Milos Rancic wrote: 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. 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

Milos Rancic wrote: The scientific approach can be just as ideological and totalitarian as the religious. A lexicographical approach strikes me as based on semantics divorced from reality. The bare claim that one's approach is scientific is often no more than a rhetorical device for supporting one's point of view. In reality the scientific approach is a subset of NPOV, where it is balanced with other approaches. An encyclopedic approach has more to do with comprehensiveness than neutrality; an ideological encyclopedia can be comprehensive within defined parameters without being neutral. I begin from the premise that NPOV must apply to all WMF projects without exception. What that means to different sister projects is quite variable. The broad applicability to Wikipedias is much clearer and more established than in other projects. In the others it is much less obvious, and the disputes on Wikisource relating to NPOV are a much smaller proportion than on other projects. If NPOV is accepted as a broad principle it is the responsibility of each project to define how it applies to that project. Ec

2009/4/22 Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>om>: That's why NPOV and Scientific Point Of View are different things. (speaking here as a sceptical atheist who considers Richard Dawkins entirely too moderate, I have had occasion to suggest to other sceptics that they tone it down for Wikipedia - anyone who disagrees won't listen, and anyone unconvinced will be put off by a didactic tone.) It's where the apparently-odd en:wp phrase "verifiability not truth" comes in: we're mere humans, we don't have access to cosmic truth in all its glory; verifiable references are all we have to go on and show to others. - d.

Nemo_bis, 22/04/2009 23:49: I forgot to mention that we have also policies on original research (http://it.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:NRO) and notability (http://it.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Wikiquote#Significativit.C3.A0): it was very useful to adapt such notions to Wikiquote (again, en.wikiquote does not have policies on that). Nemo

2009/4/22 Ting Chen <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de>de>: I think the point is to have whatever would be the locally relevant version of neutrality. On Wikipedia it's NPOV. On Commons or Wikisource, I expect it would be neutrality of subject matter. Etc. The key point would be (something like) that Wikimedia projects are not for pushing views. - d.

2009/4/22 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>om>: And even then, some of the most interesting original content is interviews, which are all about the subjective POV of the interviewee. I'm not clear on the connection between neutrality and Marxism ... could you explain the logical steps between the two clauses of your first sentence? - d.

2009/4/22 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>om>: Yes, that makes sense :-) en:wp has experienced this - the arbcom finally had to say "no, peer-reviewed journals are more reliable sources on global warming than Rush Limbaugh radio transcripts or Michael Crichton novels, and fifty faith-based science advocates don't get to vote the UK's top climate scientist off the island. Don't be bloody stupid." In a few more words than that. - d.

Hoi, There is a difference between the way photo journalists work and the way most of the illustrations come to Commons. The NPPA code of ethics are clearly written for active press journalists. They get paid for what they do. Also the NPPA is a USA national entity and consequently their rules do not take into account the people that provide us with illustrations and the fact that they are from all over the globe. Another important difference is that the intent of our illustrations is to illustrate encyclopaedic and other educational works. This means that a slight exageration in an illustration may actually serves our purposes well. Many of the subjects that are covered are historical and consequently we have to make use of the materials available to us. There are best practices about historic and other material and they are not universally shared. * Having access to the original material and providing information where this material can be found * Preferably including the meta data as available from the library, archive or musuem * When material is altered, the alterations have to be documented to enable people to assess the illustration * High reolution material is always preferable to low resolution images * Non compressed material is always preferable to compresssed material for original material * Compressing material can always be done before material is actually served from our Wikis Thanks, GerardM 2009/4/22 Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>

I'm not sure what the answer is, and I agree with you that it's not easily resolved, but it seems to me that some sort of neutrality policy ought to apply to Commons. In my opinion the universal form of the NPOV policy is simple - be honest. On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 2:00 PM, Mike.lifeguard <mikelifeguard(a)fastmail.fm>wrote;wrote:

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think any image can be neutral given the right context, but that context matters. Images in commons don't exist by themselves - they would be fairly useless if they did. (I guess a biased image could be made useful by adding context to them afterward, but then, so can a biased encyclopedia article. So maybe the difference is one of immediatism vs. eventualism, but the end goal is the same.) I think the points described above are all good ones for anyone taking photographs. The key in the first two sentences is the word "subjects". I think you're reading too much into the rules if you think that it excludes someone from taking a picture of something other than the event itself when attending an event. I don't think such a rule is even meant to apply to professional photojournalists. Is commons meant to be a dump of anything and everything, or are the images in it meant to depict something? If the latter, then they can depict something accurately or inaccurately, and that's where neutrality comes in. Yes, it's an amateur site, so expectations are low. If you're just randomly pointing at a subject and shooting, then it's only your subconscious biases that you have to worry about, but if you're intentionally making images with the intent of depicting something, then there's a lot of room to introduce biases when doing so. I would not I would want want a rule of "Do not contribute photographs you made during events in which you were involved yourself without disclosing that fact" though. I find it incongruous that you would agree with this one with the caveat that a proper description excuses it, after going point by point on the others assuming that the rule excluded photos regardless of description. If you want a picture to describe "punk", why not make a few edits here and there to make your image closer to the concept (assuming you have permission of the individual(s) in the picture, anyway)? If you want a picture of a dog swimming, why not airbrush out that stick that you used to coax the dog into swimming? Why is it okay to manipulate the scene before you take the picture, but not afterward? --- But now we've moved from journalism, at least in the classic sense, to art. Does a neutrality policy make sense in art? Considering the ability of art to cast or dispel stereotypes, I think it can. On the other hand, does a "no original research" policy apply to art? I don't think it can. Art *is* original research. Fortunately, there seems to be no reason to abandon original research in Commons, as it is banned in Wikipedia. Commons is a less collaborative site. It's more like Knol than it is like Wikipedia. And as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing. But I think a neutrality policy does make sense. Maybe I'm confusing "neutrality policy" with "honesty policy" though, because I think the summation of a proper neutrality policy is simply "be honest".