Perhaps there is a way to reconcile the seemingly POV approach of these books with the non-negotiable NPOV of Wikipedia/media? I am not certain there is.
A textbook may have a particular purpose, i.e. it is used to advance certain theories of knowledge, so it seems to me that on some level there can be no NPOV textbooks that deal with interpretive subjects (history books are often like this, as history is not written by the vanquished there is often an implicit POV even if it is written in NPOV language there is still often an agenda, different theories of history, such as social historians have fundamentally different POVs from political historians, they see the cause of events not being political events but development and transformation of social institutions, classes, ecnomic forces, etc.) So it might be very hard for a really well written history text book to be NPOV as that would detract from the ability to explain the subject without constantly having to put in foot notes making cross references..
So how to be NPOV and still publish things from the point of view of particular theoretical approaches or from a certain school? Every page would have to make it clear that such a page was being written from a particular perspective and that it was only being explained from that perspective; to be fair it would have to point to the other POVs that would also have to be explained in detail. This seems to defeat the purpose of having such a textbook. Would anyone who needs such a text book use it? Well they might edit out the NPOV references to make it POV in thier fork, but that would seem to defeat the purpose of writing it with all the references to other works of competing opinions. Would the creationist write the book that cannot be used without the reference to all the anti-creationist stuff (and indeed the anti- creationist would have to collaoborate with the creationist -- hard to imagine that happening also).
I can't see a way to write such a book from a NPOV approach so that it could be useful to someone who has a particular "agenda" of course, as Jimmy points out, anyone could start a creationist textbook wiki and make such a book; it just does not work with NPOV.
Alex756
----- Original Message ----- From: "Karl Wick" karlwick@yahoo.com To: "text" textbook-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 12:25 PM Subject: [Textbook-l] Re: history texts
This issue has not yet come up in any textbook. However, my hope is that, on occasion, Wikibooks could be home to textbooks advocating a certain point of view. In cases such as these, the POV of the book could be explained in a mission statement at the beginning of the book. That way a creationist textbook could be written and prepared on the site by and for creationists.
My tendency is that rather than regulate freedom in this sense, let the books fend for themselves. If enough people think that they have merit, they contribute to the book and it advances. If not, then the book just sits there.
I'd like to at least keep the door open and deal with it as it comes up instead of outright outlawing it from the start.
Karl
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