QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 14th June 2010, 3:54pm)
The issue I would love for them to consider is, of course, "Is there truly such a thing as the neutral point of view?" Is there any neutral point of view at all? If so, is it necessarily unique? Can there be more than one neutral point of view? Is is possible that Wikipedia has fetishized the concept of neutrality to the point that it no longer understands what neutrality is?
I note that none of the commentators on the workshop so far are willing to question the existence of the "neutral point of view". Someone needs to spike the kool-aid.
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying it, but it seems to me that an article is NPOV if you can't tell what side its writer is taking on the issue. For example, when I write a WWII article, I try to make it read like neither side was good or bad or deserved to win or the winning side's victory was inevitable.
With the global warming articles, its a little more complex than, I think, a lot of people realize. There are different levels of belief or skepticism involving the theory of human-caused climate warming. The beliefs range from alarmists who appear to truly believe the earth is doomed unless drastic action is taken very soon to deniers who think there actually has been no warming. Most people, of course, fall somewhere between those two positions. WMC and his group appear to lean towards the alarmist opinion and make little-to-no attempt to give any other position on the subject in the involved articles. What makes it worse is that, in my opinion, WMC is also trying to help his RealClimate colleague Dr. Michael E. Mann and friend and Climategate participant Phil Jones, whose research and ethics are, to say the least, under rather severe scrutiny with both scientists' reputations and careers at stake.
So, what ends up happening in the global warming articles is that WMC's cabal fights tenaciously over any proposed information addition to any of the global warming articles, including BLPs, which appear to water down to any extent the more alarmist position on warming. A case in point is the recent battle over the
Gore Effect article. The only topic area I've seen besides global warming where involved editors tried so hard to
keep information out was in the Palestine/Israel articles. In that case, however, both sides were often trying to do it. With Global Warming only one side is usually trying to keep information out that they don't like, no matter how reliably sourced it is.
This post has been edited by Cla68: