| Wow, this is an incredibly bad take. Sanger claims that, in altering his early, rambling draft [1] of Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy [2], the project "no longer has an effective neutrality policy" and has endorsed an "utterly bankrupt" policy of "false balance". However, the principle of undue weight, which is what Sanger is referring to as "false balance", was already present in the exact version of the policy which Sanger edited: > Articles that compare views need not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views. We should not attempt to represent a dispute as if a view held by only a small minority of people deserved as much attention as a very popular view. That may be misleading as to the shape of the dispute. And this is precisely the policy which he proceeds to argue against! According to Sanger, the article on Barack Obama should focus more on the various short-lived media scandals and conspiracy theories surrounding his presidency, and articles on vaccines and global warming should focus more on their detractors. Of course, this is nonsense. The only thing that really changed in Wikipedia's policy was the abandonment of the clearly flawed principle that neutrality could be established by "presenting all points of view" on a topic. To understand how that policy is flawed, one need merely consider what would mean for topics with a single, simple consensus view and many fringe theories surrounding them, like Egyptian pyramids. To present every point of view about the pyramids (that they were built by or for aliens, or that their shape or arrangement has mystical powers... etc) alongside well-established scientific consensus (that they were built by Egyptians as royal tombs) would lend inappropriate weight to those points of view. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Neutral... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... |