ENPOV: The Emotionally Neutral Point Of View.

Policy Description[edit]

This policy or philosophy differs from NPOV in that ENPOV allows for articles to contain points of view, however any editors with ENPOV must strive to write articles that are Emotionally Neutral.

The concept of neutrality to any particular point of view is frankly, impossible to achieve, and may lead one to question the logic and very foundations of the article itself. Of course there will be at least one point of view for any concept. The concept must be viewed, otherwise the concept would not exist. To say otherwise would be to call all human beings blind, deaf, olfactory insensitive, lacking taste, tactile deficient, emotionally deprived, spiritually hollow and insufficiently intelligent.

What ENPOV allows for the editors to do is reason ABOUT the article without being fettered to the ramifications of their own reasoning. By achieving a Zen-like state*, the editor disconnects his own emotions from his actions and lets his intuition guide the editing process, while simultaneously attempting to

Of course, an editor with ENPOV is not infallible. In fact, he may not be aware that specific edits of his may in fact be EPOV.

One may also edit ENPOV but also without care to article content. He may be perpetuating some other "Grand Strategy" (for example SEO). This intent will not be tolerated, and is addressed in other policies **

Even ENPOV as a policy may not be infallible or consistent. But if something as simple as the laws of arithmetic cannot be proved to be consistent, (only possibly inconsistent), why worry about inconsistencies until one has been found to exist?

This policy may be the original intent of NPOV, however it has not been tested to see that ENPOV and NPOV are in fact different.

FAQ Regarding Policy[edit]

How can one reliably say that one is not editing articles sufficient to the ENPOV policy as described?
Answer: I don't know yet. For a total answer, there may be no specific method to determine this for all articles (I suspect this is so). That does not mean that in specific instances we cannot reliably determine the answer. For instance, many forms of language can be described as full of emotion. If this language is present in an article DESCRIBING something, then obviously it is not ENPOV. In fact, we may consider it EPOV (Emotional Point of View).

One must be careful, as one might be lead to describe an EPOV. This can indeed be done. In fact we could use ENPOV to describe any EPOV or ENPOV. We could even inductively use EPOV and ENPOV as a description, but ENPOV only requires the outer most description be ENPOV. This is quite easy to construct, but sometimes hard to see beyond a vast sea of concepts.

For example (this is constructed and is only meant for hypothetical discussion).
1. George Bush : (ENPOV)
2. I have gushing love/smitten hate for him: EPOV
3. I hate extreme partisanship over the president: (EPOV although thinking that extreme partisan ship is wrong might be considered ENPOV)
4. Many people have extreme views over the current (as of 2006) United states president. Some love him, some hate him. Some believe extreme love or hate of him should be tempered. The views in and of politics in the United states are far and wide, but stand no measure to that of Rome {{citeneeded}} : (ENPOV, I have no idea about the accuracy of the Rome statement but this is for show anyway.)
Here we have an EN Point of view about both an EPOV about George Bush and an EPOV about certain EPOVs about the ENPOV “George Bush”. ***

The thing that we need to be careful about is that any EPOV can be expressed by wrapping said expression by an ENPOV. Wikipedia is not intended to be the set of all points of view or even merely nearly all points of view. Such a construction is either impossible or useless. ****
What about motivations. While we edit ENPOV, our motivation for performing the edit (or more than likely, ADD or REMOVE) may still be emotional.
At this time, I have no answer, and this may be a serious problem with ENPOV, and in fact may underlie Problems with the concept of Wikipedia Itself

Footnotes[edit]

* I personally believe Zen like states can be achieved without being A Buddhist. In fact, this state may be possible in many Religions, if not all of them. I certainly feel prayer in Christianity is akin if it is not the same (after all, God requests you are giving ALL your cares to GOD, which means you do not care any more). This statement was not meant to estrange people that do not have a pleasant view of Eastern Religions or Philosophies.

**Side note: for whatever reason this struck me like "Testing God" in the bible. THOU SHALT NOT TEST WIKIPEDIA! Root4(one) 18:47, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

***This really ought to be described more thoroughly or completely redone/removed, but I'm running out of time, and i can't decide if adding more description, even in this footnote, detracts from the document or what. Right now, it kinda looks like total BS, I’ll admit. Root4(one) 18:47, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

****While this statement of intent of the Wikipedia fathers may be true, I do fear that the way wikipedia is is being used as such a repository. That is, the intents of many/most of the wikipedia users and contributors do not match even slightly the intents of the creators.

Personal Commitment[edit]

In any case, I plan on using this policy on all my edits, with exception to my discussions (as sometimes emotions need to play out to see what one really believes) and my user page.

I felt I needed to type this out, and all comments are original, although may be related to existing policies.

Root4(one) 18:47, 16 January 2007 (UTC)