Hi folks.
I'm curious about the relationship between historical NPOV and wikipedian NPOV.
If I understand Julie correctly, historians tend to refrain from making moral judgements about history, particularly when the people of that period had a significantly different world view. So it's not OK to say that "women were treated unfairly", but it is OK to say that "women were not able to vote or own property" - the former being a statement of morality and the latter being one of historical fact. Similarly, historians explain things in terms of the temporal context, so the Rape of the Sabines in Rome would be explained in terms of how the romans viewed women, sex, marriage, and the necessity of making lots of little Romans who would grow up to throw weird-shaped spears and feature in historical novels.
However, certain periods in history have been reinterpreted by later generations. The inquisition is a classic example, in that some neopagan religions have used as a quasi-historical basis. Also, (IIRC) later christian leaders have retrospectively apologised for the inquisition, so clearly they were judging the morality of the period against modern morality. The inquisition has been used as evidence for the claim that christianity and/or organised religion is amoral. Finally, the term "witch hunt" is an idiom for an irrational search for evil-doers that works similarly to the way the Salem trials and the Inquisition are supposed (in popular imagination) to have been conducted.
The historical NPOV would seem (if I read Julie right) to be to ignore these later moral judgements as fundamentally ahistorical, anachronistic, and irrelevant. My question is, is the wikipedian NPOV "wider" than the historical NPOV: should we include content that historians would judge inappropriate? If so, how can we include it so that the historical view is not damaged or confused by non-historical approaches?
Martin Harper