[WikiEN-l] NPOV and how to find and maintain it

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

It's time that I pipe up on this.

Under the subject header, Re: [WikiEN-l] Neutrality enforcement: a proposal
At 06:30 PM 5/8/2009, Sam Korn wrote:
>On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 11:24 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>[...] Even though a core of opinionated-though-neutral editors
> > accumulates, there's an eternal stream of people who don't know and
> > don't care about NPOV or Wikipedia principles in general - as far as
> > they're concerned, someone is being WRONG on the Internet.
>
>Indeed.  The solution to Israel-Palestine disputes on Wikipedia is
>that there be some lasting resolution to the meatspace
>Israel-Palestine conflict.  Sadly, I think that is beyond the
>capabilities of even our esteemed Arbitration Committee.

Actually, no, though it's the community that can help, and the 
Committee can only have some influence. There is no way for the 
Committee, as far as I can see, to enforce what is needed, but it 
could recognize it and encourage it and discriminate between 
disruption that maintains lack of consensus and disruption that 
increases consensus.

The key to understanding this is, first of all, that NPOV isn't a 
thing, a fixed state, a property of text in itself, it is a balance 
that represents consensus.

We can measure NPOV by the percentage of editors who agree with a 
text, and our goal should always be 100%. While we may, in 
controversial areas, never be able to reach 100%, we should always 
maintain some level of skepticism that text is truly neutral if there 
is even a single dissent from a responsible editor. We may have 
overlooked something, and, if that editor can find *any* support from 
other responsible editors, we should, as a community (which may 
require only one of us initially), examine the reasons for dissent 
and see if it is possible to address them and either convince the 
dissenting editors to support the text or, if we become convinced 
that the text can be improved to broaden consensus, implement that change.

I have written a draft essay that examines this, and a process that 
could be followed, at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Abd/NPOV_and_how_to_find_it

Comments, here or on the essay Talk page are invited. The draft at 
this point is written from a personal POV, but my intention is to 
edit that out and to leave a citation behind to the original essay 
from history, so edits to the essay to improve it and make it general 
and not personal are also invited. TIA.