User:Mesocarp/"Neutral" = "source-oriented"



Out of all the Five Pillars, I think NPOV might be the one that inspires the most confusion and takes new editors the longest time to master. Even just speaking for myself, it took me a year or two after making an account to feel like I really had a firm grasp of it. I think the reason for this is not that it's inherently complicated per se, but rather that when many people hear the phrase "neutral point of view" they're inclined to view it in terms of longstanding philosophical battles around ideas like objectivity and relativism and all that, which actually have little to do with what neutrality has come to mean on Wikipedia. People's feelings about those controversies tend to run strong, and they have reflexive responses to them when they come up that they often developed long before they became Wikipedia editors, which presents obstacles to their understanding of neutrality as a Wikipedia-specific idea. This confusion is so pervasive in the community and has existed for such a long time that, in my opinion, even the most mainstream pages on NPOV have passages that contribute to it. In practice, my experience has been that the most useful way of seeing NPOV in the context of Wikipedia is as a "doggedly source-oriented mindset," where you aim to just summarize what the appropriate reliable sources on the topic say, accurately and proportionally, whatever that might be, without reference to your personal view of the topic itself or any considerations of objectivity or neutrality in a general sense.

Our goal is to find consensus
It might be fine to take "NPOV" as meaning "an objective view of the topic" if that was something everyone could agree on. However, every topic has elements of subjectivity, where different people have room to take different perspectives and the world just doesn't offer any way for them to settle their differences everywhere for all time. In a social environment where no one is in charge and one person's opinion is as good as another's, it's thereby pointless to strive for pure objectivity. That's just a recipe for conflict, which we always have to move beyond to make any progress here.



However, it's much easier to look at a set of sources and weigh whether or not an article represents their contents fairly. There's still a degree of subjectivity in that, but far less, because it's focused around a pool of hard evidence that all the parties can look at together. This anchors the discussion in something solid outside the perspectives of any of the participants, something fixed and unswayable—that is to say, in a sense, neutral. This is a huge boon for reducing conflict: once everyone decides to defer to the sources, the differences in their personal opinions on the topic become irrelevant.

There's still room to disagree about which sources to use, of course, and those questions can be difficult to settle in some cases, but in practice most Wikipedians seem to broadly see eye-to-eye about what kinds of sources are appropriate. I think this is partially because there are strong cultural norms around that in many contemporary societies; here in the U.S., for example, the sorts of people who would edit Wikipedia are likely to be sympathetic to the idea that a peer-reviewed academic source is more credible than a random blog post. Pragmatic considerations also seem to help: I think people understand that we have to limit the amount of text we consider somehow or every article would be huge and rambling and hard to read. Last but not least, the idea that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and therefore we should focus mainly on secondary sources, provides a helpful rule of thumb for what sorts of sources should be eligible in a given context.

False balance is a red herring


Many times I have seen an editor complain that some other editor is taking a non-neutral viewpoint because they're falsely equating two sides of an argument when the first editor feels that one side is clearly the correct one. They will shout "'Neutral' does not mean 'balanced'!" and try to press their point from that perspective. This is a common argument off-wiki in political debates about scientific things like evolution or global warming or whatever, so it makes sense to me that it spills over to Wikipedia, but it won't really help you understand how to actually achieve NPOV in a way that will broadly convince other editors. No matter how right you might feel you are, to the other editor it's just your opinion and it's no better than theirs. What will convince many people is a few strong sources that give unambiguous support for what you want to do in the article. Therefore, there's no need to even think about false balance in particular: all you have to focus on in any content dispute is, "Here's what my sources say; what about yours?" In other words, rather than asking questions like, "Does this article display false balance?", or even, "Does this article lack NPOV?", it will get you further faster to ask questions like, "Does this article represent its sources effectively?", and, "Are the sources all on-topic and of high quality?" In my experience, the sooner everyone gets focused on what the sources actually say, the sooner everyone will come to an agreement.

Neutrality can be frustrating


Sometimes I come across an article on Wikipedia and think, "This article totally mischaracterizes its topic!" Then I start looking at the sources and realize that my real beef is with, say, the way the topic comes off in the popular press. That's not Wikipedia's fault. It would be really nice if we could correct every misconception in the world at large just by editing Wikipedia, but in practice, Wikipedia has to follow behind sources like the popular press. The best place to take those kinds of fights is off Wikipedia, into the publishing world itself: if you manage to get what you think is a good characterization of the topic published in a respected forum, the corresponding articles may well come to include your perspective.

I think it's healthy to view a Wikipedia article not as the "sum total of human knowledge" on the topic in question, but rather just as a sort of barometer of what sorts of things have been said about the topic in academic and popular publishing. That's more realistic and helps to keep your blood pressure down.

Maybe "neutral" wasn't the best choice of word


In closing, I think perhaps it might have been better if the person who coined the phrase "neutral point of view" had spent a little more time considering how much that would lead people to think about "being objective" and how much confusion and conflict that might engender. "Source-oriented point of view" is a bit more of a mouthful, although it does have the advantage of leading to the more-pronouncable SOPOV, which sounds rather like an old-time Russian computer. Ah well, as with π, it's likely too late to change.