Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view

idea: if roughly more than 20% of serious, credentialed academic authors in a field hold a minority view, that view should be attributed, not be omitted or overly minimized

I think Wikipedia has been possibly overzealous with excluding or overly minimizing some views on the basis of FRINGE. I'm coming out of a discussion about for example, should articles on ancient religious figures present a dominant view of the history and archeology to the exclusion of other perspectives that are less popular in current academia, or about the extent that environmental determinism in population genetics studies of intelligence is a closed book consensus. Both pretty controversial areas with plenty of open issues that Wikipedia tends to gloss over to present the majority as the consensus view of academia, despite minority views in RS that aren't obviously pseudoscientific or misinfo, but aren't accepted by most, but not all, but not 99% either. More like 80%. WP:RS/AC demands an explicit academic consensus and it should already require other RS, not simply an editor's opinion, to exclude a minority POV. But what about a rough rule of thumb to put a little bit of an impetus on editors to remember how to write for the opponent and address some of the criticism that NPOV has become weak as the consensus side has stopped throwing a bone to the loyal opposition. To my mind 20 vs 1% is a meaningful distinction. Though I could see 30% or 1/3 also working. Andre🚐 00:53, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Setting a numerical threshold is a recipe for long arguments over exactly who should be counted and on which sides they should be counted. I don't see how this solves any problems. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:08, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks(?) for reminding me that I should check in on Talk:Cass Review again, where we have editors persistently saying things about "the whole world" when talking about sources applicable to mostly WEIRD countries where less than 20% of the world's population live. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with other editors that numerical thresholds are prone to bad applications and gaming. For better or for worse, Wikipedia needs people to intelligently evaluate and discuss an issue case-by-case. But I agree with the principle that if something is repeatedly picked up in multiple reliable sources, it should be covered. If it's a more controversial claim that is covered in multiple situational or dubious sources, then it should be covered from the careful lens of the most reliable sources with a reputation for fact checking and accuracy (or not covered at all). Shooterwalker (talk) 17:02, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Concur that numerical thresholds are suboptimal. But suggest that a viewpoint which is supported by 20% of "serious, credentialed academic authors" in a relevant field, clearly meets the non-numerical thresholds as described at WP:DUE and WP:BALASP. Rotary Engine talk 02:23, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I was trying to think of a way to explain this idea without using an actual number. Basically I want to remind editors to explain the diversity of views on controversial topics rather than selecting which one is the majority view and minimizing other views. There is a difference between a fringe view, like aliens or never went to the moon hoax POVs, and a minority view: either an older view, a newer revisionist view, or just the main opposition camp. In some cases this is about the traditionalists versus the modernists, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes there are just different views. Wikipedia tends to favor modernism. For almost any controversial topic there is an evolution of views, in some cases a very recent one. So editors should be reminded to look for opposing viewpoints and explain the landscape. In some cases like climate change, yeah, almost no climate scientist disputes that there is anthropogenetic climate change. But that is an unusually clear-cut case. Andre🚐 03:23, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In the case of views changing over time, then it should be possible to just say that views changed over time. Modernism (in the sense of art), for example, appears to have been preceded by Renaissance art and 18th-century art, and it appears to have been followed by contemporary art and post-modern art. That's not exactly "opposing viewpoints".
One of the more difficult areas is when scholarly views are X, but the subject isn't inherently (or entirely) scholarly. Freud would have been considered a "serious, credentialed academic author", but that doesn't automatically mean that a psychotherapy patient's perception of his situation is always wrong if it differs from Freud's.
In particular, one doesn't want to protect "serious, credentialed academic authors" from criticism. It's December, so it's time for complaints at Talk:Santa Claus. The experts say children aren't harmed by parents telling stories about Santa Claus, but individuals say they were harmed. Who's right? Parents say that children will be harmed by the Wikipedia article, but experts say they won't be. Who's right? The answer to that question probably depends on whether you think an evening of unscheduled emotional labor on the parent's part constitutes "harm" or not. The parental POV doesn't have to be supported by "serious, credentialed academic authors" to be real. (I am hoping that the warning I installed at the top of that talk page last week will cut down on the think-of-the-children complaints.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:07, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't mean modern art versus older art periods or periodizations. Creating a periodization for a movement can itself be part of an art historiography. I meant when there are different scholarly schools of thought. For example, in quantum mechanics, there are Copenhagen, Many Worlds, etc. interpretations. In Historiography of World War II there is an Orthodox view, a Revisionist view, etc. So if we wanted to apply that to art maybe the aesthetic expressivism versus formalism. They aren't so much different schools in terms of later or earlier periods but they have attitudes and perspectives about what things mean or what things are important. I don't think this concept really applies to whether Santa Claus is real or not. I think the parental POV can be safely ignored or relegated. I am referring to scholarly, published, academic, reliable schools of thought. Andre🚐 08:27, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You are referring to scholarly, published, academic, reliable schools of thought. But:
  • Not everything we write about has any scholarly, published, academic, reliable schools of thought. Including only scholarly, published, academic, reliable schools of thought would result in an empty article.
  • Some subjects have one or more scholarly, published, academic, reliable schools of thought and also non-scholarly, non-academic but WP:YESPOV-relevant POVs. Including only scholarly, published, academic, reliable schools of thought would result in a biased article.
WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:55, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I'll buy that and not purely for the sake of argument. There are many schools of thought or notable POVs from other entities such as NGOs, governments, popular non-academic writers, or other things like say, a poet who writes graveside inscriptions, or a local zine, or an influential graffiti artist. But, WP:BESTSOURCES has language that implies for topics which have an academic context they should prefer academic sources, meaning books and journal articles primarily, which I think work out to many or most encyclopedic topics, because academics study most everything under the sun. Including your point, how would you translate that to a broadening or an improvement here? Because we could probably cover both the academic-schools and total-POVs together. Unless that isn't really what you meant. Andre🚐 22:04, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's complicated. You do want to say that most people alive today believe in ghosts; you don't want to say that ghosts are real. The subject need not be inherently scholarly for scholarly sources to exist (e.g., academic papers about celebrities).
