[Foundation-l] NPOV as common value? (was Re: Board statement regarding biographies of living people)

[Ting Chen]

Hallo Brianna,

NPOV is mainly a principle of Wikipedia, later also used by Wikibooks 
and Wikinews. There is at least one project (Wikiversity) which 
explicitely allow participants not to follow NPOV, but the Disclosure of 
Point of Views in Wikiversity follow in principle the ideal of NPOV: It 
tells the reader and participants that the content has a point of view 
and thus gives the reader and participants to be aware of this and 
accordingly to adjust their judgement in reading and writing the content.

The question here is about projects like Commons or Wikisource. Mainly 
they collect free content and serve as a shared repository for other 
projects so that these other projects can use these content. The content 
themselves may have POV, that's for sure, and we don't make edits or 
comments in these sources to make them NPOV. But we do category them. 
And at least here we do make sort of comment in the source. Let me take 
an example that actually happend on Commons. It makes a diffrence if we 
categorize a caricature of an israeli bus in form of a coffin to the 
very neutral Category:Bus or to more commentary category 
Category:Political caricature or to the very strong commentary category 
Category:Anti-israeli caricature. It makes very big difference how 
Commons categorize such images. And I am in these cases more for the 
implementation of a similar policy like Wikiversity's Disclosure of 
Point of View: A source with a very strong bias of point of view should 
be accordingly categorized. With that we do nothing else as to hold our 
principle ideal of NPOV on projects like commons.

The example of the caricatures also show that although the majority of 
our Commons community are indeed interested in free content and NPOV, 
but there are seemingly also people who had discovered Commons as a 
medium to broadcast their political agenda. And for me this is a very 
strong abuse of our principles. IMHO the community should not close its 
eyes and does so as if this is not real.

Commons is a very unique project, you see this alone on its URL, it is 
not de or en or fr or ar.commons.org, but commons.wikimedia.org. I 
recognize what you said about the two possible natures of Commons, but I 
also think that Commons is both. It is a service project, but it is not 
a zombie or a gollem without its own insights and ideals.

Ting

Brianna Laugher wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think the Board's statement is quite commendable if unremarkable
> (which is I guess part of the reason for the silence - nothing new,
> which is as it should be!). Only one comment actually surprised me.
>
> 2009/4/21 Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net>:
>   
>> The Wikimedia Foundation takes this opportunity to reiterate some core
>> principles related to our shared vision, mission, and values. One of
>> these values which is common to all our projects is a commitment to
>> maintaining a neutral point of view.
>>     
>
> I find it a bit strange to talk of Wikimedia Commons as having a NPOV
> policy. Like Wikiquote, our "unit" of interest is something that
> typically has a strong authorial voice rather than being a synthesis
> of multiple contributions. (Unlike WQ, it does in some circumstances
> make sense to edit a file, unlike a quote -- but usually if the edit
> radically changes the meaning, it should become a separate, derived
> work.)
>
> We are also, like WQ, bound by the creations of others, especially in
> relation to past events. If there is some past conflict, where the
> (free) media is available only represents one side of the conflict,
> there is nothing we can do to "balance" that. So there is an external
> limit on how "neutral" we are able to be.
>
> I also find there is some tension between the views of 1) "Wikimedia
> Commons as a service project" and 2) "Wikimedia Commons as a project
> in its own right".
> According to 1), the files in Commons are "context-free", waiting to
> be used somewhere and given context. And context is a major part of
> NPOV. As a service project, it would not be up to us to decide
> questions of "proportional representation", because that would all
> depend on how they are used in the projects.
> According to 2), the Commons community would have a role to play in
> deciding appropriate proportional representation, and we would assume
> the Wikimedia Commons itself is a context of use for the files.
>
> This plays into the question of how much autonomy the Wikimedia
> Commons community has. If we have a curatorial role beyond being
> "license police" and enforcing our necessarily very broad project
> scope, then that must be negotiated between these two views. I
> definitely believe it is not Common's role to decide "for" projects,
> which free media they should use. So this is something of a constraint
> for (2).
>
> It *may* make sense to talk to NPOV for Wikimedia Commons, but I don't
> think it is necessarily obvious, or that it should be assumed everyone
> has a shared understanding of what that means.
>
> Of interest: <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Neutral_point_of_view>
>
> cheers,
> Brianna
>
>   


-- 
Ting

Ting's Blog: http://wingphilopp.blogspot.com/