referred to:

"Wikipedia is a collaborative project, with a common goal shared by its creators and most participants:

Our goal with Wikipedia is to create a free encyclopedia--indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and in terms of depth. We also want Wikipedia to become a reliable resource."

I am having some trouble understanding how we are to reconcile breadth, depth, and reliability with concise "NPOV" summaries of major areas of human activities. I can understand that we might want all major initial articles or subjects to start with an "NPOV" summary and then get more specialized as greater depth and detailed logical arguments or explanations are provided in linked sub articles.

...

Communism was certainly a great experiment, the results of which generated a great deal of knowledge, there is no point at all in throwing the knowledge away.

I'm not saying that we should throw this knowledge away. I am just questioning:

1. How much of it should be on Wikipedia, and

All of it that someone chooses to include which can be edited into an NPOV presentation to interested readers?

2. If it should be on Wikipedia, where

Good question. I propose we use hiearchies starting with the most general overviews and link to greater depth, breadth, and detail. This would imply that "Marxist view of Freedom" would be linked from somewhere under the "Freedom" hiearchy as well as from anywhere someone wants to reference the Marxist view of freedom rather than the "American blue collar union view of Freedom" (Collective bargaining without fear of assault or retaliation) or the "Enron view of Freedom to manipulate electricity futures markets" (Executives should not be accountable or restricted).

What I was arguing was that the answer on question 2 should be "either on the page on Marxism or on the subject page, NOT on a page called 'Marxist view of <subject>'".

The Marxist.org "Freedom" glossary article is quite lengthy and detailed with a lot of nuances. It is difficult for me to see how we could include all nuances, add debunking or countering arguments, add other POVs properly labeled and transformed to facts of the form required by the NPOV and compress this all into a single NPOV article of suitable length for efficient serving to browser clients.

It seems to me that we might end up with hundreds of pages called "Freedom from View X" before we get close to a complete NPOV treatment of the concept "Freedom". Each of these pages will need extensive linking to vague concepts and data such as Social Security and Trickle Down Reagonomics to support charges of freedom to starve or be taxed, inappropriately or appropriately according to some specific view. Where controversy exists various evidence and arguments for and against various positions must be described and attributed.

The overview NPOV article "Freedom" is thus likely to require many iterations of editing as various more detailed views are created with augmenting details to categorize, summarize, and lead the reader to links providing the more detailed information as they become interested and choose to pursue specific topics.

I agree that it may be possible to refactor these anticipated hundreds of pages of draft contributed material discussing "Freedom" as areas of agreement and disagreement are identified, clarified and suitably chunked in NPOV articles suitable for link referencing. Much of the refactored material might end up relinked away from the resulting article hiearchy of "Freedom" to history article hiearchies or special topics such as "Politics of the 20th Century" under the politics hiearchy or whatever.

I also agree with you in doubting that much of it should merely be deleted or left out if a contributor is willing to write or edit it responsibly according to our published guidelines. In my view, this would be inherently non NPOV, approaching censorship or rewriting history via omission.

This degenerates into a question of revision control. How do we manage draft material (in work or under construction) vs. properly presented NPOV material suitable for serving to the public at large as "reliable", in depth, broad treatment of available human information or knowledge.

Detailed POVs properly labeled (thus fullfilling the NPOV requirement) could be left as orphans, linked into lists of labeled POV, or linked into NPOV articles as pertient labeled POV until they can worked over sufficiently by diverse contributing editors.

Regards, Mike Irwin