[WikiEN-l] Textbooks (was: Announcing Wikimedia Foundation)

[Daniel Mayer]

Anthere wrote:
>> The reason why our encyclopedias have to be 
>>NPOV is because our audience is a  general one. 
>>The reason why our textbooks have to be DPOV 
>>is because our audience is very focused (the biology 
>>student, for example) and we need to  bring that 
>>student through the material in a logical and efficient 
>>way. 
>
>No. Wrong. One do not have to throw away 
>NPOV just for the reason the audience is more 
>focused. That has nothing to do.

No - you are totally wrong (stings a bit doesn't it? In the future it would be 
nice if you showed some respect to the opinions of others. OK?)

>Logical and efficient is totally compatible with 
>NPOV. What you suggest is "cutting" very 
>important information, that students will later 
>need to make informed decisions. Removing 
>infos is neither logical nor efficient in the long 
>term.

You are confusing a completely liberal education with the very real fact that 
most courses are designed to get students through a certain /limited/ set of 
material as efficiently as possible. In none, not one, of my college 
textbooks on biology is there any serious mention of Creationist viewpoints. 
That is /irrelevant/ information to have in a college-level biology textbook.  
In short; there are /separate/ classes that deal with that subject.

>> Same thing is true for a section of a medical
>> textbook on abortion ; we leave out most of the 
>> history and the different political views on the 
>> subject and just talk about the procedure itself 
>> and maybe have a single paragraph at the 
>> end sating something about access to the 
>> procedure and that risks doctors  face when 
>> they choose to specialize in this area. 

>I disagree with you Mav.

Now that is a nicer way to disagree. Was that hard?

>By thus doing, we will only propose technical 
>books, cold and disincarnated. That is against 
>what some people consider education is.

Maybe what /you/ consider to be what education is.  You are more than welcome 
to write liberal education textbooks that treat each area taught in a 
comprehensive, inter-disciplinary way. But don't stop other people from 
making more technically-focused works since that is what actually gets used 
in most college classrooms (at least in the US).  

Also, most people take /separate/ classes in history, science and ethics. So 
the history of the how an element has been used is irrelevant to the 
chemistry student taking inorganic chemistry; ALL that is relevant to that 
student is is the chemical reactions of the element, and its properties and 
placement in the periodic table (of course a nice and short intro on why the 
element is important would be a good thing to have but not vital to the 
subject matter). The other stuff is optional background information that is 
easily found in the element's encyclopedia article.

The goal of an encyclopedia is to present a summary of the sum total of all 
human knowledge known about a particular subject. The goal of a textbook is 
to focus on one particular part of that knowledge so that students can learn 
about that aspect in detail. 

We /already/ have a comprehensive resource in the encyclopedia for all the 
info about a certain element. Let's not confuse encyclopedia articles  with 
textbook entries or otherwise a textbook project will not be differentiated 
enough to exist for long if at all.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)