Stan Shebs wrote:
NPOV as a policy is nearly unique to WP. 1911EB is
unabashedly
about describing the world from the British and Western POV -
they wouldn't have dreamed of representing the then-burning South
African situation as the Boers or Xhosa saw it, or the Opium Wars
as they seemed to the Chinese.
I mostly agree, although I think it may be going a bit too far to say
that it's really our invention. As far as I can tell, most
encyclopedias came around to that ideal before Wikipedia was founded.
Whether or not they've achieved it successfully is quite another
story---I think the Wikipedia process is much better at enforcing NPOV
than the traditional encyclopedia-writing process. Since at least
post-WW2, though, most encyclopedias would claim that their goal is
unbiased presentation of information, not presentation of an
Anglo-American or otherwise skewed viewpoint. In fact many have hired
the equivalent of "diversity consultants" to make sure that their
coverage of non-Western people is at the very least not offensive.
It's also typically the stated goal of textbooks, academic survey
papers, and other such "overviews" to present a neutral view of a
subject (again with mixed results). In a certain sense this may be even
better than if we had completely invented NPOV---we're the realization
of a goal nearly everyone else already agrees is the right one.
-Mark