Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Oh, I think it is a lot easier to evaluate the credibility of sources than the credibility of theories. If you offer me your personal theory of "Liquidity, Efficiency, and Bank Bailouts" then it's going to be quite hard for me to judge whether you are an economics crank or someone with an interesting theory. But if you point me to an essay of that title in _American Economic Review_, I can feel comfortable that it is at least credible.
But your comparison there is hardly fair: you've picked a (potentially) hard theory to judge but an easy source to judge. There are plenty of other sources that aren't clear cut, there are plenty of theories that are clear cut. The issue of judging source credibility is a real problem that has been discussed at length on [[Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards]], as well as various other places.
If judging the credibility of a source is so easy, why are there still millions of people who think FOX News really is "fair and balanced"? ;)
I think you're misreading it, then.
Here's a line I use in public talks which always gets a laugh. "NPOV does not mean that we have to say 'some say the moon is made of rocks, some say cheese'." We absolutely do care that a theory is credible, as it's essential to a neutral presentation of any topic.
Well, I'm reading what's there on the page. There's only one mention of "credible", and it's in a context that we should report on views even if they aren't credible:
How are we to write articles about pseudoscientific topics, about which majority scientific opinion is that the pseudoscientific opinion is not credible and doesn't even really deserve serious mention?
If we're going to represent the sum total of "human knowledge"--of what we believe we know, essentially--then we must concede that we will be describing views repugnant to us without asserting that they are false. Things are not, however, as bad as that sounds. The task before us is not to describe disputes fairly, on some bogus view of fairness that would have us describe pseudoscience as if were on a par with science; rather, the task is to represent the majority (scientific) view as the majority view and the minority (sometimes pseudoscientific) view as the minority view, and, moreover, to explain how scientists have received pseudoscientific theories. This is all in the purview of the task of describing a dispute fairly.
It seems to me from this single mention that credibility doesn't matter. If it's not credible, we report on others saying so and leave it at that, we don't make the judgement ourselves. The idea of whether those people are credible is not even mentioned and is hence a non-issue by the NPOV policy. Instead of credibility, we're asked to judge popularity instead (minority/majority views). That may not have been your intention when developing the NPOV policy, but that's how it stands now. I urge you to clarify it if it's not how it should be.
Sometimes we exclude views, but more commonly we move them to where they belong -- in an article about theories that are not widely accepted.
Which is still biasing towards "credibility", and hence not compatible with the NPOV as written. I quote: "The neutral point of view policy states that one should write articles without bias, representing ALL views fairly" (my emphasis on the ALL). I fail to see how shunting some views to seperate articles and not others counts as "fair".
Maybe since you developed the NPOV policy, it has an implicit meaning to you that I'm not seeing because I'm only reading the words explicitly written on [[WP:NPOV]]?
Shane.