I retract the statement that once appeared on User:Iambus that I will not post to the mailing list, because it is open, transparent, and archived. The statement is only visible to admins because it has been deleted. I will not however be using IRC.
Wikipedia has a big flaw: neutrality. The core principle of writing from a "neutral" point of view is contradictory: it has a point of view in itself, and the point of view is supposedly against points of view. In the wacky world of hypocrites and liars, there is such a thing as a point of view without viewpoints. In reality, however, facts are limited and mostly things are opinions, philosophies, viewpoints, or lies. Wikipedia suffers from so many problems in article space (inaccuracies and NPOV disputes) because it is trying to achieve the unachieveable. Neutrality only exists in people's minds, mostly everything is opinion and you have to form your own. I propose that neutrality should be questioned as "policy". I also peopose that editors should be forced to admit their biases at the top of articles they originally wrote and if someone else has a differing opinion, they should put a line (<hr> in HTML or ---- in wikicode) and offer their opinion, sort of like http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ThreadMode. http://mywikibiz.com has "advocate-point-of-view", which seems like a great idea. Please don't repeat for the thousandth time that since it's Gregory Kohs, it must be a BADSITE, when, in actuality, it was first owned by someone else as Centiare, then when it was deleted, Kohs put it on his home website. Thoughts?
On 13/04/2008, Jonas Rand joeyyuan@cox.net wrote:
Wikipedia has a big flaw: neutrality. The core principle of writing from a "neutral" point of view is contradictory: it has a point of view in itself, and the point of view is supposedly against points of view. In the wacky world of hypocrites and liars, there is such a thing as a point of view without viewpoints. In reality, however, facts are limited and mostly things are opinions, philosophies, viewpoints, or lies.
But that's not the goal of neutrality! The goal of neutrality is to *collect* all signficant points of views and represent them in the wikipedia!
On 13/04/2008, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/04/2008, Jonas Rand joeyyuan@cox.net wrote:
Wikipedia has a big flaw: neutrality. The core principle of writing from a "neutral" point of view is contradictory: it has a point of view in itself, and the point of view is supposedly against points of view. In the wacky world of hypocrites and liars, there is such a thing as a point of view without viewpoints. In reality, however, facts are limited and mostly things are opinions, philosophies, viewpoints, or lies.
But that's not the goal of neutrality! The goal of neutrality is to *collect* all signficant points of views and represent them in the wikipedia!
Indeed. Think of "neutral point of view" as "what the subject looks like from 20,000 feet up." We're all on the ground, with our various points of view, and trying to work out amongst ourselves what the subject does in fact look like from 20,000 feet up. This is of course difficult. And it's more of a compass to work towards than an achievable goal.
- d.
On 13/04/2008, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/04/2008, Jonas Rand joeyyuan@cox.net wrote:
Wikipedia has a big flaw: neutrality. The core principle of writing from a "neutral" point of view is contradictory: it has a point of view in itself, and the point of view is supposedly against points of view. In the wacky world of hypocrites and liars, there is such a thing as a point of view without viewpoints. In reality, however, facts are limited and mostly things are opinions, philosophies, viewpoints, or lies.
But that's not the goal of neutrality! The goal of neutrality is to *collect* all signficant points of views and represent them in the wikipedia!
on 4/13/08 2:05 PM, David Gerard at dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Indeed. Think of "neutral point of view" as "what the subject looks like from 20,000 feet up." We're all on the ground, with our various points of view, and trying to work out amongst ourselves what the subject does in fact look like from 20,000 feet up. This is of course difficult. And it's more of a compass to work towards than an achievable goal.
This is an excellent way of describing it, David. In fact, it should be included in the policy section on NPOV.
Marc Riddell
On 13/04/2008, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 4/13/08 2:05 PM, David Gerard at dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Indeed. Think of "neutral point of view" as "what the subject looks like from 20,000 feet up." We're all on the ground, with our various points of view, and trying to work out amongst ourselves what the subject does in fact look like from 20,000 feet up. This is of course difficult. And it's more of a compass to work towards than an achievable goal.
This is an excellent way of describing it, David. In fact, it should be included in the policy section on NPOV.
It's how I explain it to media a lot, and they seem to get the idea. If anyone wants to push to put it into WP:NPOV, please feel free.
- d.
