[WikiEN-l] Neutral point of view

[Jonas Rand]

Why does everyone keep mentioning "mainstream" points of view? They should 
be valued no more than others. If the mainstream points are published in the 
media (notice how I didn't say the mainstream media), they should be 
included and cited. If not, they should be put there with a {{fact}} tag 
until someone finds a reference. The point of view should not be included 
based on its popularity.

> From: SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com>
>
> 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

I believe as long as there are sources for opinions, they are verifiable. 
Whether they are reliable or not should not make a difference.

No, it is not neutrality if we cater to the "certain opinions", because the 
kind of neutrality you're thinking of ("no" point of view, right) doesn't 
exist. It is also not right if we only cater to "certain opinions", either. 
We should document all opinions that are published, regardless. If you want 
to publish your opinion, you should be able to put an <hr> and put your own 
opinion. --Jonas