[Wikipedia-l] Re: Why I don't believe (any more) in NPOV

[Jimmy Wales]

Björn Lindqvist wrote:
> I don't either belive in NPOV. Never did and never will.

By 'never will' do you mean: no matter what, no matter if good
arguments and explanations are presented for it?  I hope not.  Because
I think that if you reconsider it carefully, you'll find that NPOV is
(by design) something that everyone can agree on.

> Whatever happens Wikipedia will get the POV of the masses, a
> conglomerat of all authors working on the project. My task is
> therefore to add my pov on things to increase the sum of all
> recorded human knowledge that wikipedia is (coming to be).  Over
> time most of the articles converge to something that becomes the POV
> of the masses - aka NPOV. Some wont, like the articles on drugs,
> because there seem to be a lot more potheads that write those than
> read them.

This is what I like to call the "competitive model" of wikipedia,
versus what we really try to encourage, which is the "co-operative
model".

In the competitive model, lots of people try to insert their own point
of view in articles, and the end result of long competition is
something that hopefuly resembles neutrality, but actually is just
"POV of the masses".  This sometimes works, but sometimes won't,
because activists are more inclined to edit that others.

Well, that's why the competitive model is wrong, and is a mindset
that we must avoid as being ultimately incompatible with NPOV.

The co-operative model is that we each try to *avoid* putting our own
POV into articles, and to write everything neutrally in the first
place.  We should always avoid the temptation to polemics, and simply
stick to a presentation that would be considered fair by all sides.

On this model, what you are doing, i.e. "add my pov on things" is
_wrong_, it is something that you should not be doing, because it is a
violation of the NPOV principle.

A valid article on drugs could be written by a pothead or by someone
who thinks that drug use should be punished with extremely harsh
penalties.  It is very likely, of course, that the *best* article
would be written by those parties working, not in a competitive
fashion to try to smuggle in their own viewpoint, but in a
co-operative fashion to try to present the facts about the issue
fairly.

I think it's very rare -- and possibly non-existent -- to have a case
where reasonable people can't work together on something
co-operatively, despite major differences of opinion.

The NRA gun rights organization says one thing.  The Handgun Control,
Inc. people say something else.  But thoughtful and sincere people
from both sides can certainly agree to fairly _characterize the
argument_, summing up the evidence neutrally.

If I may be so bold as to insert my own POV into *this* email, I think
that a big part of the problem is that the schools today teach
(implicitly or explicitly) moral and cultural relativism, combined
with a mild postmodernism that says that all speech is political, that
avoiding bias is impossible, so play it deuces wild and see what you
can get away with.

But I'm old school on things like that.  I think that neutrality is
possible.  I think that conflicts of interest are illusory and that
people who disagree about even very fundamental things can and
*should* work together to accurately summarize the issue.

--Jimbo