[WikiEN-l] Neutral point of view

[Wily D]

Most articles are written by a host of people who have a wide
assortment of biases.  Going over the biases of everyone involved in
writing [[Muhammad]], say, would take weeks or months.  Realistically,
in a "wiki"-model, the reality is a huge mismash of biases exist, and
we hope they more or less average out (this is really only expected as
the number of involved editors goes to infinity, but usually a dozen
or two will get you pretty close) - and once dozens or hundreds get
involved we expect this.

Wiki-info or some such thing (I believe it's run by Fred Bauder)
adopts an "advocate's" POV, I believe they also have 2nd pages that
adopts the "critic's" point of view.

So you can look over what adopting an advocate's POV would look like.
The answer is that it's pretty useless as a resource - the web is
already full of biases sources - what pushes Wikipedia to the 9th most
viewed site on the internets (or wherever we live these days) is
partly NPOV - you're far less likely to be reading a blatant
misrepresentation that you are on Joe Random's website.

NPOV may only be achieve asymptotically, but that's far more valuable
than what drips out of a propoganda outlet.

Cheers
WilyD

On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 12:58 PM, Jonas Rand <joeyyuan at cox.net> wrote:
> 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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