Milos Rancic wrote:
In relation to your Wikiquote example, I think that
you were talking
there about notability, not about NPOV.
To the extent that notability has any value for us at all as a concept,
it is only because it draws on the principle of a neutral point of view.
Applying quotability criteria to Wikiquote is an approach to ensuring
that it's not my point of view about what is a quotation, but instead
I'm neutrally documenting quotations used by other sources. That's a
rather straightforward form of neutral point of view, in fact, whereas
notability has proven much more challenging to define.
NPOV is a very good starting point for writing an
encyclopedia. But,
it is not any kind of general knowledge which may be implemented
everywhere. And, if it is treated as such, then it is an ideology.
If the Board is not able to make a general scientific framework for
projects other than Wikipedia, I think that it should hire some
scientists to do so.
Scientific? Is there something scientific about neutral point of view as
a framework for Wikipedia, even? It has some similarities to the
scientific method, I suppose, but I'm not sure that's what we imagine
ourselves to be doing. Science is part of the knowledge we are
compiling, certainly. But neutral point of view is not a kind of
knowledge itself. Rather, it is an approach to knowledge, one that has
served us well and, as far as I can tell, runs through the culture of
all our projects.
--Michael Snow