I've thought for a couple of years that BESTSOURCES needs a complete re-write, but I've not figured out what I think it should say.
Additionally, unless the Gaza genocide dispute has already died down, now's probably not the time for me to be saying that non-scholarly POVs should be included, too, because I made that argument there, too (namely that the existence of non-scholarly POVs should be acknowledged as existing, at the end of the introduction). WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:38, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
On including non-scholarly POVs, I think this is about standards of evidence, like original research versus verifiable reliable sources in the era of 'citizen journalism.' There are already groups who try to use expertise to do geolocation and other aspects of 'open-source reporting,' and some of them have a good enough reputation to be quoted in reliable sources - and the field can be expected to grow in the future. Definitely something good to watch and consider. --Edwin Herdman (talk) 20:53, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think many Wikipedia readers would be concerned to hear that views with < 20% support are excluded by policy. Outside Wikipedia, "fringe" implies more like 5% support or lower. - Palpable (talk) 22:47, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It seems that in some cases at present we might even omit 40%. Andre🚐 23:31, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Which is unfortunate, but occasionally real. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:35, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Example? Guy (help! - typo?) 20:31, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well as I started at the outset, biblical historiography and archeology is one where I'd say the split in the field is probably 50-50 or 60-40 minimalists/traditionalists or maybe a balance that includes in-between, but if you think about the weight of sources and the fact that many biblical archeologists do consider biblical historiography to have value yet aren't religious apologists, and the fact that until recently, minimalism was considered a radical revisionist position, many articles do not explain the change over time or portray the split, or the extent of traditional/maximalism is some primary source stuff as opposed to academic work that simply is from the school of thought that biblical historiography is probably somehow historically useful in certain periods and contexts. Wikipedia has a mixed record on it. Another example could be Modern Monetary Theory. There's a growing minority of adherents yet we consider it a heterodox theory relegated to the footnotes, fringe essentially. Or the view of dietary cholesterol and saturated fat. A substantial minority of experts in nutrition science believe the link between dietary cholesterol and saturated fat and heart disease is largely nonexistent. However, the prevailing medical view in 60-80% of MEDRS still believes there is one. Andre🚐 21:59, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That is the area probably more prone to motivated reasoning than any other. It is dead easy to find scientific shroudies, for example, but there is absolutely no reason to give their beliefs parity with the empirical facts we already have. Guy (help! - typo?) 22:13, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't proposing parity. I think the articles should portray the extent of the landscape and explain what the splits are in scholarly views, and characterize minority positions, such as those at 20% adherence or 40% adherence, rather than excluding or completely minimizing them. But parity was never mentioned or proposed, and is an obvious non-starter. Andre🚐 22:57, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Looking at WP:FRINGE, I don't see a major problem here. If a theory is "fringe" but there is a good discussion including reliable sources that try to be NPOV and avoid undue weight, then it is likely safe to add at least a brief discussion of it. For example, Hollow Earth refers to a theory that could be called fringe or even extinct, but it has been thoroughly discussed and meets all quality standards. On the other hand, if I had some a Hollow Earth-related theory that wasn't meeting notability or verifiability standards, that would not be admissible to Wikipedia - even if I believe or know something to be true, that alone doesn't make the fact admissible. --Edwin Herdman (talk) 20:41, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
How would you apply that to something like surgeons telling all of their patients not to eat or drink anything beginning at midnight on the day of their surgery (e.g., 8 hours if the surgery is scheduled to start at 8:00 a.m., and 16 hours if it's at 4:00 p.m.)? This is a very common rule, but researchers say that it's wrong. (The real answer depends on multiple factors, including the type of anesthesia, the body parts involved in the surgery, and the person's overall health, but research supports a fasting period as short as three hours for clear liquids.)
Is that approach "fringe" because it's non-evidence-based, or "mainstream" because it's very common? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:26, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think reliable sources can do the heavy lifting here. I think you probably can find reliable sources describing that as a 'mainstream' practice, but if you find reliable sources calling it a 'fringe' view I would say that is noteworthy. While I have my own view on what the allusion of 'the fringe' implies, I have no problem with following the lead of reliable sources when a term is used, especially in a specialist context with a specialized vocabulary. If it's not clear enough what is meant, that would be a reasonable grounds for further discussion and research. Of course, if reliable sources avoid terms like 'fringe' or even 'mainstream,' we may do well to follow their example. Sometimes 'fringe' sounds hostile or dismissive, after all, and a reliable source may well avoid that on purpose. --Edwin Herdman (talk) 01:03, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think you're right that some reliable sources avoid 'fringe'-type language. For example, skeptic.com has 32 ghits for "fringe", and Science-Based Medicine has almost a thousand, but a typical medical textbook has zero. PubMed has just three for "fringe theory" out of 39 million records ("fringe" itself appears in more indexed articles about, e.g., fringe projection or Fringe genes, so it's not a good search term there).
For the most part, editors have to make a determination, as we have to know whether WP:FRINGE applies, and we usually have to do this without a source using the word fringe. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:30, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
They don't have to use the exact word fringe, but they do have to indicate in aggregate that the perspective is discredited, or something that means something along those lines, wouldn't you say? Andre🚐 04:48, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Returning to your original idea: If we can find reliable sources saying that a particular view is held by x% of the relevant field, then applying UNDUE seems to be trivial, right? So I suspect that the real problem here is what to do when we have to guess about how many adherents a view has - or, alternatively, when sheer headcount isn't really relevant because popularity doesn't determine truth of a fact. But I think that just takes us back to the original replies - it's hard to make those judgments and I think it's valuable to give editors some leeway to make good judgments without being overly rulebound. --Edwin Herdman (talk) 05:26, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
