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As a Wikipedia editor, I think this can mostly be attested to the site's policy on maintaining a neutral point of view. [0] Over time you learn to watch out for

• schoen 10y ago
  As a counterpoint, here Wikipedia's discussion on why NPOV is hard or maybe unattainable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_not_so_great#NPOVness_.28non-bias.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_not... I think the NPOV policy has been great for Wikipedia and contributes to many positive outcomes, but I often think Wikipedians are too sanguine that they can recognize and/or achieve it, and about the scope of the "neutrality" they're actually working towards. One reason for that is the other policies on reliable sources and undue weight, which means Wikipedia will usually appear to be NPOV when it reflects the attention and approaches given to something by media and academic scholarship that are readily accessible to Wikipedia editors. While that might be more neutral than any available alternative, it's still going to reflect tons of biases found in the underlying sources and in the editors' ability to select and access them. I've been thinking of trying to describe some examples, maybe deliberately including points of view that I don't hold or agree with instead of those that I do. :-) I think one highlight is that if a point of view is now a minority view or extremely unfamiliar in middle-class English-speaking communities, paying a lot of attention to it on enwiki will be considered undue weight because editors can correctly describe the status of the view as marginal. But that point of view might be more correct or extremely important from some other perspective, even though reading an encyclopedia that gave more weight to it would be jarring for many readers and they might find it less useful overall. (It might also be a majority view in some other social classes, cultures, or language communities whose views aren't expressed in reliable sources that many Wikipedians can access, understand, or defend as reliable sources.)
  • cooper12 10y ago
    I agree that true neutrality is likely impossible. For starters, Wikipedia is only as biased as its sources and like you said "media and academic scholarship". It's this attribute that lets us readily say that vaccines don't cause autism, but that will also prevent it from assimilating new breakthroughs or ideas until they are readily accepted. (In other words, Wikipedia is not The Truth) FUTON bias is a problem in a lot of areas [0] but there are tons of articles that use offline sources. As for your last point, you might find this essay [1] interesting in that we often assume too much to be a given, and Wikipedia definitely suffers from an anglophone bias, but that's why multilingual editors are important to bring those sources to the fore. Fringe theories [2] are an interesting subject that I think should be discussed more, but I do find the current approach sensible. Thanks for the interesting counterpoints. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUTON_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUTON_bias [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_do_need_to_cite_that_the_sky_is_blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_do_need_to_cite_... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories