Erik Moeller wrote:
Daniel-
Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV, leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars to all articles that link to the forked versions
In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article. Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.). Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most inclusive).
So you will get a version of the circumcision article approved and edited by the APA, or a version of the creationism article approved and edited by the Institute for Creationism.
Well, you get articles like "Christian views of women" which is entirely POV. When I found it I could have renamed it to "Atheist views of Christian views of women". I don't know if this would work too well.
My take is that splitting articles can be a good thing. Sometimes the best way of dealing with a larger and more complicated issue is to place it in its own page and summarise that page in the main page's section. Hey, we do it for articles with lots of content, why not for contentious issues? We don't have to agree with the views, just characterise them.
TBSDY
This mangifies the potential influence of Wikimedia content even further and it is something that other news and information sources cannot easily compete with because they are not open content (ironically, it's also the reason for the success of agencies like AP, Reuters and AFP - they allow their stories to be modified for the purposes of individual users). The edit war problem is negligible in this context, as each group can define its own rules of exclusion.
However, whether it is desirable to have such functionality within Wiki[mp]edia is open to debate. I have contemplated a separate "Wikiviews" project, or simply making it as easy as possible for third parties to manage forks of Wikimedia content in their MediaWiki installs. Temporary and fixable problems like "edit wars" are certainly not a strong argument in favor of a very conservative approach, though.
NPOV is great, but it does not allow me to make use of my existing "reputation information": I cannot easily get from the current article on creationism to an article that includes the points of view only of the people I trust on this particular topic. On controversial topics, I will have to wade through many pages of text to get to the meat of the matter. Therefore, many people will prefer specialized information sources like EvoWiki and talkorigins.org on such subjects, because they know that their information space is not "polluted".
This in itself carries a much greater risk of duplication of effort than us providing the tools to do it properly (easy merging between changing revisions). We should not close our eyes to this problem and explore ways in which we can make Wikimedia content more useful to specific interest groups while maintaining NPOV as the central ideology of the Wikimedia projects. Open content is not just about vertical growth: from 100 articles to 10,000. It is also about horizontal growth: from 1 article about a topic to 10 or 100. Only if we embrace both types of growth we will become the catalyst of the media revolution .
Regards,
Erik