See the article on [[Evolution poll]] for some depressing statistics.
It doesn't matter if the majority of the American people think that the world is flat or not -- this is not a question which is in their domain of knowledge.
We wouldn't expect the U.S. population as a whole to know how to calculate the effect of Jupiter on the Earth's orbit, would we? We would, however, expect astronomers to be able to do it. There are different domains of knowledge which are relevant to different questions.
The whole religion/science thing is about these boundaries. Is the origin of the universe a topic to be answered by science or the bible? Not an easy question. However it is clear to me, anyway, that the default, "unmarked" view to be represented in the article [[Big Bang]] is that of the people who are recognized to be the experts in it -- astrophysicists. That much seems easy.
But what about articles like [[Creationism]]? Now it becomes more contentious -- statements of "fact" become very questionable. Now statements like "The earth is thought to have been created X years ago" start requiring heavy attribution (i.e. to Bishop Ussher) where they didn't before.
I think the best approach is to attribute anything which would possibly be a "contested fact" -- any bit of information which someone might question the origins of. There is not much debate on the height of the Empire State Building -- there is no need to attribute such a fact. There is, however, some debate over the age of the universe, and so such statements should be attributed. And so forth.
But of course this doesn't really answer the question of which way Wikipedia should "lean" on such questions. I'm not sure there's a way to solve this from first principles -- it would be best if someone with authority (cough cough, Jimbo) would put out a decree saying, "Wikipedia should strive for NPOV as much as possible, but if there are questions as to which direction to lean in terms of very subtle unmarked POV, it should lean towards the POV of the relevant scientific community." At least, that's what I'd like the result to be, both for my own personal reasons, and because I think it would make Wikipedia a more reliable resource, but that's obviously up for objection.
FF
On 7/2/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/2/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
The scientific view is *not* the prevailing view in American society. Most Americans are Christians and believe in some form of Creationism or other.
Most? I would say that the creationists are a significant minority; I don't believe that they're a majority, at least not yet.
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