[Textbook-l] Re: Textbooks

[Daniel Ehrenberg]

--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> 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

Well, I think the encyclopedia should continue being
written as [[Wikipedia:NPOV]] and we should
differentiate between this more on-topic POV and
classic NPOV, by calling this new subset of NPOV
'DPOV'. Just for clarity.
-LDan

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