User talk:Stephen Bain/Content policy

Contributors who force their own perspective into articles or refuse to integrate opposing viewpoints into articles on controversial topics do Wikipedia a disservice.

I have suffered much internal turmoil over the problem of POV-pushing and was much distressed to find that opponents of neutrality at Wikipedia had managed to turn the tables on me: they got me branded as a "tendentious" editor and a "POV-pusher", which is far from the truth. I only ever wanted articles on controversial topics to refrain from endorsing either side; and for them to include opposing views, even if marked as "minority" views.


 * we exclude exaggerated or diminished representations of any one line of existing thought

Well, the bullet point above sounds noble and good, but that fails when enough editors band together to achieve "lock in" of their POV. See: and most of the articles relating to Communism and Genocide. (I'm not even going to touch US politics.)
 * 1) intelligent design
 * 2) theory of evolution
 * 3) global warming

The first two have a definite and pronounced materialistic bias, and the third has a pro-UN bias which verges toward pseudoscience.

I might be biased and not know it. I could be asleep and only dreaming that I'm typing this; I could be a disembodied brain (as in Danial Denett's example); maybe I just favor scientists from Harvard and MIT because I grew up in Cambridge (Mass) and my parents got postgraduate degrees from those institutions. How can I know when I'm biased? I can't know, and you can't know, which is why we need to include "marginal" ideas such as those of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen and Harvard scientist Sallie Baliunas. --Uncle Ed 12:30, 13 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I note that the articles Ed lists here are all where his participation resulted in an arbcomm ruling in which Ed was placed on probation for disruption from pov pushing. I have a hard time seeing his comment here as anything but evidence that he has failed to have gained any insight from the experience or mended his ways, and evidence of whipping up controversy and agitating to gain like-minded fellow travelers to pick up where he was forced to leave off. FeloniousMonk 04:25, 16 April 2007 (UTC)