[Foundation-l] NPOV as common value?
Michael Snow
wikipedia at verizon.net
Wed Apr 22 06:06:09 UTC 2009
Milos Rancic wrote:
> In relation to your Wikiquote example, I think that you were talking
> there about notability, not about NPOV.
>
To the extent that notability has any value for us at all as a concept,
it is only because it draws on the principle of a neutral point of view.
Applying quotability criteria to Wikiquote is an approach to ensuring
that it's not my point of view about what is a quotation, but instead
I'm neutrally documenting quotations used by other sources. That's a
rather straightforward form of neutral point of view, in fact, whereas
notability has proven much more challenging to define.
> NPOV is a very good starting point for writing an encyclopedia. But,
> it is not any kind of general knowledge which may be implemented
> everywhere. And, if it is treated as such, then it is an ideology.
>
> If the Board is not able to make a general scientific framework for
> projects other than Wikipedia, I think that it should hire some
> scientists to do so.
>
Scientific? Is there something scientific about neutral point of view as
a framework for Wikipedia, even? It has some similarities to the
scientific method, I suppose, but I'm not sure that's what we imagine
ourselves to be doing. Science is part of the knowledge we are
compiling, certainly. But neutral point of view is not a kind of
knowledge itself. Rather, it is an approach to knowledge, one that has
served us well and, as far as I can tell, runs through the culture of
all our projects.
--Michael Snow
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