Supporters of the NPOV policy include: Larry Sanger, Koyaanis Qatsi, sjc, tbc, AxelBoldt, J Hofmann Kemp, -- April
Opponents include:
Are links to 'Verified Scientific Sources' a problem? This is relative to some work I'm doing with the Dyson_sphere article. In other non-wiki articles I see numbers bandied about with no verification. Would it be proper to refer to a Nasa site as the source for average earth orbit, or mean earth diameter? I suppose those are numbers everyone is just supposed to 'know', but as I do NOT know those numbers, I find it useful to refer to a source that isn't likely disputed. NASA, agree or disagree with their policies, should be a fairly reliable source that particular data.
I also recently added to an 'Immigration Week' post for January 1. I had zero idea what 'Immigration Week' is, but it turns out I could find a source that stated explicitly their origin from the 'Net. Without realising it might be a 'Neutral point of view' issue, I added the link as a reference.
If such links are inappropriate, I can understand the removal, or modification. I'm simply of the 'doubtful skeptic' crowd, and I'm anxious to see external verification references where possible and fitting. --Romaq
Romaq, check out the new NPOV draft article on meta.wikipedia.com. Sourcing things is always good, but there are issues with regards to having Wikipedia self-contained (ie, if the data is important, make a wikipedia article out of it, put the reference there, and reference the article), and disrupting the flow of the article. --Robert Merkel
First, let me give my belated congratulations to the authors of this page. I also want to withdraw a suggestion I made earlier: while I like "perspectivist point of view" better than 'neutral', I grant that use of the former term would probably hurt the project more than it would help. That said, I have questions about one part of the policy as it appears on this page. I would like to see an explanation of both the meaning of the policy against original research and the reasons for it. If I keep pestering mathematicians, some of them will attempt to correct some of what they call the false math on wikipedia. Do people want them to attribute every correction to a known mathematician? This doesn't fit wikipedia practice as I've observed it, and I think it would strongly discourage participation by mathematicians. On the other hand, if someone wants to correct or add a non-mathematical argument, I would want that person to at least say something like "One might think" first and also mention any rebuttals he or she knows. (Although I might have problems defining 'non-mathematical' precisely.) What exactly does Larry say about adding arguments? I recall a mention of "significant, published" arguments in the entry. How do I recognize a significant argument? For that matter, how do I recognize a published argument? Do webpages count? What if I contributed to the webpage? --Dan
Good questions, but better to discuss them on Meta-Wikipedia. --LMS
The stricture to avoid bias increases the effort of writing an article and therefore (presumably) results in less writing getting done. Filling an article with bias seems to have the opposite effect - it results in more writing getting done, because someone else is bound to jump to add a conflicting bias. Then someone else can come along and refactor all this into a more neutral article.
So to encourage the creation of more articles, perhaps the rule should be, be as biased as you like.
A nice theory, but I am sure it would be a disaster in practice. There would be just too much bias for people to correct, and people wouldn't correct it in the long run, I think. I just think it's a lot more important that Wikipedia articles be unbiased. I can't stress how crucial I think this is. If you want me to explain why I think it's so crucial, I can do that in an essay--I don't think I've really explained it yet. (I've only explained why I think they should be unbiased, not why I think it's so goll-dang important that they should be.) --LMS
I agree with Larry. I think such a policy would turn Wikipedia into a big mess. -- Stephen Gilbert
Thirds. Remember, it is important to have people reading Wikipedia as well as writing to it, and I think that if a large amount of biased material built up it would not encourage people to change it so much as find someplace more tolerant of their viewpoints. --JG
I love the implicit meta-debate going on here, which is whether or not it's possible to avoid bias. That it isn't is the cornerstone of postmodern philosophy. LMS's position is based on the presumption that it's possible to be unbiased. However, I understand what he means. He's really talking about the avoidance of certain forms of bias. The "neutral point of view" is something of a better approach. That said, I too encourage "unbiased" articles. But one thing that does is encourage overuse of words like "usually" and "most", etc. etc. If entries have such vague qualifiers, then they should either be rewritten in a way to eliminate the ambiguity, or the ambiguity shouldn't have been added in the first place. Wiki, like other encyclopedias, does have an inherent bias: that of authoritativity. Which I think is good. People should be unable to argue with the content of entries, but because they're authoritative, not because they're wishy-washy.
That said, I largely agree with LMS, though I think biased material has a place in Wikipedia, sometimes under Wikipedia commentary. For an example of another approach, see the OS Advocacy page.
What I've observed in practice is that biased articles and comments get pounced upon very quickly. This rule was proposed after observing this. The fact of the matter is, the wikipedia process makes being highly biased unrewarding because a biased article is amended very quickly. As such, there is no need to have strictures against biased writings. Since there is little reward for biased writings, there is little need for discouraging that sort of behavior.
