[WikiEN-l] Neutral point of view

[SlimVirgin]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:44 AM, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> A big part of the point of NPOV is that if you don't agree with
>  postmodernists like Lyotard (quoted below), you can write carefully and
>  clearly, striving for neutrality as best you can manage, and be
>  satisfied that the result is useful.
>
>  And if you are in agreement with Lyotard, and regard the pursuit of
>  knowledge as a language game, you can still play.  "If there are no
>  rules, there is no game"... and the game we are playing is NPOV.
>
Wittgenstein created the idea of a language game to describe what he
called a "form of life," which he never defines, but which is roughly
how we see the world around us -- how we use language and its rules to
allow us to think and talk about the world.

The question is whether there is a universal form of life -- to what
extent there is a shared seeing. Is there a way of seeing the world
that is shared by all Europeans? By all human beings? By all living
beings?

Wittgenstein says no: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand
him." In other words, your form of life defines what you can
articulate (and vice versa), and what you can see, what you can think
about, and what you can know. That might be very limited -- regarding
some issues, it might only be people within your own culture who can
see certain things.

This tells us that the idea of a neutral point of view is impossible.

For example, look at our article on [[Girl]]. There is no hint there
that throughout history and still, the birth of a girl has not been a
cause for celebration; that they are left to die, and sometimes
actively killed, or aborted. Now, we could add this to the article --
that culture X does or did this, culture Y this or that. But the tone
of the article would never truly reflect that this has been the
serious position of many societies. No matter how dominant a position
this was within the world, our article would never reflect it. Anyone
who tried to create that reflection would be accused of POV pushing.

One of my interests is the way we treat and view animals. There would
be uproar if I started adding information about the treatment of
non-human animals to all relevant articles -- and not only that, but
if I were to change the tone of the articles so they were written as
if by a Martian who had no preference between the human and the
non-human.

The way we avoid even the possibility of NPOV is by insisting that the
POVs we reflect must have been published by reliable sources, and that
NPOV must reflect the proportion of the POVs as reflected by those
sources. I support this, because there is no other way to write a
reliable encyclopedia. But what it means is that any notion of NPOV is
lost, because the sources we respect reflect the dominant POVs of
people we regard as educated in our own language, which Wikipedia
simply repeats.

What we really mean by NPOV is a position that all educated holders of
the dominant POVs within the English-speaking world can accept as
valid and responsible. It's a wonderful achievement when an article
manages to cater to those positions. But it is not neutrality.

Sarah