A documentary that was awarded special mention by the American Film Institute, had reviews in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter apparently fails WP:NOTE, and WP:RS. The clash of political NPOVers and film lovers seems to be raising some tempers at the AFD.

This is one of the many problems of the way NPOV is presented on WP: you have to allow space for "all" positions: including those you don't like or "know" to be false. These may include racist, non-scientific, morally questionable or simply stupid subjects or statements. But if they are verifiable and notable, you have to make room for them.

Some people do think that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Unfortunately for them, it appears that they are probably wrong. That is beside the point.

The problem here is that the film appears notable and that's where the discussion has to stop...Unless the rules are changed somewhat to address these sorts of issues.

I don't see that happening, however.

Reliable sources is supposed to be a code word for "Do not listen to crazy people". It does not always work out that way, though.

Actually, I think that this is the sort of thing that NOR was supposed to take care of. Unfortunately, sometimes quake theories such as this get to be notable. This film won an award and has had a bit of press. I don't see how they can get out of having article space for it.

That said, NPOV certainly does mean that criticism of the film is allowed to be presented. Maybe that's the way to go here?

Someone added a source covering the film's premiere and its effect on the local AIDS Walk participation. That's just been unceremoniusly gutted. Next step will be removing the source because it supports a trivial fact. I smell the start of an edit war...

Not at all. OR says "Do not add your own thoughts, opinions, feelings, whatever". RS says "Only add the knowledge of people worth listening to." Films by crazy people can be notable. Usually you can find enough critics to ensure the reader is not mislead about whether its a complete lie; if you cannot, it is probably unnotable.

Except that the RS guideline/policy was written before a swath of new reliable sources came into being. RS is still pathetically 5 years behind reality, and no one seems to want to fix that.

RS cannot be "fixed" -- it was never a good idea to begin with. Reliable publications sometimes print wild ideas just to get them out there and show they have open minds, even if they are very unlike to be true. Pons/Fleischman cold fusion and bubble-induced hydrogen fusion being examples. They weren't repeatable. There was an article reporting the possible existance of a free quark, by finding a possible fractional charge on a niobium sphere (T-shirt: "It takes niobium balls to be a physicist"). Not repeatable. Papers reporting a very small fractional difference in inertial and gravitational mass between different chemical elements show up from time to time. Lots of papers finding evidence against human-causation for the recent climate change are out there (but completely overwhelmed by papers suggesting the opposite).

There's already a WP article for people who think the Apollo moon landing was faked. And there's an HIV-AIDS denialism article AIDS denialism. The denialists have the classic "multiple causes" mess of any post hoc hypothesis that is wrong-headed. They think AIDS is caused by something different in every risk group: by blood-factor treatment in hemophilia, by illicit drugs in drug users and gay men (gay man all use illicit drugs, it turns out), by HIV-antivirals themselves for everybody who got AIDS after 1985 in developed countries, and by starvation in Africa where they have large numbers of deaths in women and children who don't use drugs, aren't gay, and didn't have the money to get antiviral drugs like AZT. Except there's a little problem: starvation doesn't ordinarily kill young women without killing old people far faster. AIDS doesn't do that-- it targets the young. Oh, well. Moving right along....