User:Bjornar/BPOV

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Balanced Point of View (BPOV) is a suggested alternative to the neutral point of view (NPOV) principle in order to correct some of the mistakes in the NPOV principle.

The goal of BPOV is to make Wikipedia a more informed, self-conscious, and intelligent area. The members of Wikipedia's production of knowledge are all members of specific cultures, geographic locations, historical times, genders, class, and race. All these, and more, affect the knowledge being produced in Wikipedia.

Thus, a BPOV is needed to ensure that;

• Facts should be represented as neutral as the source they came from. It is pointless to cite a source like the CNN or the KCNA and then to present it in any neutral way.
• Opposing views should be represented fairly so that each opposing view is represented.
• Facts about facts should be neutral and unbiased, because only facts about facts are unbound by views. For example, undisputed dates, the fact that something is disputed, the geographical coordinates of a specific area, the boiling point of water, etc.
• Certain facts and issues need direct reference to individual context and meaning. The slave trade during the 18th century is something that needs not a Neutral Point of View, but each relevant point of view at the time.

First and foremost, we should let BPOV become the new guideline because;

• The word "Neutral" in NPOV suggest "no meaning" and since every individual is even so inavoidedly bound by culture, tradition, individual quirks, social control, norms handed down by society, economic bias, and so on, employing a "neutral" approach to writing an article is perhaps a bad word. NPOV combined with "consensus" creates an unimaginative athmosphere of collective passivism, where the "norm du jour" slips into a teethless, cowardly conformist view, and every edit designed to preserve the dinosaur NPOV becomes a reactionary move to perpetuate it instead of broadening and expanding an article with more poignant views.
• The word "Balanced" in BPOV suggest each writer to take more responsibility into his own editing, and providing a balance between all elements of "do"'s and "dont"'s in wikipedia becomes more apparent by using this word. It encourages a more careful and calculated, even responsible edit, where balance exists not only between issues right or wrong, but right or left, even north and south, even the inclution of references never before thought of (because of the restriction to imagination imposed by NPOV) but most importantly it allows for each factoid to stand on its own and clearly state its intention as well as its source.
• For every source, you have an agenda. While NPOV encourage listing as many sourced factoids, disguising them as NPOV, the people behind the sources are never NPOV. Instead, BPOV more honestly state the intention of each source, by adding the sourced fact in clear language. Most importantly, by doing so, it becomes less neccessary to repeat the same agenda several times with many different sources, and it becomes more evident when an article is over-represented in one agenda where it should be represented by other relevant ones.
• BPOV is more honest and intelligent towards the reader.