[Wikipedia-l] Years in review and the need for editorial judgement

Jimmy Wales jwales at bomis.com
Fri Jun 28 12:46:56 UTC 2002


Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> The NPOV isn't a great help here.  It says we should resolve disputes
> by by characterising the
> dispute and letting the differing opinions speak for themselves.  
> I can't see how that helps.  Because we are space-limited, we *can't*
> just list every event that somebody (or even a large group of people)
> thinks is important, state why those people think it was important, 
> and let the reader come to their own conclusions.

Having no particularly helpful positive contributions of my own to make
this morning, I'll just acknowledge that Robert has a very strong point
here.

However, it occurs to me that NPOV is not exactly the same thing as
"going meta".  "going meta" is a useful technique for achieving NPOV,
but it isn't NPOV itself.

So special rules of the type Robert is suggesting are actually just
new techniques for working towards NPOV, rather than an exception to
NPOV.

> Let me play Devil's advocate for a minute. The fact that we might need 
> special rules for Year In Review articles makes me wonder whether 
> they are, indeed encyclopedia articles or something else entirely.
> If not, do they really belong as part of the Wikipedia or are they
> a job for another projct with different rules?  Probably not, but it's
> something to think about.

It is something to think about.  I really like your approach to thinking about it.

One of our "discoveries" is that people of very diverse opinions can
write encyclopedia articles together, using NPOV as a guideline to
mediate conflict.  It works remarkably well.  It would not work for
poetry, for political commentary, for fiction, etc.

Therefore, whenever something is "tickling" us as a potential problem 
for NPOV, we might consider whether or not that something is really
an encyclopedia article!  That's a neat approach.

But, it seems on the face of it that an article about '1976', telling
in neutral terms what happened that year is an encyclopedia article.

--Jimbo





More information about the Wikipedia-l mailing list