fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Yep, your stawmen are indeed straw. You know they are not genuine alternatives, just debating points.
Fred, your habit of picking one thing -- generally peripheral -- out of a longer post to disagree with, replying with a couple of lines, and apparently ignoring the meat of my point is wearing on me a little.
You appeared to ask what NPOV had to do with this. Since you are having trouble seeing it at the small scale of a link to Michael Moore's web site, I thought taking the principles to an extreme would make it clearer. I think that's technically a reductio ad absurdum and not a straw man: I never suggested that you or anybody advocated the extreme version.
Regardless, if that's not helpful, you can just say, "Sorry, that doesn't help me. What I'm really trying to understand is...." Given that, I'm glad to try again.
I definitely don't see this as some sterile debate. I think it's an important issue for Wikipedia's future, and want to be sure that everybody at least understands the risks that we see, whether or not they see other issues as larger.
William