Most articles are written by a host of people who have a wide assortment of biases. Going over the biases of everyone involved in writing [[Muhammad]], say, would take weeks or months. Realistically, in a "wiki"-model, the reality is a huge mismash of biases exist, and we hope they more or less average out (this is really only expected as the number of involved editors goes to infinity, but usually a dozen or two will get you pretty close) - and once dozens or hundreds get involved we expect this.
Wiki-info or some such thing (I believe it's run by Fred Bauder) adopts an "advocate's" POV, I believe they also have 2nd pages that adopts the "critic's" point of view.
So you can look over what adopting an advocate's POV would look like. The answer is that it's pretty useless as a resource - the web is already full of biases sources - what pushes Wikipedia to the 9th most viewed site on the internets (or wherever we live these days) is partly NPOV - you're far less likely to be reading a blatant misrepresentation that you are on Joe Random's website.
NPOV may only be achieve asymptotically, but that's far more valuable than what drips out of a propoganda outlet.
Cheers WilyD
On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 12:58 PM, Jonas Rand joeyyuan@cox.net wrote:
I retract the statement that once appeared on User:Iambus that I will not post to the mailing list, because it is open, transparent, and archived. The statement is only visible to admins because it has been deleted. I will not however be using IRC.
Wikipedia has a big flaw: neutrality. The core principle of writing from a "neutral" point of view is contradictory: it has a point of view in itself, and the point of view is supposedly against points of view. In the wacky world of hypocrites and liars, there is such a thing as a point of view without viewpoints. In reality, however, facts are limited and mostly things are opinions, philosophies, viewpoints, or lies. Wikipedia suffers from so many problems in article space (inaccuracies and NPOV disputes) because it is trying to achieve the unachieveable. Neutrality only exists in people's minds, mostly everything is opinion and you have to form your own. I propose that neutrality should be questioned as "policy". I also peopose that editors should be forced to admit their biases at the top of articles they originally wrote and if someone else has a differing opinion, they should put a line (<hr> in HTML or ---- in wikicode) and offer their opinion, sort of like http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ThreadMode. http://mywikibiz.com has "advocate-point-of-view", which seems like a great idea. Please don't repeat for the thousandth time that since it's Gregory Kohs, it must be a BADSITE, when, in actuality, it was first owned by someone else as Centiare, then when it was deleted, Kohs put it on his home website. Thoughts?
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Wily D wrote:
Most articles are written by a host of people who have a wide assortment of biases...
Wiki-info or some such thing... adopts an "advocate's" POV...
...the web is already full of biases sources - what pushes Wikipedia to the 9th most viewed site on the internets (or wherever we live these days) is partly NPOV... [it's] far more valuable than what drips out of a propoganda outlet.
Exactly. Advocates -- and indeed writers of all too many other stripes -- tell you what *they* want you to hear. It's the rare resource that is truly written with the reader, and the reader's needs, in mind. The reason people like Wikipedia articles so much is because they provide the kind of introduction to a subject that *they* want, not that some advocate wants.
This is, of course, the secret of google's success, too, and it's probably no coincidence that Wikipedia pages get such notoriously high pagerank. Marketeers, advertisers, and SEO's want you to go to their pages so they can tell you what they want to say. But google steadfastly rewards pages that *readers* like.
On Apr 13, 2008, at 12:58 PM, Jonas Rand wrote:
Wikipedia has a big flaw: neutrality.
You're repeating a pretty standard criticism - it's also leveled against objectivity. We teach it in high school pretty often - pointing out that no one person has an objective viewpoint on anything. It's really an argument about the inaccessibility of absolute truth - no account of an even remotely controversial subject will be recognized as true by all viewpoints on the subject.
The thing is, that's not the sort of neutrality/objectivity Wikipedia traffics in. We don't attempt to present a single objective viewpoint, but rather a comprehensive viewpoint that mentions all of the significant viewpoints and explains them, clearly attributing claims about a subject to the people making it.
This version of neutrality is quite achievable - you can see for yourself. Load an article on a ridiculously controversial subject and you can see - we achieve what we set out for pretty routinely.
But it's important to recognize that this is not the sort of neutrality talked about in that standard "nothing is ever truly objective" argument, because we change the game from talking about the subject itself to talking about what other people say about the subject.
-Phil