[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

[Chad Perrin]

Stirling Newberry wrote:

> 
> What about the vast majority of our readers who have needs that are 
> being ignored while certain individuals ride their private hobby horses? 
> The major challenge of wikipedia is to make sure that the community's 
> activities push towards the best possible knowledge source while 
> restricting the ability of organized groups of users to slant the pedia. 
> After hundreds of posts on the arguments over hypothetical wikis, I am 
> going to invoke the NPOV requirement that points of view be represented 
> in proportion to their importance. Overwhelmingly our readers are in 
> major languages, and the challenges facing these large wikipedias should 
> be occupying far more of the discussion than is currently the case.
> 

It seems to me that NPOV is a policy meant to be applied to encyclopedic 
articles, not to metadiscussion on a mailing list.  While I agree that 
(at this time) it is probably more "important" to work toward ironing 
out the major issues with the already extant and sizable language 
wikipedias than it is to create a myriad of less-sizable wikipedias, I 
don't think your justifications for your approach to the matter are 
really valid.  Of course, that's just my POV.  Luckily, this mailing 
list seems to be an appropriate place to air my POV, unlike an 
encyclopedia article.

-- 
Chad
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