See, Whitedust seems to think that NPOV means “everybody gets a say.” That’s just not correct. Whitedust is publishing a story that says that because Wikipedia is distancing itself from people’s negative viewpoints about WalMart, that WalMart has somehow stamped out the NPOV round of Wikipedia’s policies.

Nonsense.

What Whitedust fails to understand is that Wikipedia does not seek to be the voice of the masses. The point of Wikipedia is not to be an archive of everyone’s opinions and viewpoints. In fact, Wikipedia goes into great detail to explain this; the next time Whitedust wants to talk about significant attacks against a group’s credo, I hope they’ll read said credo first. However, since they apparently can’t be bothered, I’ll explain it to them for them. I’m going to do it in a very angry way, because they’re accusing Wikipedia of folding to an attack on its conscience, when in fact Wikipedia is acting in direct concert with its consceince, and when in fact Wikipedia is fighting the users, not Walmart.

The Wikipedia Neutral Point of View Policy is simple. Clearly put, NOBODY’S POINT OF VIEW GOES IN. Ever. Not even if it’s against Walmart. Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopedia, not a gossip rag. The things which Wikipedia accepts are referenced facts. It is to the reader to draw conclusions therefrom, not for the encyclopedia itself. There is no point in an encyclopedia where any company or individual should be judged, whether in or against their favor; an encyclopedia article for each Hitler and Mother Theresa should have the same tone of voice. In fact, one of the biggest problem with the first Americanized versions of the Encyclopædia Brittanica 1913 was the polemic nature of its expanded article base; it took them nearly a decade to really get back to the austere tone they’d adopted.

There is a Wikipedian tradition of setting up debate pages when the factuality of items is unclear. That the Whitedust author seems to think this is a standout occurrence is remarkable; exactly what they think the discussion tab is for remains a mystery. Unfortunately in this case, Walmart attracts a significant number of active detractors (mind you there’s nothing wrong with the detractors; I just think they’re bad for Wikipedia.) Those detractors are of the mindset to picket, to protest and to politic; that’s a good thing in the real world. It’s not a good thing in Encyclopædiae, especially when the politicking prevents them from taking the time to understand local methodology.

Discussion pages are meant to isolate disagreements about information from the fact page specifically for the purpose of moving away from judgemental nature. Those pages are meant to allow the arguments to flare and die out, and when that’s done, the ashes are sifted through, and someone sober and disconnected will say “there are viewpoints A, B, C and D; data X, Y and Z can be seen to support these. Similarly there is viewpoint E, but data does not support it.” This was an important process after the Podkletnov debacle. It’s an equally important process with Walmart, except that the Walmart issue is ongoing, so if you’re unfamiliar with the way Wikipedia works, you’re not likely to understand what’s going on.

Encyclopediae are simple, straightforward collations of facts. They have a vested interest in a withdrawl from perspective, especially when you realize that they’re meant to be considered from the 500 year perspective.

Read the 1913 Brittanica some time. It goes on at length about the stupidity of the black man, the shiftlessness of the Irish, the weakness of the female and so on. Read the articles about nations: they’re given personal characteristics. Read the articles about forms of government: they are judged occasionally as openly backwards. There’s a laudable tone to the evaluation of documents like The White Man’s Burden. From the modern perspective, it’s kind of disgusting.

Then, read the 1880. It’s got none of that. It’s a simple, if exhaustive, collection of facts as they were known in the day. Granted several topics (chemistry and physics in special) are extremely wrongheaded; the tone is still that of an academic recounting what is known without digressing into the seperate realm of what’s believed as a result.

Encyclopedias want to be the 1880, not the 1913. The 1913 is a mistake, and what you are suggesting is that Walmart is defeating Wikipedia because Wikipedia is moving away from the controversialism of the 1913 towards the stoic factualism of the 1880. We have had the form and format of the 1880 since Encylopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Artes, et des Métiers in 1644. That what you’re suggesting is the opposite of what is desired has been well understood for 350 years.

WalMart has not defeated Wikipedia. Wikipedia has defeated judgemental loudmouths. The war isn’t Walmart versus Reasonable Viewpoints. The war is Wikipedia versus All Viewpoints. 1913 fails it, and so does Whitedust.

Whitedust, please get a clue before judging something as violating its own principles.

So, I just measured, and approximately 7% of the blogosphere is nonsense whining about Internet Explorer.

Since I’ve just caved and set up a blog, why resist being another one of the sheople? I haven’t complained about IE since IE5.0 was avant garde, and 7’s just coming out; in the fine web tradition of publishing material which is due to be out of date in a few months, let’s get to kvetching.

I just tore a bunch of neat formatting tricks out of my page, because they had been very tenuously hidden in IE with some hacks I don’t care to remake. I installed a few mediawiki extensions (after some editing) and as such needed to change the page framing somewhat. I’m not sure if that’s when the hacks came undone; it seems more likely it was when I upgraded mediawiki, as I may well have forgotten to check my page in IE. The corner icon was misplaced, the framing lines weren’t transparent but an ugly black, et cetera. I also fixed some margins.

Thing is, I’m considering putting ads back onto my page, and getting the right aligned 3rd column was kind of a hassle in Monobook (I use a heavily modified version of MediaWiki’s default stylesheet, which while pretty carries all the code savvy of a bag of hammers; it’s a hackish mess, but it’s too big for me to give enough of a damn to fix.) One particularly nauseatingly awful thing is that the stylesheet, instead of taking the time to hammer out portable correctness, has specialty stylesheets for each major browser which are loaded to deal with native formatting errors.

The maintenance nightmare which erupts as a result is surprisingly awful.

So, the IE7 team has been saying all the right things in their MSDN blogs, about how they want people to abolish the hacks they’ve been perpetrating for older IE, and replace them with modern, accurate stylesheets. It’s weird to think of IE as standards-advocative, but recently they’ve been exactly that, and as much malice as I bear towards the predecessor product, one should give credit where credit is due; this team knows how to talk the talk. (Granted my paranoia suggests they’re doing it to effect browser rollover, but that’s not the point.)

Anyhoo, I have high hopes. The stakes are a little different for me than for most; I use embedded MSHTML extensively. (My god does it piss me off that the directx image alpha filter doesn’t understand res:// .) With appropriate PNG support, a fixed box model and better support for auto margins, many things would be miles and miles easier.

‘Course, this means that I’ll still have to write heredity styling for embedded applications on platforms which don’t yet run IE7; whereas people are tolerant of broken web pages, they aren’t of similarly appearance-broken applications (not that I could blame them.) So, it’s a step in the right direction, but until I start callously cutting people away, it’s not enough.

Still, it’s better than nothing.