On 6/10/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
- To write some articles with a desirable quality, it is almost
impossible not to resort to what can be called, in good faith, original research. And this point makes the matter a hard one.
This is all meant as more material to chew on. The [[No original research]] policy helps in a lot of different ways, but clearly it has a few problems that require some tweaking with it.
Yes and no. Yes -- NOR and NPOV cannot be understood as strictly logical rules, as all entries (and some more than other) involve some forms of individual interpretation, or at least selection of some approaches out of others, etc. No -- I'm not sure they require tweaking because of this.
In the 19th-century, scientists went through what is now considered a "crisis of objectivity" -- they became increasingly insecure about their ability to be "objective" (for a variety of reasons; increasing influence of scientific opinion in public life, increasing concerns about science and religion, discovery of phenomena such as systematic observation errors, i.e. the "personal equation", etc.) and began to frantically assert their objectivity in various ways (i.e. by relying on mechanical representation over "interpretation", etc.). A number of philosophers (i.e. Kuhn) have pointed out that the idea of an "objective observation" is contradictory -- if it is an observation, there must be an observer, and all observers are, to some degree, subjective. Objectivity cannot be achieved in a philosophically rigorous sense -- indeed, it never has been.
So what purpose does the concept serve? It is an ethos more than anything else, a quasi-religious stricture about proper conduct and goals. The desire not to mislead, the desire to report only as things are and not what you want them to be, etc. and so forth. When it gets violated in some obvious way, it is held up as an example of "what not to do." Otherwise it pushes things along, and sometimes (often?) falters, because humans are fallible and the world is not a logical machine. But Wikipedia articles are remarkable for their process, not their conclusions*, and the same thing could probably be said of science as well -- many conclusions of today's scientific work will be seen as woefully inadequate in a few decades, but that doesn't mean we should disregard them today; the system of knowledge production makes them the most reliable knowledge we have.
So yes, ultimate NPOV and NOR is not possible. And never will be. But I think changing the rules to more heavily reflect this would not be helpful -- it would only encourage those who want to emphasize their policies against notions of NOR and NPOV, and as goals they are very good.
As someone I respect once said, all of the world is built up on various constructions. But the Three Little Pigs well shows that not all constructions are as good as others. Similarly, all entries are built up on some inherent POV. But some POV is more nuanced and neutral than others. Let's keep our lofty goals, even if we know they won't satisify the analytical philosophers. They make a nice ethos.
FF
*Which is why I think having hard-copies is so counter-intuitive, though I can understand why some people would want one -- i.e. slow internet connections, more interested in using it as a tool to learn with than a tool to edit with, etc.