Tom Parmenter wrote:
The history seems similar to the notorious "24", whom I missed by coming in late on all this. It is not the controversial point of view that makes these people wrong for Wikipedia, it is the refusal to engage in any dialogue to improve their contributions, a refusal that amounts to trolling in my view.
I would agree that this _is_ the essential problem.
In contrast, Mike Irwin (and Ed Poor and several others, maybe even me, not to single anyone out) are willing to soldier along, bringing up sticky points, discusssing them, defending themselves, attacking other views, apologizing on occasion, giving in from time to time, sticking to their guns on other occasions, enlivening the talk pages, and generally engaging in synthesis that assures that most of what they (we) want to say makes it into the Encyclopedia, however cloaked in NPOV it may turn out to be in the end.
Yes!
Extremely diverse intellectual perspectives are no obstacle to cooperation through the mechanism of NPOV, within a very broad range.
But I suspect that there are limits. Some views are so minority, so at odds with the mainstream, that it will be difficult to integrate them with the whole. I'm not talking about "major" points of view like Marxism or Libertarianism or Christianity or Bhuddism. I'm talking about very small and quirky points of view shared by almost no one.
--Jimbo