Wikipedia:Quotations and neutrality

Editors should take care to avoid letting quotations, especially from unreliable sources, into an article in a way which has the effect of driving a coach and horses through the neutrality policy - or worse still, the biography of living persons policy. (This applies to both inline quotations and indented quotations, e.g. those inserted using Template:Quotation.)

Ask yourself — if this quotation was rewritten to be a direct statement in the Wikipedia "editorial voice", rather than a quotation, without changing its essential message, would it be acceptable under Wikipedia policies and guidelines? If the answer is "probably not", this is an indication (though not a proof) that the quotation might not be appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia.

In some cases, such quotations will be appropriate, e.g. world leaders' responses to news of a mass shooting rampage. It can be appropriate to document, using reliable sources only, what world leaders have said in response to an event, on Wikipedia, and the fact that a certain world leader has condemned a shooting is appropriate to report even though it would not be appropriate for Wikipedia to include in the article "Wikipedia condemns the shooting" - still less the bald statement that "the shooting was an evil, despicable act", no matter how many editors might personally agree with such a statement.

However, in other cases, such as in articles about public policy issues, the inclusion of such quotations, especially in a one-sided way, may have the effect of unbalancing the article towards specific viewpoints.

How to fix a quotation which compromises or worsens an article's neutrality
A naive editor might assume that, given one slightly unbalanced paragraph containing only a hot-tempered quote from a proponent of a viewpoint, the right response is to find a suitably bombastic (or calm, depending on the editor's preferences) counterpoint from someone who holds an opposite view, and insert a quotation of similar length from that source into the article. However, consider a hypothetical case in which a badly-argued, uninformed rant from a blog in opposition to nuclear fission power is counterpointed in the same Wikipedia article (or worse still, in another Wikipedia article) with another quotation from a badly-argued, uninformed blog post written by someone in favour of nuclear power. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that both of the arguments quoted in fact represent fringe views about what the main reasons for accepting or rejecting nuclear fission power are, and neither of them are based on sound scientific arguments. How does this serve our readers?

This example highlights the fact that neutrality is not simply a matter of identifying two broad points of view - such as pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear, pro-life and pro-choice, pro-assisted-suicide and anti-assisted-suicide - and roping in any old quotation from the internet which happens to support one view or the other. Such quotations may not accurately represent an "ideal argument" or even an actually-existing mainstream argument for the broad view they espouse - and of course in any case, Wikipedia's standards are much higher than that.

Indeed, poor rhetoric, reasoning, spelling or grammar in a quotation may in fact have the opposite effect to that intended by a POV-pusher - it may actually bring discredit by association upon the position advanced in many readers' minds. For this reason, we perhaps should be inclined to reject such quotations even when they are inserted by an editor who does not appear to support the POV the quotations express - because for all we know they may be trying to sneakily achieve this discrediting effect by looking like they are trying to balance an article even at cost to their own POV, but in fact seeding the counterargument "space" in the article with poor-quality examples of counterarguments.

The best advice, therefore, may be to remove the quotation entirely. If the quotation makes a factual point or a claim which can be cited to reliable sources, it may be appropriate to add that factual point or claim to the article, appropriately cited, if doing so does not massively unbalance the article or lend undue weight to fringe viewpoints. Contentious claims, of course, should be attributed to specific people or organisations as their viewpoints, not asserted as facts in the Wikipedia authorial voice. And of course, if an editor had added, or was intending on adding, a balancing quote, they might want to consider replacing the quotes with suitably sanitised versions of both the original quote and the balancing quote as statements or claims in the article - but applying the same Wikipedia policies and guidelines to both sides, without fear or favour, which may mean that one or the other quotation has to be simply excised without trace.