> Wikipedia's NPOV policy is impressive and the community's efforts to apply it are impressive, but it's ultimately very difficult to find an objective NPOV acc

> Wikipedia's NPOV policy is impressive and the community's efforts to apply it are impressive, but it's ultimately very difficult to find an objective NPOV account of things, and one that's satisfactory to everyone. One difficulty here is the Undue Weight policy (which, to be clear, is probably necessary to make NPOV workable). This says, in effect, that it's considered NPOV to mention something at greater length than its relevance to the topic at hand warrants, or in a context where it's not particularly important. Unfortunately judgments of relevance, salience, or importance are themselves quite POV and Wikipedia's solution is mostly to rely on "reliable sources" -- typically published journalistic and academic writing. But journalistic and academic writing itself contains all sorts of biases (many of which Wikipedians are extremely aware of and have discussed at some length), including the likelihood that nobody will have actually written a journalistic analysis of the Mormon/vegan/Russian government/left-anarchist/Hindu nationalist/Reformed Christian/Maoist/gender-critical/Extinction Rebellion take on specific person or topic X. Which could very likely, if it existed, place much more weight on some aspect or issue than would be considered "due" in most other published analyses. > You can also read many Wikipedia articles and see that, to the extent they relied on sources, the sources all held the view that the subject of the article was good/legitimate/appropriate/normal, or was bad/illegitimate/sketchy/questionable, and it is in principle "NPOV" to not report on any other views (if they don't have reliable sources mentioning them). However there must be people who have substantive reasons to take another perspective but don't have the ability, resources, motivation, or desire to produce reliable sources reflecting that perspective. In the absence of that, those views can be described in their own article but can't be used to color any other article. This is an excellent summary of the issue with wikipedia and how the rules that were set up to eliminate biases are unable to deal with certain types of biases. I think its possible to improve on this situation (I'm not sure how but I think its possible) but to some extent the problem is unsolvable because there are no bare facts absent interpretation. Ultimately you're just going to repeat information you heard elsewhere and the decision about which information to include and which to exclude is inherently value-laden (i.e. biased).