Frd bauder responds to SLR's discussion on NPOV:
Big problem here though. For example, if you apply this to Judaism, you are taking the Reform Judaism position.
Fred, are you joking? We are NOT a fundamentalist religious encycloepdia. We are NOT here to push the Orthodox Jewish view of history, ethics and the Bible in our articles. Similarly, we are NOT here to push the Fundamentalist Christian or Muslim views of history, ethics and the Bible in our articles.
From day one fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Muslims
have swammped our talk pages claiming about imaginary bias in Wikipedia, because we use history instead of blindly accepting their POV as factual. And fortunately, the great majority of us have reverted their partisan POV edits, and restored Wikipedia articles to be in line with our NPOV policy.
You really need to re-read what our NPOV policy says. For instance, We do not say that: "God created the world 6,000 years ago."
Rather we say something like: "According to many Orthodox Jews God created the world 6,000 years ago. However, this belief has evolved over time, and even in the medieval era a number of Jewish rationalists disagreed with this view. Using the science and philosophy of their, they concluded that the world was much, much older, and that such reinterpretations were not a violation of Jewish principles of faith. Today, all non-fundamentalist Jews reject such views, and instead re-interpret their religious texts to be in consonance with modern say scientific findings, to show that the the world was created several billion years ago."
As SLR writes, NPOV often means multiple points of view. This means providing not only the points of view of different groups today, but different groups in the past." If anyone is unwilling to follow NPOV policy, they cannot contribute to our articles. End of story.
As SLR writes "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. One important task for articles is to explain things. In the case of human beliefs and practices, explanation encompasses not only what motivates individuals who hold these beliefs and practices, but an account of how such beliefs and practices came to be and took shape."
He is right. To do anything less means the death of Wikipedia. We are not a religious encyclopedia with a religious agenda, no matter what some of our contributors may wish.
Robert (RK)
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I really don't know how to resolve this problem which I see as being quite difficult to resolve.
For example, I believe (without doing a lot of research on the question) there is no evidence from Egyptian sources of the existence of Moses, or Joseph either.
How do we deal with this and what significance does it have?
Actually the language from our article, [[Moses]], deals with this quite eloquently, "If he is a historical figure, he may have lived between the 18th century BCE and the 13th century BCE.
According to the Hebrew Bible, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. He received and recorded the will of God on Mount Sinai."
My own solution to this sort of thing is to take the viewpoint, to a certain extent, of those who have faith. Taking the lead from the Moses article there may be occasion for many uses of the language, "According to..."
Fred
From: Robert rkscience100@yahoo.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 05:53:02 -0700 (PDT) To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] This is NOT a religious encyclopedia; we do not push religious beliefs.
Fred Bauder responds to SLR's discussion on NPOV:
Big problem here though. For example, if you apply this to Judaism, you are taking the Reform Judaism position.
Fred, are you joking? We are NOT a fundamentalist religious encycloepdia. We are NOT here to push the Orthodox Jewish view of history, ethics and the Bible in our articles. Similarly, we are NOT here to push the Fundamentalist Christian or Muslim views of history, ethics and the Bible in our articles.
From day one fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Muslims
have swammped our talk pages claiming about imaginary bias in Wikipedia, because we use history instead of blindly accepting their POV as factual. And fortunately, the great majority of us have reverted their partisan POV edits, and restored Wikipedia articles to be in line with our NPOV policy.
On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 07:59:26 -0600, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
My own solution to this sort of thing is to take the viewpoint, to a certain extent, of those who have faith. Taking the lead from the Moses article there may be occasion for many uses of the language, "According to..."
"According to..." - now there is language which is very seldom POV. :)