User:Elaragirl/artNPOV

Looking over WP:NPOV, three things stand out that most people seem to ignore:

Dealing with Conflict
The neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting views, NOT as a means of proving who's 'right' or who is 'wrong'. However, since many people want to own their articles, no matter how much you fling WP:OWN at them, there is a certain level of ... intrangience in this subject.

Being 'right' or 'wrong' has no meaning in an encyclopedia. Particularly hateful is the 'sympathetic point of view' which seeks to cast everything in a rose-colored light -- of the majority.

When two views conflict, there must be either consensus, submission, or deletion. (Everything comes back to Deletion, my god and savant.) Let us examine this closer.

Consensus
Let us have an example. We have the Church of X, which has two competeing factions, the Brotherhood of Y and the Brotherhood of V. Both feel that the X originally meant something else. The Brotherhood of Y feels X was once Y and the Brotherhood of V feels that X was once V. Both sides have millions of members and are respected in society, and there is some evidence for both viewpoints.

The article on the Brotherhood of X is caught in a series of edit wars and reverts and vandalism.

The NPOV is to include both viewpoints, in subarticles about Brotherhood of Y and V, and to include neutral language that avoids the topic of what X used to be. This way, a person who knows nothing about the subject can educate themselves on all sides.

The answer is NOT to get an admin to lock the page, or to force one side to quit. Consensus must rule.

Submission
Another example is Wall Theory, which states that all forces that hold walls up rely on the Strong Attractive Force Thingy of Walls, a rock-solid scientific law that has been around for 800 years, with multiple real-world applications and research done on it. There are a few missing bits of how it works, but the theory is totally sound.

Now, the Church of Q does not believe in Wall Theory. They think the Flying Wall Angels hold up all walls, for eternity. They represent a minority of the country, maybe 30%, but still sizable. They are flying in the face of common sense.

The NPOV solution here is to admit that the only neutral point between something probably true and something probably untrue is to go with what is true in the main article, and then have a link to the page of whackaloons. Such as with Evolution vs. Creation.

The answer is NOT to ban people who edit too much, and then use WP:OFFICE to lock the damned page.

Deletion
Finally, we have the theory of Gooey Gum Power, held by the members of the Splatterfast Looney Fellowship, a church with 8 members. They are rabidly editing pages to 'convince' people of their belive, complete with linkspam, and editing good articles to fit their belief.

Delete them. Salt the pages. Delete and salt the user accounts, ban and block their IP's, and have a bot put up that deletes and reverts articles that fit a template of words the Splatterfast Looney Fellowship uses. Don't be 'nice', and fuck 'assume good faith'.

WHEN PEOPLE SPIT IN YOUR EYE, THEY DIDN'T DO IT IN GOOD FAITH. Delete and move on.

Dealing with Fact
'Fact' = "a piece of information about which there is no serious dispute." 'Opinion' = "a piece of information about which there is some dispute." If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it does not belong in Wikipedia (except perhaps in some ancillary article) regardless of whether it is true or not; and regardless of whether you can prove it or not. However, this is NOT what most people set out to do when they start hurling WP:NPOV about like some kind of flag. Instead we get this:

The neutral point of view is an objectivist mob rule. It is not used to deal with conflicting views, or to give neutral bias and equal weight to all views, but to only present whichever side has the most editors, admins, etc. Whatever view is held to be 'NPOV' is right and everything else is 'wrong'. A fact is whatever agrees with the NPOV of whoever is trying to claim their 'facts' are more factual than someone elses facts, which are always derided as 'opinion'. If a viewpoint is held by some tiny number of people, it MUST be included since NPOV includes 'all views'. To me, this is a result of idiots cherrypicking WP:NPOV for whatever they see fit. It makes many AfD and Arb disputes look like packs of squabbling schoolchildren.

==Dealing with Controversy