Why NPOV is important

Posted by Angela Beesley on July 11, 2006 (Politics, Wiki, Wikipedia)

Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” policy, known as NPOV, states that “all articles must be written from a neutral point of view, representing views fairly and without bias… Where there are or have been conflicting views, these should be presented fairly, but not asserted. All significant points of view are presented, not just the most popular one. It should not be asserted that the most popular view or some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one. Readers are left to form their own opinions. As the name suggests, the neutral point of view is a point of view, not the absence or elimination of viewpoints. It is a point of view that is neutral - that is neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject.”

I’m giving a talk today for the Students of Sustainability conference at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. The conference website includes this extract from freepress.net:

“when viewpoints are cut off and ideas cannot find an outlet, our democracy suffers.”

When votes come up on the site, a common opposition to those votes is that Wikipedia is not a democracy. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not important to democracy, and the inclusion of viewpoints that the NPOV policy tries to ensure may be helpful to this.