It's time that I pipe up on this.
Under the subject header, Re: [WikiEN-l] Neutrality enforcement: a proposal At 06:30 PM 5/8/2009, Sam Korn wrote:
On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 11:24 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote: [...] Even though a core of opinionated-though-neutral editors
accumulates, there's an eternal stream of people who don't know and don't care about NPOV or Wikipedia principles in general - as far as they're concerned, someone is being WRONG on the Internet.
Indeed. The solution to Israel-Palestine disputes on Wikipedia is that there be some lasting resolution to the meatspace Israel-Palestine conflict. Sadly, I think that is beyond the capabilities of even our esteemed Arbitration Committee.
Actually, no, though it's the community that can help, and the Committee can only have some influence. There is no way for the Committee, as far as I can see, to enforce what is needed, but it could recognize it and encourage it and discriminate between disruption that maintains lack of consensus and disruption that increases consensus.
The key to understanding this is, first of all, that NPOV isn't a thing, a fixed state, a property of text in itself, it is a balance that represents consensus.
We can measure NPOV by the percentage of editors who agree with a text, and our goal should always be 100%. While we may, in controversial areas, never be able to reach 100%, we should always maintain some level of skepticism that text is truly neutral if there is even a single dissent from a responsible editor. We may have overlooked something, and, if that editor can find *any* support from other responsible editors, we should, as a community (which may require only one of us initially), examine the reasons for dissent and see if it is possible to address them and either convince the dissenting editors to support the text or, if we become convinced that the text can be improved to broaden consensus, implement that change.
I have written a draft essay that examines this, and a process that could be followed, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Abd/NPOV_and_how_to_find_it
Comments, here or on the essay Talk page are invited. The draft at this point is written from a personal POV, but my intention is to edit that out and to leave a citation behind to the original essay from history, so edits to the essay to improve it and make it general and not personal are also invited. TIA.