Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view

Policy on Demonstration of Falsehood or Formal Fallacy

When providing details on various opinions and debates, both past and present, is it beyond the scope of NPOV to enumerate or explain, detail, or discuss the particularities and structures of the arguments? Specifically how any particular line of argumentation encounter logical failings, is discounted by evidence, or falls to some point of subjective arbitration.

I am well aware that saying "This is wrong because, and therefore..." is horribly outside of NPOV, but there seems something of a grey area in the middle, talking about the legitimate failings of formal logic or insufficient, inadequate, or contrary evidence used to develop a claim. To what extent is it appropriate to provide explicit description of an argument, as a purely academic endeavor, and to what minimum is it negligent on the part of the editor to not bother including such analysis of the argument's premises and structure.

Personally, I would think that it would be less than due diligence not to provide objective detailing, bordering on deliberation as to why any particular line of reasoning may be ill founded (not the claim itself), but I would like to know a bit more of the community consensus on this one going forward, as it certainly is a question I ask myself anytime I go near a mildly controversial article.

Azeranth (talk) 09:52, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

• This is where our NPOV policy intersects with our WP:No original research (NOR) policy. We (as editors) should not conduct an analysis of an argument and reach a conclusion as to the arguments truth or falsehood... doing so would be “original” to WP. However, if others (reliable sources outside of Wikipedia) have conducted such an analysis, we can mention that anslysis. So, we can not say “X is false, because...”. Instead, we need to say “According to Critic Y,this is false, because...” (and then cite where Critic Y says it). Blueboar (talk) 12:14, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
  • I suppose I just find it a little different or extraneous to arbitrate on the following:
  • Imagine you had a source, which provided a generic rule, let's call it the "Puppy Dog's Rule" and it describes a format of deduction needed to make an assertion. Some reliable source provides "if X, then Y" and then I have a second source which asserts "X" but does not explicitly state "and therefore Y"
  • Is it beyond the realm of NOR to say "Source A says something is X, and thus according to source B, therefore Y" even though source A doesn't make the leap, and source B doesn't explicitly mention the thing the example case talked about i Source A. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Azeranth (talk • contribs) 06:27, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

But in your example, you do not know that source B arrived at its conclusion because of what source A discovered. Source A might say that puppy dogs wag their tails a lot, and source B might say that puppy dogs can damage their tails. But neither source is saying that because puppy dogs wag their tails a lot, their tails get damaged. The two facts may or may not be associative, causation or in any way related other than in your own mind. Where I personally find Wikipedia wanting is that if someone outside of Wikipedia made such a relationship regardless of foundation it may then be quoted on Wikipedia as though it were true. Varybit (talk) 15:13, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

Request for comment: proper labeling for controversial naming

With declining hard copy sales and increasing dependence on sponsor revenue, I believe many publishers are more conscientious to avoiding friction with sponsors and their industry. Often times, euphemism and double spoken labels are sometimes used for political correctness or from editorial and author bias. If the purpose of reference isn't for conveying the position presented by the source, should the word loading transfer into prose?

1.) homeless, houseless, vagrants, transients: For example, double spoken phrase like "members of the houseless community" have been gaining popularity in my local government's publications. I prefer to use the term "transients" as it is not dependent on houseless vs homeless semantics. It is a term commonly used in formal documents as well.

2.) People who apply graffiti: Graffiti vandal vs graffiti artist. News outlets regularly use both for those who apply graffiti. Both labels are controversial due to the perception by audience on if the product is art or vandalism and if there was permission. So I feel that more appropriate label is not too frequently used but a conveniently short "graffitists" or "graffiti practitioner"(have seen used in social science and criminology related publications) and avoid both the "graffiti artist" and "graffiti vandal" labeling in general.

Thoughts?Graywalls (talk) 13:01, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm unsure if you have a general point you are trying to make. If so, I missed it. Specifically on "homeless, houseless, vagrants, transients" I dislike the genericalisation of transient as it implies that people are between one state and another. The reality is that many homeless people are trapped in that condition, and are not transiting to anything better. Even those who are without fixed abode as a lifestyle, are not necessarily physically transient as many prefer to hang around a fairly limited locale. "Members of the houseless/homeless community" is awful: one of the big problems for many is that there is no community, and trying to pretend that all these people are in some kind of homogeneous social group is as daft and damaging as talking about "members of the adoptee community." Varybit (talk) 15:53, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

Second hand journalism source bias

Articles written about events that involved a journalism controversy almost always exhibit heavy bias towards the side of the journalists involved. This seems to be almost entirely reliant on the fact that almost any source on the topic that would meet the standards for sources on Wikipedia is very likely to take its own side. Most journalists aren't gonna write badly about themselves, and people who aren't journalists aren't publishing edited second-hand commentary on the situation. This leads to many articles that either ignore this bias and simply fill almost the entire page with support for one side, then defending the imbalanced nature of the article on grounds of source quality, ignoring the greater problem at hand, or articles that that try and fail to compensate for this issue and end up with poorly cited sections that lack evidence and are constantly being revised and deleted. As issues surrounding all forms of journalism are approaching the forefront of social discussion, I think it is important to address this problem now, before there are many broken and unfair articles creating flame wars. The amount of multi-level reporting is decreasing over time, as people begin to rely more heavily on first hand accounts of events and the ease of access to digital copies of evidence on a daily basis. A lot of important information doesn't end up in newspaper articles and scholarly reports, why can't Wikipedia adapt, and develop some method of cataloguing first hand information such that articles do not omit content due to a lack of second hand sources. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheSpoonKing (talk • contribs) 02:17, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

I agree that Wikipedia has problems in relying on what it defines as 'reliable sources' when such sources can simply be the people who own the media. As all the fake news over recent years has shown, just because it is in the media does not mean it is right - and just because it isn't in the media, doesn't mean it is not right. There is also a problem with editors simply cherry-picking their own data, then using that data to enforce an unbalanced viewpoint because the data they have chosen says what they want it to. I think an adoption of "other information" and "unsourced commentary" would be beneficial, even if these were initially collapsed to a phrase on an article so that people would only see them by clicking on the phrase. Varybit (talk) 13:37, 8 April 2019 (UTC)