[Textbook-l] Re: Textbooks

[Toby Bartels]

Jimmy Wales wrote in part:

>Daniel Mayer wrote:

>>Our current NPOV policy does not restrict topical
>>focus; that was my point.

>Well, it does, though, doesn't it?  If an article is about X, then it
>is about X, not "X plus some other junk that people like to argue
>about".  Often we have to fix this by adding some qualifier to the
>title.

Exactly.  If all that mav means by "DPOV" is
«restricting the topic to the discipline at hand and NPOV within that limit»,
then I agree with him about how the textbooks should be written.
But I disagree that this isn't already just part of NPOV.

In Wikipedia, when we write an article on part of biology,
then that article too is restricted to the displine of biology.
This doesn't violate NPOV, and neither will the biology textbook.
An important point is the existence (or potential existence)
of other articles on parts of the discipline of scientific creationism
(such as the attempts to pin down the dating of the flood
by cross-referencing Genesis with geological data)
and similarly, the (potential) existence of a textbook on that topic.
To be sure, we don't have those articles on Wikipedia
and probably never will have that textbook -- but we could.

The text in [[en:Wikipedia:Neutral point of view]] of course must be changed,
since it refers to a comprehensive encyclopaedia on everything.
But this is /context/, not the /essence/ of NPOV.


-- Toby