[WikiEN-l] Challenge: explain NPOV in a sentence.

[Dabljuh]

On Tue, 8 Aug 2006 10:16:05 -0400
"The Cunctator" <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wikipedia has, and naturally should, a strong bias towards verifiable
> information.

Here I disagree. When someone reads anything on Wikipedia that goes 
against social consensus (the mainstream view, if you want), 
increasingly, the first reaction is to go "Oh Wikipedia's got it wrong!"

In a way, that's good - Wikipedia has got it wrong a lot of the
time and people should change it. But then there's the cases
- and they're frequent - where the mainstream opinion is 
terribly wrong because of various reasons, and people fight 
"The Truth (tm)" vigorously.

Consider the regrowth of neurons - only ten years ago, the
scientific consensus was that neurons would not regrow in
adults. Now we have pretty hard scientific proof that this
is simply wrong. There was never any hard proof for the 
traditional view - according to the portrayal of a neurologist -
this traditional view was simply asserted by a single individual
at a time without evidence and, rather unscientifically,  
accepted by the scientific community and transported to
popular media where it became mainstream 'knowledge'.

Yet the article on neurons reads as if new evidence was challenging
old and acting all controversial on the subject - I have little 
doubt that this is because of WP's bias towards mainstream ignorance 
rather than towards scientific knowledge. A neurologist changing
the article would soon to be bullied out of Wikipedia for "pushing
his POV..."

In science, the single most important sentence you can ever use or
hear is this one: "We don't know!" and the second most important
"We were wrong" But the mainstream doesn't work like that: 
People want absolute answers for everything, even if they're 
completely fabricated (read the bible for further info)

I disagree with a certain interpretation of NPOV that basically
says that the mainstream view should be viewed as the right POV.
The only POV that can claim to be the rightest of all, is the one
that is supported by most of the evidence - not the number of
people who believe it. I would go as far as promoting a
"scientific point of view" in favor of NPOV. 

And to imply Wikipedia had a bias in favor of scientific opinion
instead of popular, is simply delusional tbh.