steven l. rubenstein wrote:
I appreciate RK's work on developing our NPOV policy concerning historical context for articles such as ones on religion. For what it is worth, I think we can explain it in a simpler and more direct way.
- NPOV often means multiple points of view. This means providing not
only the points of view of different groups today, but different groups in the past. 2) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. One important task for articles is to explain things. In the case of human beliefs and practices, explanation encompasses not only what motivates individuals who hold these beliefs and practices, but an account of how such beliefs and practices came to be and took shape.
Well put. It's not just for history and religion that this is important, but for science too. The story of the development of scientific ideas can be very interesting too. From a modern perspective some of the abandoned paths are too easily dismissed as speculative pseudoscience. When you consider how few scientific tools they had to work with, I am amazed that they ever got anything right.
Ec