Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/In focus
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A global standard for Neutral Point of View
A proposed standard neutral point of view policy was developed to support young, developing and small Wikipedias.
Different Wikipedias have different challenges
The neutral point of view is a core philosophy of Wikipedia. It was the very first policy written for English Wikipedia, way back in September 2001. Comparable policies were soon developed on other Wikipedias, and it was often the first policy for new Wikipedias as they were created.
But somewhere along the way, as the Wikipedia family of projects grew, policy development on younger projects lagged behind. While NPOV was a core philosophy on these projects, documentation of it was often entirely absent, or represented by a link to the policy of another project. That link was often to English Wikipedia’s policy, which had continued to expand and become more complex over time. It was a policy suited for a mature, well-developed Wikipedia, rather than a young, small Wikipedia in its early stages of growth.
This was one of the challenges that a small NPOV working group took on starting about a year ago. After communicating with younger, smaller Wikipedias, and doing some research on how other Wikipedias documented this core philosophy, we realized that it would be helpful for Wikipedias to have a common NPOV standard that they could link to, one that would use as much simple language as possible, and that would be easily translatable.
The result is below, ready for community discussion. The underlying philosophy is familiar to most Wikipedians, and even some of the language is reminiscent of the English Wikipedia policy, but it is short and simple.
Proposed baseline standard text:
Wikipedia articles are written from a neutral point of view. Articles are expected to be impartial and objective. Their content is expected to reflect the range of knowledge available in reliable published sources. Wikipedia articles are a summary of the information and points of view found in reliable sources.
This standard is not negotiable. Neither editor consensus nor other policies and guidelines can supersede the principle of neutral point of view.
All Wikipedia projects are expected to adhere to the core principle of neutrality. Individual projects are encouraged to include this principle in its documentation on creating content by doing one or more of the following:
- having a written policy
- providing editing guidelines
- referring to this standard as part of their editing principles
What does it mean for English Wikipedia? Well, our policy contains everything in the proposed global standard, and considerably expands upon it; we have lots of related policies, guidelines and processes. The same is true for most mature Wikipedias. We don’t have to do a thing to meet the global standard; this project’s policies helped to set it.
It means a lot more for smaller, younger, and developing Wikipedias. These projects usually have considerably smaller communities, and their primary focus is content development in their language, rather than the infrastructure that includes policy development. Feedback from leaders on many of these projects was that they and their communities simply did not have the time or experience to develop project-specific core policies, but that they would find a simple and straightforward “standard” to be much more applicable than trying to translate or copy the large and complex policies present on mature Wikipedias.
Participate in the discussion
On June 17, a discussion of the proposed global NPOV standard has started on meta. Editors from all projects, large and small, are encouraged to participate. The discussion will close on July 15. Some questions to think about:
- What are the “best practices” that you think are most helpful in ensuring our project demonstrates NPOV?
- Is there a really key aspect of NPOV that this standard doesn’t include?
- What can large or mature projects do to help younger or smaller projects develop this and other policies?
Discuss this story