[Foundation-l] Wikiversity

[Jimmy Wales]

Cormac Lawler wrote:
> The obvious question this raises is (as Elian has already asked):
> "where do we draw the line?"

I think this is the wrong way to look at the question.  The whole point 
of NPOV is that it is not about line drawing.  It is about a social 
approach to collaboration.  We draw the line at the point where we have 
consensus among virtually all reasonable people that the material is 
neutral.

> We could orchestrate, for example, a policy that says "Wikiversity
> will not host materials that endorse a particular world-view". But
> then, we are excluding all religious material (and not all religious
> material is bad). It could well be argued that much of what most
> people consider to be appropriate educational material espouses a
> particular world-view, such as that of free-market economics,
> feminism, whatever.

It could well be argued that this is one of the things which is deeply 
flawed about proprietary texts... the passing off of propaganda of 
whatever kind as being educational materials.

> This is a difficult issue that we can't simply dismiss out of hand.

Certainly, we do need to discuss it in detail.  But I think it would be 
a tragic mistake to dismiss NPOV out of hand based on arguments which 
fail to draw on our deep experience with how it works and what it means.

--Jimbo