[Wikipedia-l] Historical NPOV and wikipedian NPOV

[martin.harper at speechmachines.com]

Hi folks.

I'm curious about the relationship between historical NPOV and wikipedian 
NPOV.

If I understand Julie correctly, historians tend to refrain from making 
moral judgements about history, particularly when the people of that 
period had a significantly different world view. So it's not OK to say 
that "women were treated unfairly", but it is OK to say that "women were 
not able to vote or own property" - the former being a statement of 
morality and the latter being one of historical fact. Similarly, 
historians explain things in terms of the temporal context, so the Rape of 
the Sabines in Rome would be explained in terms of how the romans viewed 
women, sex, marriage, and the necessity of making lots of little Romans 
who would grow up to throw weird-shaped spears and feature in historical 
novels.

However, certain periods in history have been reinterpreted by later 
generations. The inquisition is a classic example, in that some neopagan 
religions have used as a quasi-historical basis. Also, (IIRC) later 
christian leaders have retrospectively apologised for the inquisition, so 
clearly they were judging the morality of the period against modern 
morality. The inquisition has been used as evidence for the claim that 
christianity and/or organised religion is amoral. Finally, the term "witch 
hunt" is an idiom for an irrational search for evil-doers that works 
similarly to the way the Salem trials and the Inquisition are supposed (in 
popular imagination) to have been conducted.

The historical NPOV would seem (if I read Julie right) to be to ignore 
these later moral judgements as fundamentally ahistorical, anachronistic, 
and irrelevant. My question is, is the wikipedian NPOV "wider" than the 
historical NPOV: should we include content that historians would judge 
inappropriate? If so, how can we include it so that the historical view is 
not damaged or confused by non-historical approaches?

Martin Harper