On Fri, 03 Sep 2004 17:38:58 -0400, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
It's often not explicitly stated, but it's irritating when you can obviously tell the political leanings of the person who wrote the article just through a casual reading.
That's a pretty good indicator of when an article has POV problems.
FWIW, the use of that Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand is a common culprit. It belongs some places, but it shows up a lot more places than it belongs, as if someone is really trying to work it in everywhere. Some of the circumcision stuff also reads like it was written by anti-circumcision activists. The tone is just wrong, even if the facts (and even the conclusions) are fine: you can tell when an article was written by someone who has a strong personal opinion about the matter.
Many (most, probably) Wikipedians have strong personal opinions about things. It's best if they have self-knowledge about this and can consciously restrain an POV-pushing that they might subconsciously do.
Generally, it'd be nice if people avoided editing articles they had a very strong personal opinion about, or at least let someone who didn't care much do a thorough re-editing afterwards.
Of course, people tend to edit articles about subjects they are interested in. I'm not particularly interested in curcumcision, for example, and have never read that article -- so obviously I'm not going to have edited it.