Re: NPOV and NOR as a local or a global policies on Wikibooks?

On 3/12/07, Piotr Derbeth Kubowicz <[email protected]> wrote:
> The problem with essays is that you can find many people having different opinions on the same topic and therefore able to write different essays covering this topic. These essays can contradict themselves. Wikimedia projects were created to provide readers with accurate knowledge; you can always correct factual errors in essays but you cannot correct personal interpretation of the facts. There will always be fundamental conflicts between various essays, people may argue about them endlessly and I think it's not what we want. Prohibition of expressing personal point of view in Wikimedia projects is a protection against self-promotion of amateur authors and nonsenses in their writing.

I completely understand why NPOV is nearly perfect for any kind of
something which we call "objective knowledge". And there is no
question about NPOV inside of factographic descriptions of anything.

However, POV analysis of art are very usable for art studies.
Actually, there is no such thing like NPOV art critics. (But it is
possible to have NPOV book about art critics.)

My point is that I think that we need, for example, "Dadaist critics
of South Park" -- for educational purpose because:

- Dadaism is not live cultural movement and it is not so obvious that
there will be some dadaist who would do so. However, it is possible to
imagine dadaist critics of South Park.
- If Wikibooks and Wikiversity want to have complete courses for some
art field, there is a lot of needs for improvisation. If there is no
some art critique which we need because of educational purposes, we
should make it. In other words, if we want to have a *real* free
source for complete education, we need a lot of things which are not
NPOV nor NOR.

So, there are a couple of solutions:
- Wikibooks and/or Wikiversity allow POV and OR for art analysis. This
is the best solution because we will have one community. Also,
realization of the goal "free education" will stay inside of the
projects which aim to work on this goal.
- Wikimedia makes another project for such purpose (something like
"wikiartstudies"). This is something like a "middle solution" because
we will have de jure one community, but de facto two. Realization of
the goal "free education" will be outside of Wikibooks and
Wikiversity, but inside of Wikimedia.
- The worst solution is to try to find a solution out of Wikimedia
(i.e. Wikia or anything else) because we will have both de jure and de
facto different communities. Realization of the goal will be outside
of both -- projects and Wikimedia.