“Both of you are right,” Jeta typed. “And both of you are wrong.”
A libertarian from Texas argued: “Subjectivity is bias. Delete it all.” An Albanian folklorist from Tetovo countered: “Without subjectivity, you erase the experience of 90% of the people who live there.” Finally, a Wikipedia administrator—a weary librarian from Durrës named Jeta—locked the page. She summoned Blerim and Donika to a private chatroom. pershkrimi objektiv dhe subjektiv wikipedia
Then she posted a link to the edit on her poetry blog with the caption: “Objekti vret peizazhin. Subjekti e ringjall.” (“The object kills the landscape. The subject resurrects it.”) At 3:00 AM, Blerim’s phone buzzed. A bot he had programmed flagged Donika’s addition: Unsourced. Potential original research. NPOV violation. “Both of you are right,” Jeta typed
She explained: Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View does not forbid subjectivity. It forbids unattributed subjectivity. You cannot write “The mountains are majestic” as a fact. But you can write “In Albanian folk poetry, the mountains are described as majestic (cite a song).” She summoned Blerim and Donika to a private chatroom
She wept.
And somewhere in the server logs of Tirana, Blerim and Donika never met again. But each, alone, smiled when they saw the article had survived 10,000 views without a single revert.
And that argument, they finally understood, was the only honest description there is.
