## 3 From EPOV to Content Neutrality
### Some Use Cases
#### 3.4.5 Variant Spoofing and Meta Data Conflicts  
We now assume that a particularly malicious [PERSON] calls his article \"Evolution (scientific variant)\" and starts filling it with creationist thoughts. [PERSON] still believes that her article \"Evolution(Darwinist variant)\" is the one and only variant which should be called scientific; moreover, numerous readers are irritated by the contents of [PERSON]'s article, which, due to the adjective \"scientific\", shows up in search engines at a much better rank. This problem is of a deeper nature, since the edit war on content has now shifted to an _edit war on meta data_. It demonstrates that in a world loaded with data, sovereignty of interpretation and control of searching, filtering and ranking are much more important than control of content itself. The situation may be compared to the music industry uploading bad-quality files to file-sharing sites: The value of these sites for the freeloader is reduced when a downloaded file is likely to contain a bad-quality version of the song [20].  
_The first solution_ is to use non-descriptive aids for the variants. Similarly, the title of an article could be considered as no longer authoritative, basing search and article access on different properties of the document. Competing for the \"correct\" name of a variant thus becomes a wasted effort. As a side-effect, the new question arises how a user can find and distinguish variants. This will be answered, shortly and in Section 4.3.  
_The second solution_ uses community or recommender based descriptors. Readers provide descriptions and ratings for variants; this information is used by others to assess the quality and title of variants. For this, many users must read many variants and provide their feedback, thus placing a high burden on the reader. This burden can be offloaded: For example, normalized reading times of variants can be used instead of ratings and explicit tagging. Variants with very short reading times compared to their length will get a low rating. In order not to annoy the user with numerous variants, every article is presented in two variants: One with an already good rating and one without a rating. We assume that a user will quickly decide for the \"better\" variant and will continue reading its text, thereby automatically generating rating values. With over eight million WP page views but only 5.000 page edits per hour [21], the number of ratings scales nicely compared to the number of freshly generated variants.  
_The third and probably best solution_ separates documents from their access paths. Traditionally, the topic name or title of a Wiki document serves as its primary access path; other access paths are categories and tags. A problem arises when variants are introduced as a means to capture specific points of view in the document while assuming at the same time (incorrectly) that the access path may be considered neutral or objective. It is natural to extend the EPOV idea to access paths as well and to acknowledge the difference between a document and its access paths.  
In the context of our running example, [PERSON] has written an article on evolution from the creationist perspective and calls it \"Evolution for Scientists\". [PERSON], who takes the Darwinist perspective, wants to access this article as well, but denies the article the status of a scientific document. Therefore, she would like to access [PERSON]'s article by the name \"Evolution (alternative theories)\". The separation of a document from its access path enables [PERSON] to provide her own access path to this document.