is it trivial? Can you outline what you would find and how to apply UNDUE and what each different case looks like, and how that is guided in the guideline? Or is that a piece of practice that isn't codified? Andre🚐 05:45, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe something like a high-quality survey of relevant experts would work. Imagine an academic paper that said that 96% of computer scientists believe that quantum computing will not be meaningfully commercialized during the current decade, or that 85% of primary care providers regularly recommended chiropractic care as an effective treatment for back pain, or that 98% of economists thought the economy was in a recession in 2008, or that 92% of school administrators said that students are less prepared for university-level math than they were in 2010. That would make those POVs be "mainstream" and the opposite probably be FRINGE.
It's harder if you have sources that say "One group...but another group..." or "Most say X, but some say not-X". That might represent two equally mainstream POVs or one mainstream and one FRINGE. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:32, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"Fringe" is not necessarily the opposite of mainstream - I think mainstream to not-mainstream is like a one axis of a plot, and dogmatic to fringe is another. YMMV of course.
On UNDUE: I agree my 'trivial' isn't the whole picture. My example considers polling sources, which can cause bad bias. But bias can also mean practicing values, and Wikipedia has some discriminating values. I believe verifiability is not merely a matter of counting sources. Wikipedia does not conduct original research, but we do try to make value judgements based on quality criteria - if necessary, separating popularity from scientific verifiability (falsifiability if you insist on being Popperian).
For a scientific topic, we might find the majority of reliable sources cover a non-scientific discourse. I wouldn't begin the article with a summary of non-scientific discourse and the most prominent advocates or theories in that sphere. "Verifiability" can mean judging what was actually said, but it can also mean guessing whether something is likely to be true. Of course, some topics generally considered non-scientific have their own articles despite being considered falsified by the majority of the scientific community, but commentary and interwiki links are often handy to take you from crop circles or demonology to relevant scientific principles. That is not hostile to believing that the scientific consensus may be inaccurate; it's hostile to the notion that scientific process could be considered generally irrelevant to a topic.
If I could have some more relevant examples of a controversial topic where the system has failed, I could try and see if my rant applies there. --Edwin Herdman (talk) 21:23, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you want an example of an unresolvable dispute, then whether Gaza genocide should have a different name (e.g., Gaza genocide allegations) is an obvious one.
My scale runs from "mainstream" to "legitimate minority" to "fringe". The opposite of dogmatic is undoctrinaire or open-minded. People who hold fringe positions are often dogmatic; that is, they are absolutely certain that their view is correct and that the rest of the world is wrong. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:24, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I find this issue comes up a lot in articles on under-researched medical topics (due to their rarity, or often conditions primarily affecting women). Often a “mainstream” view will be supported by the majority of academic sources, but all or the bulk of those sources may be extremely outdated—-while the “minority view” appears in a much smaller percentage of sources but specifically more recent ones (and often more comprehensive, better-designed studies/research).
——
As a hypothetical example, imagine Wikipedia existed during the time of Galileo:
The majority viewpoint/scientific consensus was that the sun revolved around the Earth. If someone tried to edit the article about the sun to include mention of a newer (but well-supported) viewpoint proposed by this one academic, Galileo, there’s a good chance it might’ve be reverted as a “fringe theory.”
——
Not a perfect analogy, but often with under-researched medical topics, there will be inter-community awareness (by patients and doctors who regularly treat them) of new or more factual information LONG before it makes its way into research papers and subsequently into mainstream medical awareness (sometimes a decade or more even).
I’m never totally sure what to do about this issue. So far I stick to the precedent of only including information that does have at least some published research behind it (not necessarily as a replacement for earlier schools of thought, but as a “newer research states that…” type addition) but I’ve still seen edit debates about whether such info is even worth including by those less familiar with the subject who are sticking hard to the “majority consensus” rule of relevance.
On topics where there is likely to be a heavy amount of inaccuracy and bias in “mainstream consensus” due to a historical lack of sufficient neutral research, prioritizing older schools of thought simply due to the fact that the volume of sources supporting them significantly outweighs that of newer (and more accurate & less biased) sources which contradict them seems like a problematic standard.
——
And as a much less hypothetical example (a debate I actually saw on this site):
It leads to things like seeing “hysteria” referenced as a legitimate medical condition in an article and editors insisting it should be left as such due to all their many “long-respected” (but now highly outdated) sources supporting that view, and dismissing more accurate modern sources that lack the same volume and historical respect simply due to the fact that accurate assessment of the topic has only happened in more recent history. Catfrost (talk) 00:25, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
So our coverage should depend on how many scientists dark money can buy? Guy (help! - typo?) 19:27, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I mean what about the Monsanto ghostwriting? Does that give some pause? Andre🚐 00:39, 12 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Just putting in my $0.02 worth here: This proposal would at least be an improvement. I mean, agreed: If you're going to make neutrality dependent upon some previous determination of which sources are "reliable"—as if that could be ascertained without bias (it can't)—then at least give the full range of views found in those sources, including minority views represented in those sources. But at present, Wikipedia routinely violates even this low standard. Larry Sanger (talk) 20:40, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Are "academic authors" even "reliable sources" for opinions, or just "one source of opinion"? I think the assumption here is that those authors are expressing their own opinion, and your 20% figure is a way of determining how minority that opinion is by counting academics who hold it. A different kind of academic source might document public opinion via polling, or might be a genuine attempt at (or hopelessly biased rant) describing the various academic opinions held by different parties, factions or groups. These are all different kinds of sources of opinions. An opinion held by an academic might be more valuable because of their expertise in the field they are talking about (if they are talking about their field and not off topic), but might also be weakened if their academic career is dependent on promoting some point of view and rubbishing another.

