Peter Mackay wrote:
Accordingly on other articles, different points of view need to be included based on their prominence and level of support in the real world, not just on which happens to be most popular among the Wikipedia editing community.
That's the problem. In theory, theory and practice are identical. In practice, they aren't.
WP articles are not written by the general community, they are written by editors, usually a handful of core contributors. NPOV works out to what these editors agree it is, simply because nobody else has any significant input.
Indeed. The point is that those editors
Writing consistently with NPOV is not 'inflicting your opinion on an article'. Biasing an article towards your own opinions *is* inflicting your opinion on an article, is obviously not consistent with NPOV.
Beg pardon, but it is. If (say) a Republican and a Democrat write an article, each one only writing material that supports and reinforces their partisan views, but the end result is balanced and consistent with community support, then that is NPOV.
That is entirely dependent on where you draw the line on what the 'end result' is. I am perfectly happy with the idea of Wikipedia articles gradually improving over long amounts of time towards some future goal, but NPOV is non-negotiable and, regardless of how eventualist your philosophy is, an article must always be NPOV. Now. Not at some time in the future. Now. Therefore I'm not happy with the editing process you suggest above, which implies one editor biasing the article towards one particular viewpoint then another editor coming along later and biasing it in a different direction. Every version should always be NPOV.
With all due respect to you, I think you're slightly misinterpreting what Jimbo (and I) actually mean. I don't think either of us are suggesting that editors should be 'opinionless automatons', just that they shouldn't let their opinions influence the way they write articles.
That's plain bizarre. There's absolutely nothing wrong with editors inserting their own opinions into articles. It happens every day. So long as it is done with NPOV in mind it works fine.
Now I think you're deliberately misinterpreting what I mean in order to throw up an irrelevant straw man (note that this is a discussion tactic that I have absolutely no 'due respect' for).
Obviously writing an NPOV-compliant article isn't a problem. Unduly biasing an article towards your own opinions is not compliant with NPOV.
Cheers,
N.