Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View"

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is written and edited by thousands of contributors around the world, is one of the great success stories of the Internet. It seems to be showing the way in fact toward a striking new and different way of writing, in which knowledge is gathered and shaped not by one mind but by many minds working at a level of collaboration heretofore virtually unknown. What is particularly noteworthy, though, is the incredibly high quality of the encyclopedia entries that are written using this method. One would expect, with so many people writing articles on so many topics, that quality control methods would break down and that the resulting articles would be a hodge-podge of fact and fiction, good and bad writing, analytical rigor and sloppy slapdash. In fact, just the opposite seems to have happened. The articles that result by the Wikipedia method of writing are of a remarkably consistent high level -- of accuracy, of writing quality, and especially of the fairness and even-handedness with which they approach each subject. Whatever system they are using seems geared to always move towards self-correction and improvement, instead of going the easier route, i.e. the entropic route towards laziness, inaccuracy, and partisan stand-offs. They key to their system is something that Wikipedia's founder, Jimbo Wales, calls the "neutral point of view". Because this idea is the root of what has turned out to be one of the great Internet media successes, and because it apparently holds so many similarities to what in journalism is called "objectivity," the "neutral point of view" bears very close scrutiny by journalists. Does this system provide an alternative to objectivity that journalists could profitably employ? Objectivity, after all, hasn't been doing so well lately. Is Wikipedia's NPOV an answer? A possible replacement? How close is NPOV to journalistic objectivity? If newspapers and TV news programs used NPOV, would readers and viewers be better served than they are now? I am going to take a look at that question over the next few days in this space. Stay tuned ...

Comments

[Sheldon Rampton]

Wikipedia is a wonderful thing, but its NPOV policy isn't necessarily the "key to their system." My own wiki, SourceWatch (http://www.sourcewatch.org), follows a somewhat different policy. Instead of a "neutral point of view," we aspire to "fairness and accuracy." Of course we don't always achieve this fully (just as Wikipedia doesn't always achieve neutrality). Moreover, we are a more specialized wiki with a smaller contributor base, which means that Wikipedia generally beats us on quantity and quality (although we frequently beat Wikipedia with respect to detail and depth in a number of articles specific to our area of specialization). Similarly, the dKosopedia (http://www.dkosopedia.com ) has achieved some interesting results in its own area of specialization.

I've written a blog entry discussing some of the issues regarding NPOV and newsgathering, at the the following URL:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3122