[WikiEN-l] Neutral point of view

[Carl Beckhorn]

On 18/04/2008, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>  ... I'd suspect that what we're summarizing is in effect the 
>  consensus view of the sorts of people who happen to edit Wikipedia in 
>  a particular area, which is itself a somewhat biased sample. 

Yes, this is exactly what we are summarizing. We can't expect otherwise. 
But, because we hold ourselves open for all to edit, we hope that if an 
article is too biased, an articulate voice will rise up and help bring 
it back on target. 

"Netural point of view" is a socially constructed concept, in that as we 
make decisions about how to implement it in particular articles, we also 
define what it means, which in turn affects how we apply it to articles, 
etc.  So both the indivuduals involved in Wikipedia and also random luck 
(which incidents happen to occur in what order) will affect its meaning. 
Our use of non-prescriptive, mutable policies expedites this process.

So if I start ten encyclopedias, separated from each other but with 
similar contributors, and tell them each to make the encylopedia have a 
"neutral point of view", I expect to see ten different interpretations 
of what the phrase means.  Some might value scientific viewpoints more 
heavily, others might view "pseudoscience" and science on the same 
terms. Some might have the neutrality towards animal rights that others 
on this list have said English Wikipedia doesn't have.  I suspect such 
differences already occur between different Wikipedia projects.

 - Carl