On Sep 19, 2006, at 7:40 PM, Ben McIlwain wrote:
Don't hold ArbCom as a threat over the heads of other editors; it
doesn't work and it's not a good tactic.
Don't threaten to remove valid content. It's an even worse tactic.
And as for NPOV articles ... if someone is being paid
to write
articles
on these businesses, it isn't going to be NPOV, but it's going to
be POV
in a way that you could only establish it as such if you were
intimately
familiar with the subject matter, or were prepared to do lots of
research. That's why we have the general prohibition against
publicity
articles; they tend not to be NPOV, and even when they do appear to
be,
they likely aren't.
Actually, all we have is a vague admonition against autobiography.
It's "considered proper." Nothing else. Consider the [[Cyrus
Farivar]] case - the article was started by him. But he's a notable
figure, and we kept it. Likewise, if the company is notable, and
nobody can find anything wrong with the article, we assume good faith
and keep it.
For instance, I could write one hell of a POV article
about hypernovae
that would totally discount one of the two major theories in the field
as to how they occur, and yet simply by reading the article you would
never know it, and it would only be after doing some in-depth study on
the subject that you would realize that what I wrote was utterly
not NPOV.
You're right! We should make sure that people who know anything about
physics topics aren't allowed to, because they'll probably just
advance their own pet theories.
-Phil