I present to you Xenu's space plane, and a misplaced No Original Research policy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Xenu_space_plane.jpg

Okay, so some of you here don't like the original research policy. That's because you're doing it wrong. Take a look at the image description (sorry, links don't work here):



So a couple of people read the article, and slapped together their interpretation of what they think it would look like. Why is this an issue? No one really seems to mind that the "artist" is a Wikipedian, and the image is OR. But my guess is that any attempt to delete it would be met by calls of censorship or a pro-Scientology biased editor trying to delete something that has been on WPedia for more than 2 years.

Won't somebody rid the pedia of this original research in the name of encyclopedic-ness? I mean, I think the Scientologists are a little odd, as do most people, but if a policy is going to be in place, why not have it apply to everything?

Just for the record, I don't know if anyone here has a problem with the idea that an encyclopedia is supposed to contain sourced research and not original research, as those concepts have traditionally been understood. What some of us do have a problem with is the bizarro world interpretations and mutations of Wikipedia's initial WP:NOR policy that have been rammed up the kazoo of Wikipedian policy pages over the last couple of years by SlimVirgin and her Ship of Phools.

Jon Awbrey

Scientology is more than just "a little odd." However, this intepretive artwork has no place in a serious exhibition. Besides the original research angle, ChrisO's impression of Xenu's purported spacecraft isn't in any way notable, having no significance to Scientologists, or to their detractors, or to anyone else.

Note that the controversial content would be perfectly fine if the site had advertised itself as a compendium of popular culture.

I never liked that "artist's impression", and I complained about it once a long time ago, but the complaint was dismissed because, well, that's the kind of plane Hubbard mentioned, and there it is flying through space, like he said it did--the simplicity of the interpretation, according to this argument, means that it isn't OR. I don't think that argument is necessarily completely without merit, but I'm pretty sceptical of it.

Apparently there is a clause that photographs and images created by wikipedians are not original research and do not abide by the same sorts of criteria text does.

There's an rfc on that where some funny folks are questioning the use of a personal photograph of japanese people being used in a template created by the photographer.

Also, there's the $20,000 fund for paying Wikipedians to come up with their own new illustrations for the project. Of course, being paid to create GFDL content does not present any conflict of interest, unless it's Wikipedia Review. And even when Wikipedia Review wasn't paid and was just experimenting (Arch Coal), it's still a conflict of interest. The $20,000 fund is okay, though!

Carry on!

Greg

Policies don't apply to unpopular kook religions. They can be written by anti-Scientology deprogrammers, yet are still deemed NPOV enough to make FA without a peep about COI. This is a variation of the Cberlet rule. Chip gets free reign because he's liked so much. Anti-Scientologists do because their target is hated so much.

It can't possibly be OR, as it is a literal rendering of the text. Hubbard was completely explicit about the DC8 stuff, the only exception being "the DC8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't." (http://www.xenu.net/archive/multimedia.html)

A far better argument against is the one to bias because of low quality/amateur production. If someone drew a stick-man version of Moses descending from the mountain with his Ten Commandments in hand, the Christians and the Jews would be up in arms because the artist's impression -- that the religion is as cheesy as the slapped-together graphic -- is leaking through the art.

What constitutes neutrality is debatable.

The notion that neutrality must lie between the position of all factions is self-contradictory: it presumes that every point of view is by nature equally non-neutral, but if so, there is not even a potentially neutral point of view for the article to achieve. If, on the other hand, a neutral point of view is achievable, then it's perfectly possible that one of the "POV factions" is already presenting it, in which case a neutral article will assume the same tone as that faction, thus look like "POV pushing" for that faction. In short, the definition of neutrality cannot rest upon its intermediate position relative to what others are saying and remain coherent.

Moreover, any purported example of neutrality, under the prevailingly dysfunctional definition, can be disqualified ex post facto merely by adding another point of view, however irrational, to what is being considered.


But there are an arbitrarily large number of "literal renderings of the text," if specifying things that aren't specified in the text is allowed. Did it say "NASA" on the tail? Was there a blue stripe down the side? etc., etc., etc.

Yes, one presumes that scientologists don't believe these planes were from NASA, considering these events were supposed to have occurred in the distant past. I think I'd be more comfortable with a real image of a DC-8 just sitting at an airport or engaged in a normal flight through Earth's sky. It should suffice, if any image is needed, to simply show the reader what a DC-8 looks like, without requiring any iffy "artist's impression" created by a Wikipedian. If there was any depiction of these intergalactic flights created in some notable context outside of Wikipedia (in literature of Scientology or its critics, for example), then it would be good to have, but I'm just not sure I like the idea of Wikipedian artistic impressions. Wikipedians can take photos of things, and they can draw up charts and graphs as images, but I have a feeling that these sorts of artistic depictions, even when based on simplistic interpretations, shouldn't be done by Wikipedians; it seems to undermine accuracy in some subtle way.

I think you're confusing neutral and unbiased.

Neutral, balanced, and unbiased are often used interchangeably, but they are not quite the same.

A balanced account can prevent strong partisan arguments on all sides of an issue, none of which are neutral or unbiased.

An unbalanced account can be biased in one direction.

A neutral account would be devoid of value judgments.

Most contentious articles present conflicting value judgments, oftimes exaggerating and exacerbating the tension rather than resolving it.