Cormac Lawler wrote:
The obvious question this raises is (as Elian has
already asked):
"where do we draw the line?"
I think this is the wrong way to look at the question. The whole point
of NPOV is that it is not about line drawing. It is about a social
approach to collaboration. We draw the line at the point where we have
consensus among virtually all reasonable people that the material is
neutral.
We could orchestrate, for example, a policy that says
"Wikiversity
will not host materials that endorse a particular world-view". But
then, we are excluding all religious material (and not all religious
material is bad). It could well be argued that much of what most
people consider to be appropriate educational material espouses a
particular world-view, such as that of free-market economics,
feminism, whatever.
It could well be argued that this is one of the things which is deeply
flawed about proprietary texts... the passing off of propaganda of
whatever kind as being educational materials.
This is a difficult issue that we can't simply
dismiss out of hand.
Certainly, we do need to discuss it in detail. But I think it would be
a tragic mistake to dismiss NPOV out of hand based on arguments which
fail to draw on our deep experience with how it works and what it means.
--Jimbo