Maveric149 (Daniel Mayer) wrote: I'm sorry, mav, but you've completely lost me here. I've heard of deceiving people by leaving things out, but that's definitely not what happens in an NPOV dispute when somebody removes a "Many people think ..." statement. This is deliberately a choice to refuse to state an opinion. And in this NPOV dispute, the person taking Ec's position is even open to including a more carefully worded, documented statement. The only deception would be if we described Osama Bin Laden in such a way that people might get the impression that many people /don't/ think that he's a terrorist. Then by failing to point out that this is wrong, we deceive. That's definitely not the situation that Ec was talking about. If instead we take the position, as you seem to advocate, that failing to mention an important fact about somebody is a "lie of omission", then NPOV is an unworkable policy. Disputants with no documentation or evidence on either side will have nothing to do but revert each other over and over; it will be impossible to settle on any sort of compromise. Instead, Wikipedia should take the position that we include information only when it well established, and disputants that want to include text must back that up. Silence from Wikipedia must always indicate ''incompleteness'' (and Wikipedia is always incomplete), never denial. It's also insufficient to cry "common sense" and say that everybody ''knows'' that OBL is widely considered a terrorist. In this case, I don't know it until you add "in the west", and Ec may not know it in any case. OK, so we're wrong! But this is where NPOV comes in and says "If people don't agree on the claim, then state the reasons instead." Common knowledge cannot replace NPOV when it's not, in fact, common. -- Toby