Proposal:Replace NPOV with Identifiable-POV
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Summary
Relax, generalize, or even eliminate the NPOV requirement in Wiki and replace it with Identifiable-POV, a requirement that articles or sections of articles clearly identify the point of view from which they are written.
Proposal
Require that sections of articles clearly identify the point of view from which they are written.
Points of view would be well defined. There would not be too many of them. Creating a new identifiable POV would involve some careful process so they don't proliferate and become meaningless. For example, there might be Scientific-Consensus-POV to represent the best current scientific thought on a matter. For a controversial organization, there might be an Insider-POV, written from the perspective of members of the organization. To diffuse the ever popular believer/skeptic debates, one could create a Believer-POV and Skeptical-POV.
It would not be permissible to have John-Doe's-Personal-POV ... too specific and not helpful. One could imagine that the various WikiProjects could own and manage a POV, to make sure that content written from a particular POV really represents that POV.
A completely non-controversial article may be written from a single point of view. Presumably, a hard-core scientific article would be written from the point of view of the scientific consensus. The content of more controversial articles would distill into the most relevant major POV's. This could be done top down by creating POV-specific divisions of the entire article, or it could be done bottom up within sections.
It would be good to avoid redundant text where there is agreement. Create Consensus-POV that would be close to the current NPOV. Consensus-POV would be the identifiable POV label for articles and/or sections for which there is agreement across other contributing POV's.
Motivation
Currently articles must be written from NPOV. But who gets to decide what is neutral? In the proposer's opinion, NPOV is a joke. It doesn't exist. Every sentence exists in the context of a point of view. You may be aware of it or you may not. Tremendous energy is wasted on Wikipedia arguing about whether or not something is NPOV. Tons of manipulation occurs in the form of the majority bludgeoning the minority into accepting that the Majority-POV must be NPOV. What passes for NPOV in wiki is actually much closer to Majority-POV or sometimes Scientific-POV or even Wacko-POV.
Key Questions
Is there a small enough, stable enough, and agreeable enough set of identifiable POV's?
Would articles become less readable?
Sometimes constructive arguing to reach NPOV ultimately creates a better article. Would this cause the overall quality to drop?
Potential Costs
Require modifications to Wiki code to make this easy to support.
References
None
Community Discussion
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