Perhaps people think that Wikipedia is collaborative in that one person will write one article, someone else will write another article, etc., until we have a big pile of content created by many different people. But the real essence of the wikipedia process is that articles themselves evolve under the loosely collaborative effort of numerous editors, unknown to one another and separated by an indefinite amount of time. Articles started today may one day be amended by editors yet unborn. The result of this process is that articles will gradually come to represent a consensus view, one that is mostly satisfactory to most people.
All this process needs is input. Bad input is not a significant cost because it is corrected very quickly. It may have value because it incites people to include other inputs. And this gets the process of evolution started.
It's equivalent to pitching the legion's eagles into the opponent's camp. It gets people moving, but not because they are happy or like what is happening, and I wouldn't be surprised if most people find it gets old fast. Something to be used sparingly at best. Surely we have more respect for our authors than to try to get them to work in such a fashion. --JG
Tim, maybe the reason biased articles are pounced on so quickly is precisely that we have a firm rule against bias; if we were to remove the rule, maybe they wouldn't be pounced on so quickly. I don't know if this is true, but it sure seems plausible anyway. New people (and maybe the old ones) might begin to view biased claims made in a given article as the "right" of the person who added them, and be less likely to de-bias the claims (after all, if there's no community animus against bias then what justification is there to render the article unbiased?). --LMS
I think and hope that Larry's right. I hope that I will jump on an article that is biased, even if I happen to enjoy the bias. Why do I do that? In part because we have all loosely committed ourselves to an ideal. The commitment itslef, as expressed in the loose community mores, is important to me in my role as a contributor.
The expressed consensus rule also serves as a reference point in case someone comes along and gets mad about us editing out their bias. They may say "Hey, why can't I be biased? Why do you jerks keep editing my article to be unbiased?" Because we have an expressed commitment to a lack of bias, we have a reasonable answer: because that's the community consensus of what Wikipedia is about. --Jimbo Wales
24 - the idea that any author can avoid bias, or that any informal process of m:governance can reduce it to zero is absurd. Each group and study has its own standards for assessing a statement of fact, and of course if it is possible to identify why you believe something matters, you can use (3), or if you're aware of looking at something very differently, you can use (2), but any author will find sneaky ways to do (1) - like reverting everything that has a point of view at all. This rule is entirely wrongly stated. What matters is to notice a Governing Ontological distinction that guides your own cognition. That done, you can start to share it, and see how it differs from the views that drive the world...
Unless somebody can provide a good reason not to, I will move this article to the wikipedia namespace. --maveric149, Saturday, April 6, 2002
With Larry Sanger gone, much of the context of NPOV has been lost... obviously just saying "this is NPOV" or "this is not NPOV" does very little to tell you how to fix it, or how to balance sources, or deal with outright catfights. I think this is why meta is so full of articles about ethics... some of this material would be useful to those presently discussing the issue.
I'm not sure what meta does vs. what wikipedia does, but "meta" in my mind implies a guiding philosophy or "meta-physics" by which we determine how real we think things, e.g. physics, "actually are". It's stuff of current interest, as opposed to historical or "community" commentary which I think is best moved to wikipedia.
If someone wants to form a political party to take over the wiki, to me, that's meta, since they'll have a philosophy and they'll expound it as one. If a bunch of people just want to complain or point out each other's faults, that's not meta, and it should go in wikipedia.
So it all depends on how you see this article... and the commentary...
This really is more suited to be in wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view, because that is what it is. It really isn't appropriate to just dump this in the meta. I wish it was possible to make wikipedia talk archive:Neutral point of view. So I don't know what to do with it. --maveric149
First of all, I was reading this article, and when I saw the NPOV acronym I was completely lost, that is until I clicked over to this talk page. Now I realize that NPOV stands for Neutral Point of View, but it may be nice to provide that definition in the article itself. Also in the sentence:
"[...] we often use so-called scare quotes. In the Middle Ages, we "knew" that the Earth was flat."
I'm pretty sure that should be "square quotes" and not "scare quotes" unless I'm mistaken.
I'm going to exaggerate the point a bit, but the current way the NPOV is presented is misleading and dangerous. True neutrality is unachievable without omniscience, and that's unachievable. A neutral point of view is something that can be worked toward, but we are imperfect beings with imperfect knowledge and imperfect language. Only perfect beings can be truly neutral. --The Cunctator
One change I might suggest for this page is a re-ordering of the non-English languages listed. For instance, hardly anyone speaks Esperanto; that should be listed last. Hephaestos
