On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:51 PM, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:44 AM, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com 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.
Wittgenstein created the idea of a language game to describe what he called a "form of life," which he never defines, but which is roughly how we see the world around us -- how we use language and its rules to allow us to think and talk about the world.
<snip>
The way we avoid even the possibility of NPOV is by insisting that the POVs we reflect must have been published by reliable sources, and that NPOV must reflect the proportion of the POVs as reflected by those sources. I support this, because there is no other way to write a reliable encyclopedia. But what it means is that any notion of NPOV is lost, because the sources we respect reflect the dominant POVs of people we regard as educated in our own language, which Wikipedia simply repeats.
What we really mean by NPOV is a position that all educated holders of the dominant POVs within the English-speaking world can accept as valid and responsible. It's a wonderful achievement when an article manages to cater to those positions. But it is not neutrality.
Sarah
If anyone doubts both the exact accuracy and the necessity of this statement (especially if one replaces "educated" with "informed"), consider the battles over evolution and creationism. Genuine NPOV would mean that 40% of the articles would talk about Genesis. Genuine NPOV would be a death-knell for this project as a scholarly enterprise. But filtered through our policies on reliability we can keep that fate at bay.
More generally, viewing each of our three original foundational policies individually is a mistake, which is why the last three mega-threads have been more heat than light. Understanding NPOV by itself is absurd, it needs V; V left to itself sounds dangerous, it needs NOR. And so on.
RR