Björn Lindqvist wrote:
I don't either belive in NPOV. Never did and never will.
By 'never will' do you mean: no matter what, no matter if good arguments and explanations are presented for it? I hope not. Because I think that if you reconsider it carefully, you'll find that NPOV is (by design) something that everyone can agree on.
Whatever happens Wikipedia will get the POV of the masses, a conglomerat of all authors working on the project. My task is therefore to add my pov on things to increase the sum of all recorded human knowledge that wikipedia is (coming to be). Over time most of the articles converge to something that becomes the POV of the masses - aka NPOV. Some wont, like the articles on drugs, because there seem to be a lot more potheads that write those than read them.
This is what I like to call the "competitive model" of wikipedia, versus what we really try to encourage, which is the "co-operative model".
In the competitive model, lots of people try to insert their own point of view in articles, and the end result of long competition is something that hopefuly resembles neutrality, but actually is just "POV of the masses". This sometimes works, but sometimes won't, because activists are more inclined to edit that others.
Well, that's why the competitive model is wrong, and is a mindset that we must avoid as being ultimately incompatible with NPOV.
The co-operative model is that we each try to *avoid* putting our own POV into articles, and to write everything neutrally in the first place. We should always avoid the temptation to polemics, and simply stick to a presentation that would be considered fair by all sides.
On this model, what you are doing, i.e. "add my pov on things" is _wrong_, it is something that you should not be doing, because it is a violation of the NPOV principle.
A valid article on drugs could be written by a pothead or by someone who thinks that drug use should be punished with extremely harsh penalties. It is very likely, of course, that the *best* article would be written by those parties working, not in a competitive fashion to try to smuggle in their own viewpoint, but in a co-operative fashion to try to present the facts about the issue fairly.
I think it's very rare -- and possibly non-existent -- to have a case where reasonable people can't work together on something co-operatively, despite major differences of opinion.
The NRA gun rights organization says one thing. The Handgun Control, Inc. people say something else. But thoughtful and sincere people from both sides can certainly agree to fairly _characterize the argument_, summing up the evidence neutrally.
If I may be so bold as to insert my own POV into *this* email, I think that a big part of the problem is that the schools today teach (implicitly or explicitly) moral and cultural relativism, combined with a mild postmodernism that says that all speech is political, that avoiding bias is impossible, so play it deuces wild and see what you can get away with.
But I'm old school on things like that. I think that neutrality is possible. I think that conflicts of interest are illusory and that people who disagree about even very fundamental things can and *should* work together to accurately summarize the issue.
--Jimbo