steven l. rubenstein wrote:
my real purpose is to spark a frank discussion about our NPOV policy.
From: Pete/Pcb21 pete_pcb21_wpmail@pcbartlett.com
Yeah really?
A couple of points about your wikiquette today/yesterday:
...[enumeration of points]
This is not consistent with wanting "to spark a frank discussion"
On 5/16/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
I wasn't around for the fireworks, but from what I can tell, an "anti BCE/CE" voter tried to re-write the argument of the "pro BCE/CE" side in a way that subverted the "pro" argument, and tried to unilaterally move the page to do the same thing.
That is one of the problems with the actions the Slrubenstein has taken - he has diverged the history onto two pages so no one can figure out what happened (whether present for the "fireworks" or not).
He protected a page in which he was involved in the debate, and did not use any notification in the history about what he was doing. He has personally attacked those that honestly believe that the terms BC/AD have meanings independent of the words for which they are an abbreviation (what I slopily called their etymology). He gets a compromise on the Jesus page* (which he claims to support) on Sunday and follows it up Sunday night with this proposal.
The entire thing shows once again the wisdom of the original distributed setup of Wikipedia i.e. that setting up general guidelines and then letting each article evolve within those guidelines (primarily the NPOV) is a much better approach than the top down authoritarian policy driven approach. Although this approach takes time it is much more likely to evolve towards neutral, than the approach I think of as "my idea is neutral so I'll make it wikipedia policy."
Jim
*The compromise was to use BC/BCE only and to avoid the use of AD/CE all together.