User:Peter jackson
Wikipedia: Dispute resolution#Last resort: Arbitration says "If you have taken all other reasonable steps to resolve the dispute, and the dispute is not over the content of an article, you can request Arbitration." What if it is over content? Wikipedia has no answer. Many disputes just go on and on. If you look at [1] you can see that there are thousands of neutrality disputes & that a substantial proportion have been going on for years. Arbcom were sufficiently concerned to launch an RfC: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Content dispute resolution. It's never been closed & archived.
Wikimedia says
Consensus should not trump NPOV (or any other official policy). However, a group of editors may be able to shut out certain facts and points of view through persistence, numbers, and organization. This group of editors should not agree to an article version that violates NPOV, but on occasion will do so anyway. This is generally agreed to be a bad thing and to be avoided.
This is one consequence of the lack of effective dispute resolution. In some articles a group of editors impose their own bias, and there's no effective system of enforcement of neutrality.
Yet the Wikipedia community won't even admit it has a problem: "The community generally believes that the Wikipedia method works" (Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct/Creation#Wikilawyering).
I think the best I can do is not help Wikipedia with content any more, but support the competition instead, though I still make comments from time to time related to possible reforms (there's now Wikipedia: WikiProject Dispute Resolution, which might eventually find a solution). Maybe competition can eventually force Wikipedia to reform.
What about the competition? Citizendium gives experts authority over articles in their sphere, which should solve the problem in those areas where they actually have a resident expert. So far there are many areas where they don't. Wikinfo solves serious disputes by simply letting each side write their own articles and then putting a see-also at the top. Some people go even further & have separate encyclopaedias for their points of view: Conservapedia, Liberopedia & no doubt others.
[edit] Policies
[edit] Reliable sources
Buddhist sources aren't reliable sources for the views of any other Buddhists. You wouldn't trust the Pope or Billy Graham for an accurate & unbiased account of Christianity. This is just common sense. Whether it's also Wikipedia policy I'll leave for others to argue about. Users might like to consider the meaning of the references to "third-party" sources in WP:V & WP:RS.
Western Buddhism is almost entirely of a type that emphasizes modernist elements (Routledge Encyclopedia of Buddhism, 2007, page 286), so gives an unbalanced picture of Buddhism as a whole.
WP policy (WP:PSTS), in accordance with common sense, is to prefer sources as specialized as possible. It seems reasonable to start with general sources with extensive bibliographies. Note that these scholars are not obliged to comply with Wikipedia's criteria for reliable sources in compiling their bibliographies. I give numbers of authors to indicate how specialized a book is. Numbers of entries in bibliographies are from my own counts, so liable to error. In particular, I haven't checked for duplication between different sections.
- Bechert & Gombrich, World of Buddhism, Thames & Hudson, 1984: 11 authors; 297 illustrations, including 82 in colour; longest bibliography (375 entries) I've found in a readable book on Buddhism
- Eliade, ed, Encyclopedia of Religion, Macmillan, 1987: including 185 articles on Buddhism (listed volume 16, pages 99-101); all articles have their own bibliographies
- Buswell, ed, Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Macmillan, 2004: over 400 articles written by over 200 scholars; all articles have their own bibliographies
- Mitchell, Buddhism, 2nd ed, Oxford University Press, 2007: 1st ed, 2002, has longest bibliography (181 entries) I've found in a recent readable book on Buddhism
- Keown & Prebish, ed, Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Routledge, 2007: written by 23 scholars; bibliography 685 entries
One simple criterion for how reliable something is: what language(s) do you need to know to have first hand knowledge of the topic? To study Buddhism in a particular country you need its language & maybe a classical language too. Exception: India, where much of the literature survives only in Chinese or Tibetan translations. To study Buddhist art or architecture you may not need any languages at all. For pan-Buddhist studies of scriptures you need Pali, Chinese & Tibetan. For pan-Buddhist studies of Buddhism on the ground you need about a dozen languages.
See also /Textbooks.
