[WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV

[Carl Beckhorn]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:21:18PM -0500, WJhonson at aol.com wrote:
> It's not our place to decide *for* the community, what sholuld come to 
> the top of the pond.  It's our place to just skim the top of the pond 
> and write up what we find.

We can also use our actual knowledge as members of the relevant 
community of physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. to judge
for ourselves how "prominent" a particular viewpoint is, in order
to decide whether to go along with some particular content addition. 

The idea that we have to wait a few years for secondary sources to sort 
things out before we write about a piece of news would be very 
surprising to the people who edit biographical articles about current 
politicians and articles about the latest release in the Harry Potter 
series. The general practice on wikipedia is simply that if material is 
verifiable and a consensus of editors on a page favors it, then it can 
be included. Why would academic articles be different - why would we 
have to wait for history to judge a new mathematical theorem, when we 
don't have to wait for history to judge some political scandal? 

  - Carl