| Neutral wrt what?
The Why position
Recently Michael Gove argued memorably in The Times, talking of the Today Programme in particular and the BBC in general, that we are all Partial Observers With Particular Prejudices. Seven years before John Lukacs, in a scholarly treatise on the deep challenges for historiography in the story of Hitler, brilliantly put it this way: Every Word Is A Moral Choice.
That summarizes the Why position on, or at least one of our Big Why Questions about, Neutral Point Of View. Still, many pages on Wikipedia show that there can be value when a group of people who disagree about some aspects of an issue agree that FAPP one or more pages has achieved npov.
In other words, we should encourage such efforts and not to be too worried if they fail to reach agreement. Following are some thoughts and definitions of npov arising from one editor's quick browse of wikipedia. Note that the wikipedia prefix is now defined in pre. Making the page names look nice may take a little longer.
The conversation is picked up with a reference to Kent Beck. And when was Kent the optimal example of npov? He wouldn't have been Embracing Change so much in - and influencing the global practises of - software if he had been. We should look at Extreme Point Of View one day. -- Richard Drake
Conversation extracted
Refering to the comment from Richard in Court Of Appeal, the quote I remember from Kent Beck (and repeat quite frequently) is "Talk about what you've done, not what you're going to do". I view this as very different from, for example, "don't talk about stuff". The Kent Beck that I know loves to talk about stuff.
Meanwhile, there is some very good material on NeutralPointOfView in Wikipedia. Not that we should make any effort to adopt their npov approach here, but that this page and its links lets us see the insights and reflections of another wiki community.
Those of you who know me from Ward's wiki know that I also prefer reshaping's that, as much as possible, retain (instead of deleting) the original. My motivation for this is so that over time the corpus acquires all points of view, instead of being relentlessly driven towards whatever perspective was "appropriate" during the refactoring.
Our community here is perhaps more receptive to my use of the Hebrew Scriptures as illustrative -- they often repeat the same story from multiple perspectives, rather than edit it into just one. More than scholar has observed that it is this characteristic that makes these texts useful as historical sources -- had they been redacted into one viewpoint, they would have been rendered hopelessly biased. -- Tom Stambaugh
Note carefully that I'm refering to Kent's attitude not to "talking about stuff" but "talking about talking about stuff", which is a very different thing. It's the many layers of what I'd call Wiki Hyper Bureacratization that I think that Keith and I have avoided well on Why, whatever its many other faults. -- Richard Drake
Yes -- well -- Kent always did say that the Metaclass circularity at the root of the Smalltalk metastructure gave him a headache. Yes, I certainly understand the distinction you draw. The reason why I so often quote his maxim is that it leads to an effective way of cutting through the Wiki Hyper Bureacratization. We can all have a constructive discussion about how something turned out after we've all lived through it, especially when we have the version history needed to undo whatever we decide was inadvertently broken. This, in my experience, is usually far less painful and more fun than arguing interminably about all the horrific things that might happen if we did so-and-so. The pithy example I like best is Kent's observation that quick interactive compilers have enabled lots of cool code by giving developers permission to make syntax mistakes, knowing that the compiler will find and gently fix it. All sorts of cool stuff emerges because developers try things that might otherwise be too scary. -- Tom Stambaugh
As for learning from wikipedia, well yes, of course we should. I haven't hopped over to read that page yet but a sensitive summary from someone who knows both communities (and preferably is trusted by me on this one) on how what has been learnt over there could benefit us here would be cool indeed. -- Richard Drake
I spent one very late night browsing around over there. It's a very different community from us, and some of the differences might be important. Interestingly, they also spawned large volumes of dialog about science and faith. Here are some highlights:
-- Tom Stambaugh
It is a very different community from us, as highlighted by Why As Review Medium and Connection-Centric View. To be fruitful here you need to Make Up Your Mind and be quite clear about that. -- Richard Drake
Fascinating, Tom, that you should mention Hebrew scriptures that "often repeat the same story from multiple perspectives". It recalls S�renKierkegaard's little masterpeice, Fear And Trembling, which starts off by retelling the story of Abraham and Isaac from multiple perspectives. It's a kind of hermeneutic Rashômon, which explores the problem of objective truth. -- Jack Rice
Here's another vital aspect, well articulated by Mark Thompson of the BBC at Davos on Friday:
For Thompson, terminology is extremely important. “We have to take into account the sensibilities of our target audiences. Excessively neutral language about events that constitute a moral outrage is extremely dangerous.” -- www.knowledgeconcierge.com/WEFPublic/summaries/Davos2005/12390.pdf
-- Richard Drake
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