Well, it's against my role as 'the Jimbo' around here to call people crackpots, so I'll avoid that word here. But you'll all know what I mean anyway. ;-) It has been my long experience, too, that there are many, uh, creative minds, who are drawn to theorizing about the puzzles and mysteries of physics. Their struggles against the tyranny of the mainstream are romantic and lonely; they are voices of reason, crying out in the wilderness. I think this presents challenges for our NPOV policy, but not _special_ challenges. As with any controversial subject, and many uncontroversial ones, there are mainstream views, minority views, and singular views. NPOV does not require us to present all these views as if they are equal! This is one of the things that's hardest to remember about NPOV. If a view is the majority view of a broad consensus of scientists, then we say so. If a view is a minority view of some scientists, scientists who are respected by the mainstream that differs with them on this particular matter, then we say so. And if a view is held only by a few people without any traditional training or credentials, and if that view is dismissed by virtually all mainstream scientists, then we can say that, too. The reason we can do all of that is that, usually, those statements are not controversial to any of the parties in the debate. We could have a problem if someone insists that their peculiar views are shared by all scientists, but that's usually not the case. Usually the creative alternative-physics types will readily agree that virtually no mainstream physicists would agree. And we can use all of that as a reasonable grounds for dividing up articles. Usually, mainstream and minority views are treated in the main article, with the mainstream view typically getting a bit more ink, but the minority view presented in such a fashion that both sides could agree to it. Singular views can be moved to a separate page and identified (disclaimed) as such, or in some cases omitted altogether. There's a popular view of bias in journalism, held more in practice out of laziness I think than held as an actual theory of bias, that the way to be unbiased is to present both sides of an argument without prejudicing the discussion for or against either one. "Some say that the earth is round, others say that it is flat." Our approach is more sophisticated, I think. --Jimbo

Geoff Burling wrote: Yes, that's exactly right. I forgot to mention that, but that's another perfectly good reason for excluding at least some of that. However, in defense of the fellow who wrote in to complain, he did make reference to some book or other published in the past, and so at least as far as *that* complaint goes, 'this is original research' wouldn't really be a good comeback. I think that's a very valid way to look at it, yes, absolutely. And this helps to tie the policy here in with parallel policies in other areas, i.e. 'verifiability' has long been accepted as a decision rule. Writing about a 'religion' that has exactly one prophet and exactly one follower, who happens to be the same guy, presents NPOV problems because it's just too small to verify. That's right, although I can imagine some hypertechnical sticklers abusing this notion. Some facts can be found more or less only online, particular facts about contemporary Internet culture. Who is the current maintainer of BIND? Probably that isn't in a book, but it's an uncontroversial fact that could be looked up online. --Jimbo