On Wed, Dec 11, 2002, martin.harper@speechmachines.com wrote:
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?
I think the answer to the first question is 'yes, the later moral judgements are valuable content for wikipedia'.
The second question is harder, but the rough approach should be the usual one, of attributing the later points of view to appropriate groups (even if the group is really almost all modern people).
The difficult cases will be ones where the presentation and emphasis when describing the historical facts is coloured by modern judgements. But this problem is basically the same as making other articles NPOV, particularly ones where most current editors share the same POV. Where people see problems, they can work to fix them.
-M-