Consider the raising of flags on lampposts in the UK as documented in Operation Raise the Colours. This is a significant cultural event and shift: in the UK, we don't normally fly flags outside of major sporting events or royal celebrations, and even then, not on this scale on public infrastructure. It is recent, so there's no long-term view of 2025. All the sources are newspapers, not academic journals. So how do we weigh opinion that this is "fill[ing] the skyline with unity and patriotism" or "the far right marking territory"? Does it even make sense to gauge academic consensus/split on this? Who even cares what academics personally think on the matter, when perhaps for such a cultural shift, it is more important what the public think? Or important to document what those doing the flag raising (or flag removal) think, or say they think. Other countries might regard their own flag flying on lampposts quite differently, so it isn't like there is a universal view on flag flying.

Assuming editors found articles in academic journals, if the political views of those few such journals aligned with one side alone, we'd have a bias that doesn't perhaps reflect a wider scope of opinions. There is a danger, which I have seen on some topics, that editors push "academic opinion" as though that is "fact" from a "reliable source". But for opinions, the reliability is just that they reliably document what Professor Smith personally thinks. And Professor Smith's opinion piece might have a tiny readership in an obscure journal, vs an editorial in a major newspaper.

On the other hand, academic opinion on the merits of vaccination seems very appropriate to me, as it is likely to be based on evidence based medicine and/or on well researched ideas about how to present public health information and persuade populations to make sensible medical choices while dealing with the consequences of occasional ill effects. Do we have a feeling which topics "academic opinion" is more valuable or where it is "just the opinion of some random person in some random university published in a journal few read but is indexed by a search engine"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Colin (talk • contribs) 10:10, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The views of people who have academic training in a relevant field are going to be more important than some random person. The important part is 'in a relevant field'. The opinion of an academic in political science who has published major, well respected, works on the political life of the UK would be more relevant than some vox pop. The flag craze is current, but in twenty years if academic works have been written about the current situation then those won't be just opinion and should be given more weight than current news reporting or opinion polls. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:49, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder whether we're using "academic" to mean different things. "Professional in the relevant field", perhaps? That would include medical and legal experts, which I think we intend to include, but it might reach down into the trades. If the question is whether professionals believe that duct tape is useful for sealing ducts, you don't need an ivory tower-type academic; a plumber's trade association or a building codes expert could give you the right answer (i.e., they prefer HVAC-specific foil tape over duct tape). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:35, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Makes me think of the wording at SPS, maybe "expert in the relevant field" is better wording. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 21:05, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Then we can fight over "the relevant field". Is Hilary Cass, a pediatrician, in "the relevant field" for pediatric gender care, or should we prefer someone who specializes in gender care, albeit for adults? At Gaza genocide, is the view of a lawyer specializing in war crimes in "the relevant field", or should we prefer someone who studies sociological aspects of genocide? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:12, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Editors will argue other the wording of any policy, but at least that would be other whether the specific person was an expert in a relevant field and not dismissive of the entire concept. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 09:26, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We aren't comparing to "some random person" or to a "vox pop" (is that even a thing any more?), but to other people who get their work published in reliable sources. At this point in time, the flag raising issue is "current affairs" so arguably a newspaper journalist, who gets off their backside and interviews people on both sides, is probably the best source. An opinion columnist who doesn't bother interviewing and just gets paid to bloviate rather than do journalism, probably isn't "important" unless their offensive comments in turn become newsworthy. An editorial in a widely read newspaper may be "important" because it is widely read. Some academic, who publishes an opinion piece in a so called academic journal? That could well be quite deeply unimportant. Plenty journals dabble in "news" and "opinion" among their more scholarly work. The idea that all articles in a "peer reviewed academic journal" are equal, or even peer reviewed, is a major source of confusion among some editors. The readership may be tiny. The opinion merely chosen to align with journal ethos. It really depends if that academic is basing their piece on their expertise, or their hard graft, or just sitting on the sofa knocking out some rant that happens to appear in an academic journal. I've read opinion pieces in journals that are lazy unfocused nonsense and I've read proper journalism in newspapers that are balanced thoughtful works.
The opposite of a "vox pop" is a serious opinion poll by a reliable organisation. These can determine, with caveats, general public opinion, which in the end is actually what matters wrt flag raising. If, for the sake of argument, the UK population reclaims their flags from racists, and really does fly them out of unity with anyone who happens to make the UK their home, regardless of colour or the origins of their parents, then we'd view the raising of them in public spaces quite differently. That will be determined by the population as a whole, and to some degree by the influence of politicians and journalists and other media figures. I can say quite categorically it won't be determined by the opinion of academics writing in journals. Deeply unimportant other than to other academics. Whereas, I hope, policy on childhood immunisation is influenced by academics writing in journals, and much much less on popular opinion. At the moment, our P&G seems to weigh both academic opinions the same, and I don't think that's right.
Where I agree is that in three years time, it would be better if our article on flag raising was sourced to something putting it in cultural perspective, rather than of the moment. And that might be a journal or a book. -- Colin°Talk 08:53, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would much rather use a non-UK academic on the meaning of such a change than the people involved in it. What the subject of an article thinks about themselves is far less important than the writings of an external observer. Yes that academic won't determine the outcome of the change, but Wikipedia documents the output rather than effecting the change itself. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 09:23, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think you've got things upside down. That external observer, if their writing is of any value whatsoever, has to be documenting what "the subject [the UK population] thinks about themselves [the flag raisers and those who have to put up with flags in their streets]". Anyone attempting to record "the meaning of such a change" based on their own foreign opinions about flag flying is deeply deeply irrelevant. Remember this topic is about academic opinions and when their are minority or important. I think this is an example of where personal academic opinion is entirely irrelevant. Cultural values and beliefs (e.g. that flying flags in the street is a symbol of unity for all vs is a symbol of racist and anti-immigrant sentiment) is not something that is ever ever determined by academics or scientists. Whereas the utility of antibiotics or the merits of randomised control trials are. So polling academic opinion, as proposed here, is misguided, for some topics, imo. -- Colin°Talk 09:16, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Here's an example. If a US academic wrote "Seeing the the Stars and Strips flying in the street fills me with pride and unites our nation. The sooner the Brits get over their hang-ups wrt misappropriation of their flag by racists, the better. The flag flying I saw when I visited the UK in summer 2025 is a wonderful symbol of national unity". Assuming this comment wasn't widely discussed of itself, and appeared in some US academic political journal, what weight would this be given to support the idea that flag flying in the UK is a symbol of national unity? Seems far more appropriate as an example some other secondary source could use to document how the US and the UK are very different culturally and don't understand each other. -- Colin°Talk 09:53, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think that this ignores the fact that many academic topics are opinion-based. And that many academics do write about social topics that are less clear-cut than the utility of antibiotics. Academics can weigh in on their opinion of the merits of a historical periodization, or the meaning or importance of something, or whether they believe this event in history is inevitable, or what-have-you. There are many topics where there isn't a right or wrong answer just a different school of thought that does ultimately come down to a professional opinion, and a qualified academic opinion is given more weight than a lay person or a popular commentator. These POVs don't strictly need to be external or neutral to be notable. Andre🚐 18:55, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
When there are different schools of thought, what we expect from a reliable source is something that says "According to this model, flying flags represents..." or "Semi-structured interviews showed that..." We're not really looking to them for opinions in the common meaning of the word. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:42, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The right term for them is POVs, but opinion means kind of the same thing, but we don't mean a value judgment like X is cool or my favorite color is green. But, there are implicit value judgments in academic work. Read papers in historiography, sociology, anthropology, and so on. They are different from works in genetics or biochem or pharmacology. For example, take "The debate over the role of lachrymosity in Jewish history"[1] [2] Salo Baron's, the preeminent diaspora Jewish historian of the 20th century, anti-lachrymose view became very influential and started what David Engel has termed a "neo-Baronian school." Engel and Adam Teller have challenged the view and added nuance or argued that it is overapplied. These things sometimes ebb and flow like the tides over time. There may be a long-term tendency but for stuff that is ultimately a judgment call: how best to frame and interpret historical narratives? Do we want a framework A or B? People do not always say "according to this model." Sometimes the model is just what anchors the analysis and it falls to others to decide which camp they fall into. Our job in determining weight of sources should in part involve sorting and clustering them to ensure that all notable camps are reasonably represented somehow. Andre🚐 01:02, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Antibiotic use (and over use, and routine use in farm animals) is controversial and opinionated, not just a "they're a good thing because science" issue. I know there are many fields that are essentially a bunch of opinions, not a hard fact in sight, and various schools of thought. What I'm trying to see if we can separate, is that there are some areas, and I think cultural values and some ethical questions and some beliefs are among them, where the personal opinions of academics are deeply unimportant, but are falsely elevated as such by our P&G.
Let me try an example I hope looks ridiculous. A lot of people are vegetarian. "I should not eat meat" is a personal opinion. It might extend further to "Nobody should eat meat". Many hold this view for religious reasons and many for ethical ones. I'm sure there is scholarly analysis of this and we would cite that. The most reasonable position is to accept this is one area where we all agree to disagree, and it very unlikely one view will prevail. We aren't all going to become vegetarian any more than we are all going to become Anglicans.
What I wouldn't expect is Wikipedia to determine the weight it gives to vegetarian issues based on what proportion of scholars are themselves vegetarian. Would we really do some count of authors in academic journals to determine if 20% are vegetarian? Or even would you expect some editor to push our articles to include attributed pro-vegetarian opinions because "This is a highly reliable academic source, which Wikipedia considers the best". Maybe the vegetarian academic is writing in the British Medical Journal and we'd have an editor say they have a MEDRS source that demands we included a pro-vegetarian opinion in our article on breast cancer. I hope that sounds ridiculous, but I'm afraid that is what I've seen on culture-war and controversial ethical issues. That editors demand an opinion is pushed (often as the only correct one) because they found a journal article by an academic who believes a certain thing they agree with. Elsewhere we might go "Don't be ridiculous, that's just someone's opinion, and being an academic doesn't make their vegetarianism any more reasonably held or importantly repeatable on wiki than being a lorry driver". -- Colin°Talk 08:59, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And what if only 10% of the scholars are vegetarian? Would we never mention the subject (except in a dedicated article)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:47, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Am I understanding that the argument generally is that we should not consider the moral opinions of academics with more weight than the moral opinions of non-academics? In essence that academics are not more morally authoritative than non-academics? --Kyohyi (talk) 18:04, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe, but what if the article's subject is a moral one? Maybe a moral philosopher actually is more authoritative on a moral subject like Legal ethics or Human cloning than a non-academic. