[Wikipedia-l] Historical NPOV and wikipedian NPOV

Sat Dec 14 13:40:00 UTC 2002

On Wed, Dec 11, 2002, martin.harper at speechmachines.com wrote:
> The historical NPOV would seem (if I read Julie right) to be to
> ignore these later moral judgements as fundamentally ahistorical,
> anachronistic, and irrelevant. My question is, is the wikipedian NPOV
> "wider" than the historical NPOV: should we include content that
> historians would judge inappropriate? If so, how can we include it so
> that the historical view is not damaged or confused by non-historical
> approaches?

I think the answer to the first question is 'yes, the later moral
judgements are valuable content for wikipedia'.

The second question is harder, but the rough approach should be the
usual one, of attributing the later points of view to appropriate
groups (even if the group is really almost all modern people).

The difficult cases will be ones where the presentation and emphasis
when describing the historical facts is coloured by modern judgements.
But this problem is basically the same as making other articles NPOV,
particularly ones where most current editors share the same POV. Where
people see problems, they can work to fix them.

-M-