[WikiEN-l] Re: Categories and NPOV

[Timwi]

Fastfission wrote:
> [[Category:Pseudoscience]] is one which gets objections at fairly
> regular intervals. The reasons for the objections are pretty
> straightforward -- the users making such objections are almost always
> either Creationists or Eugenicists or other people who believe in
> bodies of thought labeled as "pseudoscience" -- and the response is
> generally pretty straightforward as well: Wikipedia is not claiming
> these so-labeled articles are actually "pseudoscience", but rather
> that they are labeled *by the mainstream scientific community* as
> "pseudoscience".


It is the year 2047.

After a plentiful dinner, Bob and Stan have somehow got into this 
discussion that doesn't seem to want to come to an end. Bob is a 
Creationist, firmly believing in the truth of the Bible. Stan is a 
scientist and defends Darwin's theory of evolution.

To settle the dispute, Stan gets up and grabs a book from the shelf. The 
front cover reads, "Wikipedia 1.0 - Category Index". Knowing that if 
there's one thing he and Bob can agree on, it's the reliability of the 
world-renowned Wikipedia, he browses through it and eventually presents 
to Bob a page led by the heading "Category:Pseudoscience". His finger 
points to the place where Creationism is listed.

"See, Creationism is pseudoscience," he explains.

Bob snaps the book out of Stan's hands and browses forward a fair chunk 
of pages. Under "Category:Satanic lies", he shows to Stan, we find a 
reference to the entry on "Evolution".

"See, Evolution is a Satanic lie."


No matter how many people you can convince that listing Article X under 
[[Category:Pseudoscience]] does /not/ mean that Wikipedia takes the 
stance that Topic X is a pseudoscience, the vast majority will assume 
that it does.

And that is why people are complaining about those categorisations.

I am happy to have [[Creationism]] listed under 
[[Category:Pseudoscience]], but only because it happens to agree with my 
POV.

Maybe the only way out of this is to call the categories something 
unwieldy-but-NPOV like [[Category:Theories or beliefs widely considered 
pseudoscience]]...

Timwi