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:15, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Aren't they? If you are an ethical expert or someone who writes books about morality or gives speeches about it, doesn't that make your opinion more notable and encyclopedic than a lay person? Andre🚐 18:21, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And if broader society does not follow the philosophers moral framework? From a descriptive point, yes the moral philosopher is authoritative on describing their moral philosophy. But the contention becomes more is this moral framework actual societal knowledge or not? --Kyohyi (talk) 18:32, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Going back to the vegetarian thing. Being a vegetarian isn't itself a school of thought. But there are ethical vegetarian philosophers who attempt to justify or explain vegetarianism. It's more than being a vegetarian but taking a side in the debate on its merits. For example, the influential philosopher John Rawls largely excludes animals so you might think he isn't that relevant to the vegetarian debate. However, that doesn't stop articles like [3] or [4] referencing things like "Rawlsian-influenced ethical vegetarianism espoused by Mark Rowlands." This is clearly academics in an area having an informed debate and not just a survey of people's dietary habits. Andre🚐 18:46, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A philosopher is a special case of an academic who's focus of study is opinions themselves, on ways of forming or thinking about such opinions. So that's a bit meta. And I'm not trying to exclude academics who do a good job of explaining the opinion topic and why people hold opinions or listing the merits of sides. I'm concerned with the academic's own opinion. I don't think this is solely about morals or ethics even though those could be examples where a population develops a collective opinion. Flag flying isn't really something with a universal answer that would be discovered if you followed some philosophical framework.
There was a time when most of the population in my country went to church. Now, most don't. Some countries differ from that and still have high attendance. Academic's personal opinions on whether they themselves should attend church are utterly irrelevant. Church attendance as a "thing to do on a Sunday" is entirely dependent on cultural group opinion. The most an academic really can do sensibly is observe and record. Their own view on the matter isn't important. And there must really be no end to a list of such topics for which the degree of adherence to that idea is determined by a population, not some elite group of thinkers. -- Colin°Talk 19:26, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
But there are academics who study that: why do people adopt religion or irreligion, push and pull factors, how migrations influence religious beliefs, how media consumption influences attitudes in society. For example, [5] Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge's Religious Market Theory, [6] Stig Hjarvard [da; fo]'s Mediatization of Religion, [7] Peggy Levitt's concept of Social Remittances, [8] Peter L. Berger's Desecularization or Post-Secular theory. Andre🚐 21:15, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder if we're talking about different ways to "hold a view".
We don't want to say that 20% of people think churchgoing important enough to do it regularly, but only 10% of academics, and therefore churchgoing is a minority POV among academics and shouldn't be included in relevant articles.
We might want to say that church attendance has declined in Europe compared to a century ago and that academics have differing views about the cause: e.g., x% think it is due to economic changes, y% think it is due to urbanization, z% think it due to the rise of the dual-income family, etc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:00, 12 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, as worded this is a terrible idea. How do we decide what's within a field? Sources can differ wildly in weight and significance within academia, and can have different degrees of expertise across fields. Dredging up a 20% of ophthalmologists who deny evolution doesnt' make it less fringe. And that sort of thing (finding people outside the field, with no expertise, to speak on it based purely on their personal beliefs) was a common tactic, in fact, that was deployed by creationists when that debate was current, as well as a common tactic by organizations pushing misinformation on health issues like tobacco in the past. More broadly, the point is that these sorts of complexities mean we should evaluate academic consensus based on the highest available secondary sources - when there is a genuine academic consensus, we'll be able to find sources saying so; and when we can do that, editors trying to do some sort of nose-count to dispute it is totally inappropriate and shouldn't be given any weight at all. Now, when there is reasonable dispute among such high-quality secondary sources of equal weight, that means we have to reflect that, including giving significant minority views the focus they're due, but we decide that by looking at what the best available sources say, not by pulling out yardsticks and trying to measure the entire field ourselves. --Aquillion (talk) 21:20, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    We can't always find sources directly stating that there's an academic consensus for some things. Imagine trying to find a reliable source that bothers to say things like "There's an academic consensus that the ocean contains saltwater" or "There's an academic consensus that heart transplants should only be performed by specially trained surgeons". There is an academic consensus for these things, but it's so patently obvious that no source is going to bother saying so. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:10, 21 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    By any definition, ophthalmologists are not in the climate science field. You would need to be qualified as an expert in the field. That's just a silly strawman. Anyway, editors clearly do do a "nose count" to determine what is a minority view. I'm not sure how else you determine what a minority is. There isn't always, as WAID says, going to be an explicit description of something as the majority or minority view - editors today are just deciding what they think the mainstream views are by reading a proportionate cross-section of sources. And I'm not sure what you think a source survey is. Andre🚐 03:55, 21 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Wishful future debuts and openings

