Bcorr used this puzzling phrase:
* "NPOV facts"
1. Excuse me, folks, but that is a blatant contradiction in terms. I see the terms "POV" and "NPOV" misused quite a lot, and I think this misuse betrays a fundamental misunderstanding.
NPOV = [[Neutral Point of View]]
The NPOV is a /policy/ about how to describe ideas or facts which are in dispute. The term is /not/ a synonym for "objective truth". I can't emphasize enough that it is a Conscious Repudiation of the notion that Wikipedia has the capability or authority to determine what is really true or good or beautiful or valuable.
The NPOV policy is, in short, an agreement to disagree.
Let's try to distinguish better between "objective truth" (which, of course, each contributor always thinks their perfectly in command of!) from "a neutral statement about a controversial matter".
2. People have continued to say, over the years, that if we dignify fringe theories with any better treatment than utter condemnation, they'll infect all the mainstream articles. They bring up [[flat earth]] or [[Protocols of the Elders of Zion]] (PEZ) as examples. But we already have a policy for these topics which works well and is stable.
Ideas held by a partisan minority are labelled "held by a minority", and that minority is identified. Believers in a flat earth, by the way, are so few that none has ever graced our hallowed halls. Lots of Arabs, though, believe (or frequently hear their government-sponsored media say) that the PEZ is authentic. The way we treat PEZ is to say that
* Western historians dismiss PEZ as a fabrication, although several Islamic nations officially support it.
The job of the NPOV is not to determine facts, but to describe /opinions/ about reality without endorsing them. Let's get this straight. Please.
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
Bcorr used this puzzling phrase:
- "NPOV facts"
- Excuse me, folks, but that is a blatant contradiction in terms. I see
the terms "POV" and "NPOV" misused quite a lot, and I think this misuse betrays a fundamental misunderstanding.
NPOV = [[Neutral Point of View]]
The NPOV is a /policy/ about how to describe ideas or facts which are in dispute. The term is /not/ a synonym for "objective truth".
I can only underline this. Just yesterday I talked about this with a friend, and we agreed on this. Most people seem to think "NPOV" means "no POV", which it doesn't, and we came up with the following easy visualisation of it:
Imagine death penalty was universally accepted as an adequate punishment. Do you think our articles would mention any concerns of the moral/ethical implications of it? Certainly not. Not because these concerns are invalid or anything, but because no POV represents them. Thus, favouring death penalty *is* *the* NPOV of that hypothetical world.
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
Imagine death penalty was universally accepted as an adequate punishment. Do you think our articles would mention any concerns of the moral/ethical implications of it? Certainly not. Not because these concerns are invalid or anything, but because no POV represents them. Thus, favouring death penalty *is* *the* NPOV of that hypothetical world.
That's an interesting approach that I think I support. As long as the supporters of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were the only ones writing on the subject their views would be NPOV. (In reality that NPOV would not last.) Similarly, as long as there is only one chocolate cake recipe it represents NPOV, but this NPOV would have a better survivability than the one on PEZ.
Where more than one view is made evident it is unlikely that ANY one such view will be NPOV. NPOV becomes an exercise in tolerance of the other idiot's POV. ;-)
Ec
Ed Poor wrote
The job of the NPOV is not to determine facts, but to describe
/opinions/ about reality without endorsing them. Let's get this straight. Please.
Let's see - I'm not a big fan of courtroom dramas of the LA Law type, and am glad they're less in fashion than a few years ago. I did notice that you never get to hear the judge's summing-up of the hotshot lawyers' arguments. That is, summaries of advocacy of contentious matters, properly put in the context of the 'common ground' in a case, don't make good television. On the other hand they are good for Wikipedia.
Charles