No subject

"Wikipedia is a collaborative project, with a common goal shared by its 
creators and most participants: 

Our goal with Wikipedia is to create a free encyclopedia--indeed, the 
largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and in terms 
of depth. We also want Wikipedia to become a reliable resource."

I am having some trouble understanding how we are to reconcile
breadth, depth, and reliability with concise "NPOV" summaries of 
major areas of human activities.   I can understand that we might 
want all major initial articles or subjects to start with an
"NPOV" summary and then get more specialized as greater depth 
and detailed logical arguments or explanations are provided 
in linked sub articles.


> 
> > Communism was certainly a great experiment, the results of which generated
> > a great deal of knowledge, there is no point at all in throwing the
> > knowledge away.
> 
> I'm not saying that we should throw this knowledge away. I am just questioning:
>  1. How much of it should be on Wikipedia, and

All of it that someone chooses to include which
can be edited into an NPOV presentation to interested
readers?

>  2. If it should be on Wikipedia, where

Good question.  I propose we use hiearchies starting with the most 
general overviews and link to greater depth, breadth, and detail.   
This would imply that "Marxist view of Freedom" would be linked from 
somewhere under the "Freedom" hiearchy as well as from anywhere someone 
wants to reference the Marxist view of freedom rather than the "American
blue collar union view of Freedom" (Collective bargaining
without fear of assault or retaliation) or the "Enron view of Freedom 
to manipulate electricity futures markets" (Executives should not be
accountable or restricted).

> 
> What I was arguing was that the answer on question 2 should be "either on
> the page on Marxism or on the subject page, NOT on a page called 'Marxist
> view of <subject>'".

The Marxist.org "Freedom" glossary article is quite lengthy
and detailed with a lot of nuances.  It is difficult for me
to see how we could include all nuances, add debunking or 
countering arguments, add other POVs properly labeled and
transformed to facts of the form required by the NPOV and
compress this all into a single NPOV article of suitable
length for efficient serving to browser clients.

It seems to me that we might end up with hundreds of pages
called "Freedom from View X" before we get close to a complete
NPOV treatment of the concept "Freedom".  Each of these pages
will need extensive linking to vague concepts and data such
as Social Security and Trickle Down Reagonomics to support
charges of freedom to starve or be taxed, inappropriately
or appropriately according to some specific view.  Where
controversy exists various evidence and arguments for and
against various positions must be described and attributed.

The overview NPOV article "Freedom" is thus likely to require
many iterations of editing as various more detailed views
are created with augmenting details to categorize, summarize,
and lead the reader to links providing the more detailed 
information as they become interested and choose to pursue
specific topics.

I agree that it may be possible to refactor these anticipated
hundreds of pages of draft contributed material discussing 
"Freedom" as areas of agreement and disagreement are identified, 
clarified and suitably chunked in NPOV articles suitable for 
link referencing.   Much of the refactored material might end up
relinked away from the resulting article hiearchy of "Freedom" to 
history article hiearchies or special topics such as "Politics 
of the 20th Century" under the politics hiearchy or whatever.  

I also agree with you in doubting that much of it should merely 
be deleted or left out if a contributor is willing to write or 
edit it responsibly according to our published guidelines.  
In my view, this would be inherently non NPOV, approaching censorship 
or rewriting history via omission.

This degenerates into a question of revision control.  How
do we manage draft material (in work or under construction) 
vs. properly presented NPOV material suitable for serving 
to the public at large as "reliable", in depth, broad treatment
of available human information or knowledge.

Detailed POVs properly labeled (thus fullfilling the NPOV requirement)
could be left as orphans, linked into lists of labeled POV, or
linked into NPOV articles as pertient labeled POV until
they can worked over sufficiently by diverse contributing editors.

Regards,
Mike Irwin