[Bug-gnupedia] Is there such a thing as truth?

[Mark Wheaton]

All, 
        I understand what Bob is trying to say here but I think we may be in
danger of becoming a bit too relativist about this. If the pedia aims to
be a source of truth about the world, and we call all agree that some
things are true then I don't see a problem with having a (large, diverse
etc.) panel of editors who can filter out articles about the predatory
tree-dwelling whales of Papua New Guinea as being patently false. 

So, is it true that the way we then deal with touchy political subjects
like Tiananmen should be different than the way we deal with factual
subjects like science?

Depends - if you want to be pluralistic then you can let everyone
present their own verison of the truth and 'let the reader decide'. IMO
This will degenerate into a massive bun-fight and name-calling bout. It
also presents the question 'what do you do about holocaust-deniers and
other, similar types?' Do you let them have a voice or not? If not, how
do you justify that in terms of your pluralist approach? If you do, how
do you justify it in terms of historical verisimilitude? The holocaust
is an easy one because we can prove it happened beyond any reasonable
doubt, but what about disagreements over the Americal War of
Independance or the Norman Conquest? 

If you think this is too hard a path to walk, you could back off a
little and present the pedia as a 'best effort', western capitalist bias
and all and let the reader deal with this as they wish.

Which do we prefer?

Mark
---

<bob dodd>
So, coming back to my starting point, I see a large and unreconcilable
gap between the use of editors between the two projects. You use
editors to preselect voices (albeit with a mechanism to try and handle
bias), Gnupedia uses editors to help rate and organise unsolicited
entries (e.g. making sure that all entries on Tianemen Square get
tagged as synonyms...)

To my mind, Nupedia is one, western-oriented, narrow filter over the
content of Gnupedia (a "Britiannica Filter"?) There is a place for it,
but it's scope needs to be understood.
</bob dodd>