--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
My own view is that NPOV itself provides a sort of self-censorship that is hopefully not as heavy handed as what a proprietary development process comes up with.
NPOV is designed to be maximally acceptable to a wide range of people. A feminist and a pastor of very different political and ethical frameworks ought to be able to read any NPOV article or book and agree that it's fair.
With a proprietary development process, the only way to achieve consensus is to simply omit or water down material that might offend. With the many-minds creativity of the wiki process, there's usually a way to present the material in such a way that everyone can agree on it.
I wish I could agree with you, but I can't. Although NPOV is the epitomy of nonbias, it's just not enough for some people. Feminists, if they looked at Wikipedia for a school, might say that we don't use gender-neutral pronouns all the time and that hypothetical people (eg. "Each person has his own variation on language, called an ideolect") aren't either female or reffered to with the clumsy "him or her" (although that's being replaced again with "her or him"). The conservatives would complain that we report on certain topics like Wiccans and fantasy novels. It's minutae like that that are driving most of the censorship, slowly blanding all textbooks until they're nothing. There was a really good anecdote for this in that book (The Language Police) but I forgot exactly what it was. LDan
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