Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
I wish I could agree with you, but I can't. Although NPOV is the epitomy of nonbias, it's just not enough for some people. Feminists, if they looked at Wikipedia for a school, might say that we don't use gender-neutral pronouns all the time and that hypothetical people (eg. "Each person has his own variation on language, called an ideolect") aren't either female or reffered to with the clumsy "him or her" (although that's being replaced again with "her or him").
Then they should edit it. Done well, gender neutral language is invisible. Only poor writers make it seem clumsy.
I have been an advocate of gender neutral language for many years, and I think I'm pretty successful at it. To my knowledge, no one really notices it in my writing, because I avoid clumsy constructions.
There is no question, of course, that at any given point in time, there *might* be something POV about an article, including using gendered pronouns inappropriately. But NPOV, which is a social process, not a final result, is very useful.
The conservatives would complain that we report on certain topics like Wiccans and fantasy novels.
I don't think reasonable conservatives would complain that we *report on* such things. After all, *they* report on such things all the time. :-)
It is of course true that it's always possible to find some lunatic for whom any mention of hot-button topic X must include a thorough denunciation of X. We can't please those people. But even some pretty hardcore partisans who are not lunatics can agree on a presentation of X that's NPOV.
This works more often than not.
--Jimbo