Stephen Bain wrote:
On 6/9/05, Poor, Edmund W Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
The other point was that WP is (or wants to be) an encyclopaedia, and that some POVs have to be excluded. The way we do that is by assessing how much (academic) support they have, in terms of the context and subject matter. There's no need for content committees, as long as consensus decisions on WP:NPOV can be acheieved (mediation) and enforced (arbitration).
-- Stephen Bain
If the decision on excluded POVs is made on the basis of how much support they have, we will quickly turn toward a regime of censorhip of unpopular views.
- We won't even be able to MENTION that a minority of
scientists contacted by the UN's climate panel (IPCC) disagree with the "consensus" that anthropogenic emissions are causing excessive atmospheric warming.
That's not what I meant. I'll quote Jimbo again (as appearing on WP:NPOV):
- 1 If a viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to
substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts;
- If a viewpoint is held by a significant minority, then it should be
easy to name prominent adherents;
- If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited)
minority, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia (except perhaps in some ancillary article) regardless of whether it's true or not; and regardless of whether you can prove it or not.
So using your example, the majority of the IPCC adivsers say anthropogenic emissions cause global warming, and they come under #1. The minority who disagree come under #2, as long as you can name them, and for practical purposes, perhaps cite a source in which they made this claim. If just one scientist came out and said that that global warming is caused by aliens, for example, then that would fall under #3, since one scientist is a vastly limited minority.
So who is claiming that it is caused by aliens? It's easy to invent an argument that is supported by no-one and use that as an argument that the position is not verifiable.
I've never said that only one POV should be represented, only that extreme minority POVs shouldn't be.
This is still treating truth as a numbers game. Sometimes great scientific discoveries have come from people who stubbornly maintained their opinions on a discovery. Verifiability is a more important criterion than being the position of a small minority. Some people who held the ridiculous minority notion that the earth went around the sun were severely persecuted at one time.
Ec