If you look at several versions of James Beard Public Market for example, you'll see "plans on opening..." was pushed back several times. With the latest reference, it says sometime in 2027. Should we even write about future plans that is not set in stone and continue updating as things get pushed back, or take the approach of leaving out the anticipated date, then wait until it actually opens? Graywalls (talk) 16:25, 5 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Usually, if the subject of the article is endlessly postponed, then that calls its notability into question. NB that this is not something to approach with black-and-white rigid thinking: a subject can be notable – even famous – for being endlessly delayed. But for some subjects, especially films and one-time events, "delayed" often turns out to mean "permanently cancelled". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:19, 5 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

BALASP and writing an encyclopedia article

WP:BALASP currently says:

An article should not give undue weight to minor aspects of its subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject. For example, a description of isolated events, quotes, criticisms, or news reports related to one subject may be verifiable and impartial, but still disproportionate to their overall significance to the article topic. This is a concern especially for recent events that may be in the news.

It's all very negative. It's focused on what should be left out (isolated events, quotes, criticisms, news reports, recent events), rather than what should be kept in.

We have talked before about what I have called the need to write an encyclopedia article, i.e., a summary that provides basic information and places the subject in context. What do you all think about adding something like this (no changes to the existing text)?

In addition to describing why the subject is notable (e.g., "is an author", "biggest employer in the region"), encyclopedia articles should place the subject in context. For example, an article about a person should always indicate, at least in a general way, when and where they lived (e.g., "17th-century Spanish writer", "born c. 1907 in Japan"), and an article about a business should always indicate what services or products the business provides (e.g., "manufactures widgets", "shipping and logistics company").

What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:24, 5 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I like the general idea, articles without context are just collections of facts. The wording of the last sentence gives me pause, I can see people insisting it means articles should contain product lists (it doesn't and it's silly to read it that way, but still). Maybe a different example, or and an article about a company should always indicate the nature of it's business. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:42, 5 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I like that wording better. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:27, 7 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not really sure how describing the nature of a business is putting it in context, but I am supportive of efforts to bring in the details you describe. Rollinginhisgrave (talk | edits) 12:24, 7 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
"Bob's Big Business, Inc. is an American business founded in 2012" puts the business in the context of place and time. "They manufacture widgets" puts the business in the context of their industry (manufacturing) and products/activities (widgets). It is the business equivalent of saying "Alice Expert (b. 1984) is an American expert. She writes books."
By comparison, "Bob's Big Business, Inc. leverages the synergies of value-adding resources and a disruptive paradigm shift to create a win-win for investors" does not put the business in an encyclopedic context. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:35, 7 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I've added this (with AD's wording). Further iterations or ideas are still (very) welcome. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:43, 7 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Origin and history of the new definition of "neutrality"

Hi everyone. It's been literally decades since I have discussed the neutrality policy on this talk page. I would like to raise a question that is interesting to me. The following is the definition (or one of them) of 'neutrality' according to the policy page:

Achieving what the Wikipedia community understands as neutrality means carefully and critically analyzing a variety of reliable sources and then attempting to convey to the reader the information contained in them fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without editorial bias.

Let's look back at the definition, which I wrote, as it stood when I left in late winter 2002:

[Y]ou should write articles without bias, representing all views fairly... The Wikipedia policy is that we should fairly represent all sides of a dispute, and not make an article state, imply, or insinuate that any one side is correct.

Consider also Jimmy Wales' formulation:

The neutral point of view attempts to present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and opponents can agree. Of course, 100% agreement is not possible; there are ideologues in the world who will not concede to any presentation other than a forceful statement of their own point of view. We can only seek a type of writing that is agreeable to essentially rational people who may differ on particular points.

Notice that in these formulations, there is no reference whatsoever to a prior reliable sources policy. The current version of the policy page does retain the language that expresses the original definition, however: "Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them. The aim is to inform, not influence." The implication is that "disputes" that should be merely "described" are those in the approved "reliable" sources, and the language prohibiting "influence" applies only to views found in such sources.

I propose that it was a definite mistake to define neutrality by reference to "reliable sources," because—rather obviously—people who take different sides on various issues (political, religious, scientific, academic, etc.) frequently disagree about what the "reliable sources are." Moreover, you can make what would be a biased analysis according to the original policy "neutral" if you simply exclude certain kinds of sources by policy. I have two questions, therefore.

(1) When did all this change? Can someone do the research and report the answer?

