[WikiEN-l] Stating Judgements (Was: Asimov-still POV)

Fri Feb 14 04:21:17 UTC 2003

I hope I'm adding to the signal, & not to the noise, of this
discussion with my contribution.

One problem I see in this discussion about the individual in
question is that he/she has found a serious weakness in the
rule concerning NPOV. If one were to submit to Wikipedia a comment
like "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is considered the finest musical
piece written" or "Tolstoy's two novels _War and Peace_ and
_Anna Karinina_ are considered his best writings", one could
insist that this is not a valid submission -- even though these
are judgements that are widely held and considered by many
people statements of fact, rather than opinion. And even
conceding the point that they are opinions, it would not be
that hard to find justification for this opinion, along the
lines of "Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane' was voted the best
motion picture by the American Film Institute."

I'm punting on that last example -- I don't know if that is
what they agreed to, but I hope all of you see what I am trying
to explain: a given group who is considered authoritative in
a given field, makes a judgement. And that judgement is recorded
in Wikipedia as a fact.

However, all that does in move the problem of subjectivity to
another area: how do we then determine if the authority cited
is truly authoritative? What if some troll insists on countering
the reasonable example I made above about "Citizen Kane" with
her/his own citation, "Joe Blow considers 'Manos, the Hands of
Fate' to be the best motion picture ever made"?

We could avoid this problem entirely by refusing to state that
any given work or object is considered by anyone to be the
"best", "most influential", "best known", et cetera, of its
classification. However, this runs headlong into another problem,
which I would argue is equally important: by doing so, we
contributors cannot acknowledge the existence of certain opinions,
either widely-held, or the result of informed, educated discussion.
Ignoring the fact, for example, that certain authors of literature
belong in a "canon" and should be taught in schools because of
their skill with language, ability of perception, or influence of
ideas, means that Wikipedia abdicates helping a user decide if,
as an example, V. C. Andrews should be considered the equal of
Homer, Tolstoy or Virginia Wolf. Making a statement such as,
"The UNIX operating system is favored by programmers because of
its many tools and its successful abstraction of system resources
as files" then becomes impossible and prohibited. And the same
with a statement like "Although newcomers are often daunted by the long
periods of overcast skies and long rainstorms, native Oregonians
apparently take this weather in stride."

I don't have an answer to help Wikipedia out of this dilemma.
All I can do in this email is point to it, ask that everyone
acknowledges that it is a problem that needs solving, & hope that
we can discuss this as adults.

Geoff