On 7/14/07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
Well one cogent example is the article on Martin Luther. The German and Danish articles feel quite laid back about mentioning that he had a potty mouth but at the very least for a long time, the en:wp article (presumably affected by more puritan-influenced American Lutherans), was a remarkable piece of portraying the man as a saint, without blemish of any kind, or even simple human failings. Which, if you leave aside his letters and table talk spewing vitriol and scatological language, for all that, he was definitely of flesh with all that comes with it. Even Melancthon said it after his death, that Luther was (paraphrasing here) certainly remarkably potent medicine for the time but that the times ills were potent too.
I haven't been to the [[Martin Luther]] article lately, as it appeared to be
[[WP:OWN]]ed by those few who kept it closely bowdlerised and spit and polished.
Apologies for replying to my own letter. After pushing send, I went back to read [[Martin Luther]] and it is now a broadminded, even and NPOV article of the highest caliber. One that I feel now duty bound to recommend for FAC:hood.
This has been a great reenvigoration of my abiding faith the eventual perfectibility of NPOV on wikipedia. And This Clear example if people will so choose to read it, could serve to give strength to those in smaller wikipedias who labor with greater problems than bowdlerisation. Let us not look to the next week, next year or next decade for where we see wikipedia fulfill its promise. It fulfills it in the present, by on-going, but more importantly the promise will eventually manifest in every wikimedia project of any scope, each at their own pace, in their own time, eventually eventually, eventually.
-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]