On 12/19/05, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
That was it. Initiatives like this seem to think NPOV is optional rather than, say, the Number One Policy On The Site. And clearly, the creators can say "no no we mean keep within NPOV", but it's obvious that people were going to take it as an opt-out on it.
Attempts at NPOV will never cause more than heated arguments at worst for any topic in WP except for one area - biographies of living people. Therefore it seems to me that the statement "we do NPOV everywhere without exception" may warrant re-examination. You could have pretty much any policy in place (even "every article must begin with the words, <subject> is a paedophile") and you wouldn't get sued, and you wouldn't cause any major harm (except possibly to students doing last minute revision for an exam on Queen Victoria) - except for biographies of living people.
What I'm getting at is that saying "NPOV works everywhere else, it must work here" is not self evident. We must be really, really sure that both the ideal of NPOV and its actual implementation in wikipedia by real-life, fallible editors, actually work for living bios, now that wikipedia is becoming big enough and famous enough to actually matter to the Seigenthalers of the world.
Steve
NPOV is hard policy.
-- geni