On Apr 14, 2008, at 10:44 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
A big part of the point of NPOV is that if you don't agree with postmodernists like Lyotard (quoted below), you can write carefully and clearly, striving for neutrality as best you can manage, and be satisfied that the result is useful.
And if you are in agreement with Lyotard, and regard the pursuit of knowledge as a language game, you can still play. "If there are no rules, there is no game"... and the game we are playing is NPOV.
One of these days I will get around to writing "What Wikipedia Could Learn From Postmodernism" to make the second part of that more explicit. Suffice it to say that I think that appealing both to the sort of classical viewpoint in your first paragraph and to a postmodernist Lyotard-style viewpoint is an essential goal of our content policies. If we're doing it right then a committed classicist (as I suspect Jimbo is) and a committed postmodernist (hi) will both be satisfied with our policies.
-Phil