[WikiEN-l] NPOV and controversial material

Daniel Ehrenberg wrote: One of the beauties of NPOV is that it works like a fancy martial arts move to undermine critics. Anyone who is critical of our lack of "drugs are evil" stance is not going to be able to say that we are a pro-drug encyclopedia, because we aren't pro- or anti- anything. If a fact is value-sensitive, we don't assert it, we report that it is asserted. We can quite honestly and accurately report on the arguments of the drug warriors and their opponents, and we should be doing it in such a way that neither side will find anything particular objectionable about our presentation. It a little harder to wrap one's mind around NPOV for a picture -- after all, isn't a picture objectively 'true' in a sense, so long as it isn't faked? But a picture says a thousand words, and those words can have bias, nuance, suggested other meanings, etc. 100 pictures or drawings of something controversial will all be different, and some will be objectionable to some people for various reasons. The NPOV choice should make everyone -- or nearly so -- happy. We have managed to have several articles on obscene words that are tactful and tasteful and informative and entertaining and NPOV. We ought to be able to treat this issue in the same way. I think that Daniel Ehrenberg is right, that a drawing is likely to be more educational, more informative, and -- importantly -- to be more tasteful. Not everything in the wikipedia needs to be such that mainstream parents will think it is o.k. for kids to read, although most of it should be. Someday there will probably be a kids wikipedia, probably partly machine-generated and partly human-edited. --Jimbo