On 7/13/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
--- George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I am afraid that I am going to have to ask you to agree to disagree on this point.
I do not believe that Wikipedia can survive on NPOV alone, or NPOV raised on a pillar above all other policies and common sense.
Then we should probably replace the clause "absolute and non-negotiable" with "catch-as-catch-can." (See [[Catch wrestling]])
There is never going to be a single, universally acceptable agreed upon definition of where true neutrality is on any given issue.
The naming policy is a case in point; the most common widely used name for something often is not really all that neutral; it's whatever happened to stick in the public common mind when an event happened. It's still the right name to use for the event in Wikipedia namespace, as a general rule, for the reasons given in the naming policy.
It is not an abuse of neutality as a general guiding principle, for the naming principle to be "Whatever people commonly use to call this thing". That policy is neutral on substantiative issues, other than en.wikipedia being western cultural centric.
The individual specific instances of applying that policy then lead to cases where some may disagree with the neutrality of a given name. But they're disagreeing with Wikipedia naming something to accurately report the common cultural label. It's not a value judgement or neutrality judgement to say "This is what people call it, we call it the same thing".
How an article covers the naming and events can and should be much more neutral than the article title, which should be the common name, with redirects from common synonyms.
I am applying neutrality at the guideline level: the naming guideline should be neutral with respect to specific topic areas. The names necessarily cannot all be completely neutral in and of themelves without hopelessly diluting any utility to Wikipedia as a reference tool. The names have to fit a consistent neutral policy - and they do. But they also have to be useful for people finding things.