Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
The other thing I want to propose is a change to our NPOV policy.
At the moment it says: "articles should have a neutral point of view." This dates back to the time where people had confidence that in the wiki process, in the struggle between adherents of different views after some time a good NPOV version finally emerges. I don't believe in this (I never did, actually). Yes, sometimes it happens, but only if non-involved people put a lot of effort in establishing compromises, moderating the conflicts and so on.
NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of view."
Of course, that's an ideal. You can never completely leave your personal views aside. But the important is: you can try. People who openly work for pushing POV in an article, shouldn't be allowed to edit that article at all. NPOV policy is not about "I insert my propaganda into an article and let others do the tedious taks of neutralizing it", it's "do your best to write from a neutral point of view. And if you are unable to do so, leave the article alone".
I basically disagree. Wikipedia is about its contents, not about the people who write them. The NPOV article is the objective, and will remain there when the participants are long gone. I still believe in the wiki process of finding common ground.
This is not to say that it is bad to say that authors should write from a neutral point of view. They should continue to be encouraged to do so. Nevertheless, none of us can completely escape his biases, and that sometimes makes us the worst judges of our own neutrality. Try as we might, others may not consider that our writing has achieved neutrality. Writing from other than a POV in any subject is next to impossible. The POV pusher just takes it further than reasonable, and fails to consider alternative POVs in the process of synthesizing a good article. Please don't confuse the natural tendency to have a POV with POV pushing.
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