--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
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").
Then they should edit it.
They don't want to write their own textbook. I agree with you in principle, though.
Done well, gender neutral language is invisible. Only poor writers make it seem clumsy.
You're right. A wiki would make for good gender-neutral language. And it gets pretty bad when extremists say you can reffer to ''his''tory or ''her''etic. This is not a pun, it is real.
I have been an advocate of gender neutral language for many years, and I think I'm pretty successful at it. To my knowledge, no one really notices it in my writing, because I avoid clumsy constructions.
I think gender neutral language can be OK, but since it means the same thing, what's the difference, really? I guess if it pleases people like you it's fine to use it.
There is no question, of course, that at any given point in time, there *might* be something POV about an article, including using gendered pronouns inappropriately. But NPOV, which is a social process, not a final result, is very useful.
The conservatives would complain that we report on
certain topics
like Wiccans and fantasy novels.
I don't think reasonable conservatives would complain that we *report on* such things. After all, *they* report on such things all the time. :-)
Again, you bring up the "reasonable" conservatives. Like many said after you mentioned the reasonable creationists (most creationists are conservatives), reasonable conservatives using your view are few and far bewteen and are disliked by many other conservatives.
It is of course true that it's always possible to find some lunatic for whom any mention of hot-button topic X must include a thorough denunciation of X. We can't please those people. But even some pretty hardcore partisans who are not lunatics can agree on a presentation of X that's NPOV.
But they say the representation itself is, well not POV (sorry about that usage of POV), but against their religion and therefore violates freedom of religion.
This works more often than not.
--Jimbo
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