At 11:21 AM 4/2/2007, "Thomas Haws" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have a lot of Wikipedia experience, particularly in the LDS area, and I
have system administrator privileges there. I know at least one other
participant on this list is an experienced Wikipedian.
The Wikipedia community stalwarts are fiercely committed to a non-negotiable
policy of non-bias. The non-bias policy states that all significant points
of view must be represented appropriately and that when any point of view is
represented, it must be done with a sympathetic tone. The best way to
improve Wikipedia is to present all information of interest with source
citations as though you were explaining to your teenage kid all the
diversity of opinion and information in the world regarding the First
Vision.
For the First Vision article, it would be appropriate to include a statement
that in the LDS Church the 1838 account of the vision is canonical.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I agree. In fact, I just edited a change to the First Vision article
to make it more NPOV (Neutral Point of View). The only way for
Wikipedia to become anti-Mormon is for LDS to avoid the site.
It is important to realize that neutral means that all points of view
are respected. Therefore, you will read things like "Joseph Smith
claimed to have a vision ..." A faithful LDS person would rather
read "Joseph Smith had a vision". However, that would not be
permitted. It works the other way as well: "Cirtics claim ..." when
anti-Mormons would probably want things like that stated as facts.
It is important to respect this neutrality. At one point, somebody
made a bunch of biased edits to some article. It was found that the
IP Address was in the church offices, and so that raised quite a
stink. The conclusion was that it was just an over-zealous employee
rather than an organized effort to bias the articles, but if too many
such incidents were to happen, it would have caused a real problem.
I hesitate to mention this (for fear things will get knocked out of
balance), but I have been working on the article "Mormonism and
Christianity", which attempts to compare the two viewpoints. In
addition to a number of LDS editors, we have a protestant who is
asking some really good questions in trying to understand what we
believe and why. If you get the right mix of people, then articles
can come together very nicely. If, however, you get too many zealots
(from either side) working on the article, it can get quite tedious,
but even the most obnoxious are helpful in that they can detect bias
in places that we wouldn't notice.
IMHO if an article is well-balanced and truly NPOV, then neither side
is happy with it. ;^)
---
Bill Pringle
work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.unisysfsp.com
http://www.unisys.com
home/school: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.personal.psu.edu/~wrp103
http://CherylWheeler.com
_______________________________________________
Ldsoss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
