[WikiEN-l] Neutral point of view
Jonas Rand
joeyyuan at cox.net
Sun Apr 13 16:58:37 UTC 2008
I retract the statement that once appeared on User:Iambus that I will not
post to the mailing list, because it is open, transparent, and archived. The
statement is only visible to admins because it has been deleted. I will not
however be using IRC.
Wikipedia has a big flaw: neutrality. The core principle of writing from a
"neutral" point of view is contradictory: it has a point of view in itself,
and the point of view is supposedly against points of view. In the wacky
world of hypocrites and liars, there is such a thing as a point of view
without viewpoints. In reality, however, facts are limited and mostly things
are opinions, philosophies, viewpoints, or lies. Wikipedia suffers from so
many problems in article space (inaccuracies and NPOV disputes) because it
is trying to achieve the unachieveable. Neutrality only exists in people's
minds, mostly everything is opinion and you have to form your own. I propose
that neutrality should be questioned as "policy". I also peopose that
editors should be forced to admit their biases at the top of articles they
originally wrote and if someone else has a differing opinion, they should
put a line (<hr> in HTML or ---- in wikicode) and offer their opinion, sort
of like http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ThreadMode. http://mywikibiz.com has
"advocate-point-of-view", which seems like a great idea. Please don't repeat
for the thousandth time that since it's Gregory Kohs, it must be a BADSITE,
when, in actuality, it was first owned by someone else as Centiare, then
when it was deleted, Kohs put it on his home website. Thoughts?
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