accurate knowledge; you can always correct factual errors in essays but you cannot correct personal interpretation of the facts. There will always be fundamental conflicts between various essays, people may argue about them endlessly and I think it's not what we want. Prohibition of expressing personal point of view in Wikimedia projects is a protection against self-promotion of amateur authors and nonsenses in their writing.
I completely understand why NPOV is nearly perfect for any kind of something which we call "objective knowledge". And there is no question about NPOV inside of factographic descriptions of anything.
However, POV analysis of art are very usable for art studies. Actually, there is no such thing like NPOV art critics. (But it is possible to have NPOV book about art critics.)
My point is that I think that we need, for example, "Dadaist critics of South Park" -- for educational purpose because:
- Dadaism is not live cultural movement and it is not so obvious that there will be some dadaist who would do so. However, it is possible to imagine dadaist critics of South Park. - If Wikibooks and Wikiversity want to have complete courses for some art field, there is a lot of needs for improvisation. If there is no some art critique which we need because of educational purposes, we should make it. In other words, if we want to have a *real* free source for complete education, we need a lot of things which are not NPOV nor NOR.
So, there are a couple of solutions: - Wikibooks and/or Wikiversity allow POV and OR for art analysis. This is the best solution because we will have one community. Also, realization of the goal "free education" will stay inside of the projects which aim to work on this goal. - Wikimedia makes another project for such purpose (something like "wikiartstudies"). This is something like a "middle solution" because we will have de jure one community, but de facto two. Realization of the goal "free education" will be outside of Wikibooks and Wikiversity, but inside of Wikimedia. - The worst solution is to try to find a solution out of Wikimedia (i.e. Wikia or anything else) because we will have both de jure and de facto different communities. Realization of the goal will be outside of both -- projects and Wikimedia.