John Lee wrote:
The problem is, groups like Stormfront have a whole different definition of what is NPOV.
Not to get too relativistic, but to some extent, so do all cultures and subcultures. I'm not sure it's been explicitly mentioned anywhere, but IMO Wikipedia is in essence defining "NPOV" to mean "neutral according to what a sampling of reasonably objective liberal intellectuals would think", perhaps even with the caveat "liberal intellectuals in the Western rationalist tradition" (where liberal is used in the non-political sense). We believe that everything ought to be discussed (no censorship), including taboo and/or sensitive issues; that rigorous academic-style inquiry is in general the right way to discover facts; and so on.
The relationship this has to majority is an interesting one. In many countries, both Western and non-Western, it's not the majority one (I'd argue this would be true of both the United States, and of many Muslim nations, for different reasons). If we held a population-wide vote on some of our decisions, we'd end up with some significantly different ones. Of course, that does lead to a bit of a problem---perhaps we can use majority votes, but only of people who subscribe to the basic tenets to begin with. If 500 people register who think that all criticism of [(religious figure) or (national hero)] is inappropriate for an encyclopedia, then we'll simply have to discount their votes and keep it. Now who decides when that's the case is an interesting question...
-Mark