[Wikipedia-l] Historical NPOV and wikipedian NPOV

Sat Dec 14 14:28:00 UTC 2002

Hi,

you're correct that this was one of my disagreements with Julie. I  
actually agree with Julie that a strictly historical article should not be  
laced with modern moral judgments (i.e. "women were treated unfairly,  
according to .."). It's perfectly OK to include these, in attributed form,  
in a designated section or separate article.

However, the major disagreement was whether certain *interpretations* of  
the facts, especially of causes/effects - not moral judgments - should be  
presented, or whether they should be regarded as "outdated" and discarded.  
For example, was the church anti-scientific to make sure that its own  
viewpoint was the only one that could prevail? Was it the cause of the  
irrationalism of the period? Or was it simply an institution that grew out  
of the chaos that followed the decline of the Roman empire, one that  
brought order into chaos and preserved knowledge that would otherwise have  
been lost? (A frequent relativistic/apologist interpretation.) These are  
both not moral judgments, although moral judgments could be derived from  
both.

I think that any interpretation that is properly attributed and verifiable  
has a place on Wikipedia. Otherwise, our only alternative is to use  
whatever is the "scientific consensus" (what is scientific? when is  
consensus reached? do we ban all previous interpretations? do we ban all  
non-scientific interpretations, e.g. creationism? does the English  
Wikipedia concern the American scientific consensus or the African one?).  
Not all interpretations have the same place, but IMHO it is especially the  
extreme fringe (e.g. the theory that 200 years of medieval history were  
invented) that should be condemned to the fringes of Wikipedia.

In general, I am against *deleting* attributed, verifiable information.

Regards,

Erik