Here’s the corollary: The claim to “truth” that the wikipedia process replaces was ALSO a claim built on process — the “editorial process.”

Editorial process isn’t a bad process — it just doesn’t scale to a global information culture. Editorial process will remain a part of this information ecosystem, generating many (most?) of the individual facts that are eventually processed through Wikipedia. And yes, when those facts appear in conflict, then NPOV will be called upon to mediate.

We can’t know everything first-hand. We can’t verify everything ourselves. And we certainly don’t want to go back to the age of Revealed Truth and Appeal to Authority.

That leaves us with process as our best option for managing claims to truth. What’s radically different about Wikipedia isn’t that it’s “better,” it’s that the process is open, transparent and ENDLESS. It is less a document than a river. When we dip into it and collect a sample we are literally taking a snapshot of something in flux.

The search for truth is personal. Wikipedia makes the tools of that search cooperative.

But NPOV doesn’t help eliminate demonstrably false viewpoints.

At best (if you’re lucky), you can obtain a balanced treatment where an article says, “According to a report in the NY Times, Party A made Claim X, while a different story in the Washington Post reports that Party B disputes Party A and asserts that Claim X is false.”

NPOV doesn’t get to the ground truth, and doesn’t even support critical thinking and scientific examination of the evidence provided by any of the partisans to establish the veracity of any reported claim, no matter how ungrounded it might be.

Moreover, if one tries to push for critical thinking and scientific examination of disputed claims, the entrenched editors will allege that one is being “tendentious” and pushing an unpriviliged POV (namely the scientific, academic, or scholarly POV).