CZ Talk:Neutrality Policy/Archive 1

This page was borrowed from a December 2001 policy page on Wikipedia. It needs (or needed) to be edited, but it is serviceable for our present needs.

Unibased writing and thinking is quite hard in a competitive, business driven culture. We are taught to present our beliefs in as convincing a manner as we can. So I apreciate these helpful hints:

• unbiased writing means presenting controversial views without asserting them.

--Janos Abel

Wikipedia has a similar policy on pseudoscience, but with stronger language than us. Now their neutrality policy is often embattled in so-called "arbitration" cases, should we do something to prevent that? However, in another hand, our policy with the current wording, I personally think it's less likely to have those cases like Wikipedia does. Yi Zhe Wu 18:20, 29 April 2007 (CDT)

section "An Example" contains false information

This fragment was taken from Wikipedia, and (I assume automatically) "Wikipedians" was replaced by "Citizens".

"It might help to consider an example of a biased text and how Citizens have rendered it at least relatively unbiased. On the abortion page, early in 2001 [...]"

I think that in this case it should say "Wikipedians", perhaps with some clarification, like a link to the Wikipedia page. --Ion Alexandru Morega 05:12, 9 May 2007 (CDT)

Thanks--deleted. --Larry Sanger 07:55, 9 May 2007 (CDT)

Pseudoscience

The majority vs. minority thing works well for crackpot ideas, but what about raging controversies like global warming? My reading of the science over the last 10 years indicates both (1) strong scientific support for the idea that it's mostly natural and (2) occasional polls showing a solid minority of scientists leaning toward man-made causation (but nothing like a "consensus" favoring it.

So should a CZ article on climate call the pro-anthropogenic view a "minority" view on this basis, or should our project agree with Democrats and Greens that the minority is on the other side, i.e., that there is an overwhelming consensus favoring AGW (as the recent "literature search" published in Science indicated)? --Ed Poor 20:32, 26 May 2007 (CDT)

Ed, I think your assumption is incorrect. Most scientist do agree global warming exist and is caused by carbon emission. It's undeniable. The view that global warming doesn't exist, or human activities did not contribute to it, is a minority view. Yi Zhe Wu 21:29, 26 May 2007 (CDT)

Do we have an instance here of conflicting (and unsupported) assertions? "Most scientists do agree that global warming exists..." is likely to be near the truth. Why couple to it "...and is caused by (manmade) carbon emmissions" when this last statement is clearly more controversial?--Janos Abel 05:33, 12 July 2007 (CDT)

Without taking a position on this, the real question here is a strictly empirical and factual one: how many climate scientists (not all scientists--who cares about them?) believe that global warming is caused by carbon emissions?" I think, but do not know, that it is still a large majority.

Now, the neutrality issue here is certainly not whether the article should be biased in favor of AGW because it's the majority relevant-scientist view. The article ought not to take sides, period. But if there is limited space in an article, or as an article expands, the proportion of (unbiased) space spent on non-AGW views should be commensurate with the degree of acceptance of the views among the relevant scientists.

This would not be the case in an article that is specifically devoted to summarizing the debate itself, as opposed to the state of the art.

I'd also like to point out that, as with intelligent design, we can have long meaty articles about views that are widely rejected by most scientists. (Just not idiosyncratic, clearly crackpot theories.) --Larry Sanger 06:15, 12 July 2007 (CDT)

New Proposal

See [1] for a proposal from Russell Potter.

Propagating the flat earth myth

In the introduction section of this policy, we have a poor example:

In the Middle Ages, we "knew" that the Earth was flat. We now "know" otherwise.

Historians of science have been arguing for years against this mythical characterization of medieval thought. Here is an overview of the facts. I suggest changing the example to the similar, and historically accurate, notion of the solar system revolving around the earth. —Eric Winesett 09:33, 24 November 2007 (CST)

Agreed wholeheartedly. I'd like to see this particular false notion stopped also (along with many other inaccurate but prevalent ideas about the so-called "dark ages" being close-minded and backward). I don't see any reason to stop it from being changed to "In the Middle Ages, we "knew" that the Sun revolved around the Earth ..." — the essential point is not lost in any way. Please go ahead and change it Eric. I'd do it now myself but as it was your suggestion ... Mark Jones 12:26, 24 November 2007 (CST)

I would have changed it myself, but the page is protected from editing. I'm hoping someone with the proper authority will respond. —Eric Winesett 19:03, 24 November 2007 (CST)