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(a)yahoo.com>
To: "text" <textbook-l(a)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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