On 7/13/05, Poor, Edmund W Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote: ...cut...
Take for example, the Jerusalem article. A friend of mine who is a PhD-holding religious scholar told me that it was riddled with subtle digs, and thinly veiled (supposedly neutral) "historical" observations, and language style, all meant to make some person's case or another, over historical right to the land, specific religious sites and so forth.
It's the same with countless other articles. I stopped even trying to list them, long ago. It's like indexing a book. If there's only a few references, you list them by page number. When something's mentioned all throughout, you just say "passim".
So many times I get frustrated with the bias in the articles. I'm especially frustrated because the problem could be solved so easily. Simply adopt the following policy:
- Any addition to an article, which 1 or more users label as an "NPOV
violation", may be moved from the article into the text page.
- It must not be replaced, until there is sufficient agreement that an
accurate description of the dispute has been crafted.
Forget 3RR. It's mechanical and therefore (nearly) senseless. Let's start using our judgment. We are all smart enough to do that.
Ed Poor
If the [[Jerusalem]] article is so full of little NPOV issues and needling attacks, why haven't you applied the {{POV}} template to it? You can think of the templates only as editors' tools, or you can take the broader view, and see that they also serve as warning posts to potential readers.
Readers deserve to know when they are reading an article subject to POV manipulation. If you wouldn't trust a naive fifteen year old to at least know about the POV issues contained, then you should apply the POV template.
I also posted a message to the [[Template talk:POV]] page requesting that we reference the article's history in the POV template in the same way we reference the talk page. Since it is up to the reader to determine the "correct" POV for them, we should make the availability of our articles' histories more clear when there are POV uncertainties, as other POVs are usually contained there as well as the talk pages.