On 25/08/07, Jacky PB dpotop1@yahoo.com wrote:
To be encyclopedic, wikipedia has to invent the culture-independent encyclopedic style, which goes beyond existing nation-centric scholarship (actually, it's easier for technical fields). I see "WP:NPOV" and "WP:RS" as good ideological foundations for this work. But for now, it's like Communism and Soviet Russia: The ideology sounds good, but it is not yet here, and we don't know if it is actually feasible.
I think NPOV is our greatest innovation, much more radical than letting anyone edit the website. There are fields we're successfully covering which haven't been covered well in this sort of detail before we got to it, e.g. Scientology-related topics on en:wp - you had critics' pages which were full of detail but almost unreadably bitter, and Church of Scientology pages which were very positive but were considered to miss a lot of important considerations. Now there's a serious attempt at neutral overview writing on the subject that really didn't exist before Wikipedia got to it.
- d.