Neutrality dispute

A neutrality dispute is an assertion that the point of view of some article is not appropriate for its purpose, and reflects some editorial bias. The ideology that there is a neutral point of view asserts that this is corrected simply by attribution. However, it never extends to attribution of every single claim, therefore, it is an ideology not a methodology. See New Troll point of view for the counter-ideology.

See w:NPOV dispute for an overly broad definition that includes things which are actually political disputes. Wikipedia is run by a GodKing who reserves to himself the right to resolve or even redefine any political dispute in the real world and decide who is right for Wikipedia's purposes... this is an unwise confusion of sysop power structure with power structure and not to be copied for Consumerium purposes - something based on more democratic factions and factionally defined terms and processes is almost certainly preferable. This would narrow the scope of "neutrality" to those issues that were not explicitly the subject of any political disputes.

Within that range of issues that are not fundamentally economic or political, but more commercial, academic or military, there are ways agreed on "who is right" which transcend the sysop power structure. For instance, in military matters "might makes right" and the winner of a technological conflict tends to be the winner. There tend to be few such ways in economic or political matters to know who "really won" other than "who is living better", and that is itself a subject of dispute, and time scale on which one analyzes.

Content vs. opinion - where is neutrality possible? desirable?

So it is safest to say that Wikipedia has had good short-run (three years) of success with its NPOV policy, and deals reasonably well with terminology and even identity disputes of the most obvious kind, resulting in decent factoring of articles and mostly-respected identity systems and claims of identity, but many incidents ultimately of a political nature that would sink Consumerium on the scale we expect them in our Content Wiki.

And which are very likely to sink Wikipedia itself before it is five years old - it is already generating a goodly number of forks leading to a bad copy problem - one will replace it as the "leading arbiter of the GFDL text corpus". At that point w: may point somewhere else, or be replaced by another prefix like n: to mean most reliable neutral point of view.

So what does one do when neutrality is disputed in the content wiki? Removing isolating disputed claims to Opinion Wiki circles is not enough.

For "mere Opinion", the "NPOV" approach may seem to be enough, but it isn't. A much more rigorous view of the affected parties of any transaction or edit must be there - one must know roughly the balance and affiliation of types of advocates of a view.

For "Content" we probably need several distinct POVs (ecology, human environment, labour, community impact, etc.) in the Consumerium buying signal. The actual end user is not interested in a balance of a lot of other people's views or values, it's their own they want reliably expressed in that signal, so the segmenting by faction and tendency seems to be the only way to make that decision.

It also means that there would be "no such thing as NPOV" in the content wiki - the neutrality disputes would arise only WITHIN factions where presumably they could be dealt with in a factionally defined way.