(2) Why did it change? Larry Sanger (talk) 19:49, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Well, back in 2002, there was no verifiability policy. It wasn't created until August 2003. I remember that because it was one of the first major policy things that happened, that I remember anyway, when I was a new editor.[9] Andre🚐 19:54, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It looks like some time in October 2006 the reliance on reliable sources was first introduced. This was the first instance I found of it being added from a cursory search. [10] --Kyohyi (talk) 20:08, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting.
One wonders whether the defenders of the new form of the definition would say that there was something definitely wrong with earlier versions. And if so, what. Larry Sanger (talk) 21:08, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The reliability of a source doesn't depend on the side it takes in an issue, so this is only a problem in a situation where different sources have come to very different solution to the way the world has changed in the last quarter century. As to how Wikipedia's policies have evolved there are many articles you can easily find that show verifiability has been a major improvement for Wikipedia's articles from the very poor position it was in in the early 2000's. The world now has changed so Wikipedia .as changed Obviously American culture war nonsense is always going to be a problem, but Wikipedia isn't going to solve that issue. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:48, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Need I really point out the obvious, though, that people disagree—often very strongly—about the reliability of sources? Moreover, when it comes to news sources, their views on that often line up rather closely with their ideology, and always have. The same can occur in warring groups of academic journals that take different sides on controverted issues. While it's true that the reliability of one single source does not depend on the side it takes on any issue, neither is that the problem. The problem begins from the insight that people disagree about what the reliable sources are. If their views of the reliability of sources are in the minority (or are for any other reason excluded), and if their views are reported only in such disfavored sources, then their views cannot be represented (or, not neutrally) in articles at all, under the old definition. The same articles will (or can) be adjudged perfectly neutral under the new definition. Larry Sanger (talk) 21:26, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There is no need for a new definition, especially one that takes the encyclopedia back decades. If editors disagree on the reliability of a source that is what WP:Dispute resolution and WP:CONSENSUS building is for. If consensus is against a particular source or sources then editors should look to the strength or weakness of their arguments, not push that unreliable sources should be included to support content because it aligns with their views. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 23:51, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I think you mean "old" definition, or "original" definition. The question is not exactly one of need but of excellence or correctness. There are precisely analogous problems with the way consensus has changed as well, but I won't argue that here since it would take us far afield. But in any case the point is that neutrality is best understood independently of "reliable sources." Larry Sanger (talk) 00:55, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Neutrality can't be understood independently of reliable sources, that would suggest that any published information should be considered, and a lot of what people write is nonsense or designed to push a POV in a civil manner. So no, reliability must be considered. And if it's to be the "original" definition, the the more correct term would be "outdated". -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:56, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Er, yes, it can, and we can say so definitively because it was for the first five years of the project. In other words, you do not need to make the range of views that must be presented fairly depend on some antecedent set of policies about "reliable sources." Why would you? It's not outdated, because it's the correct one. Larry Sanger (talk) 20:26, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, if a source takes such a strong side in one direction as to dismiss long-established agreed-on knowledge from more central sources and falsifying information to push their preferred narrative, that's a good reason to dismiss the source as reliable. There's a reason we don't use Breitbart (falsifying quotes) for anything, or Fox for things like climate science (as they reject climate change). What tends to happen is that most of these sources that end up so biased to become unreliable like this is that they fall on the right of the political spectrum, though we'd certainly do the same for extreme left sources as well that try to create their own reality due to their bias. Masem (t) 00:52, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Your argument here perfectly illustrates the problem. It goes like this, in structure: "Because we antecedently believe such-and-such, a source that denies it must be rejected; therefore, our understanding of the range of views that must be fairly reported-on (i.e., our definition of neutrality) depends on the source." But then you are saying that such-and-such (in your example, climate change) is required to define the range of acceptable belief. What if there were a large enough group of people available to push for the opposite, that climate change was false? Then, by your principle, anyone thinking otherwise would be treated as obviously wrong, and then any source that presents it as correct would be unacceptable, and we need not fairly represent it. Ultimately, this is arbitrary and makes neutrality a matter of majority opinion. But that does violent to the very idea of neutrality, which is precisely to allow diversity of opinion (in order to allow readers to make up their own minds).
We are recapitulating, here, exactly a debate that was had and settled in 2001, and the reversed, it seems, several years later. Larry Sanger (talk) 01:05, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
One option to address the gap would be that source reliability should be defined by standing in other reliable sources, and not simply by editor majority opinion. The reason why sources like Fox News are rightfully unreliable is because they were fact checked for lying too many times to their viewers/readers. But, there are other examples where the consensus is basically down to editors' POVs. Another option would be to strengthen the "minority view" part of NPOV. That is what I proposed in the thread at the top of this page. Andre🚐 03:43, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This just makes a self-referential loop. Reliable sources are reliable sources because reliable sources say they are reliable. --Kyohyi (talk) 13:22, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
That recursion is a feature not a bug Andre🚐 03:27, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
So, an ideological purity spiral by design. --Kyohyi (talk) 19:41, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The point is to derive the reputation from other reputable sources, rather than editor opinions. Andre🚐 00:52, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
While that's a good starting point, it should not be a constraining factor on NPOV. If anything it should work the other way where reputation should be impartially analyzed, not through the inevitable purity loop that we get through deriving reputation through reputation. Humans, and by extension the sources written by humans carry bias and ideology. They invariably hold other humans and by extension sources that share their bias and ideology in higher regard. This is a positive feedback loop that leads to one ideology taking over the process. --Kyohyi (talk) 13:36, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
"Impartially"? How does that work? People just coming to the table magically without any innate biases or preconceptions? Which you say in the next sentence, so I'm utterly lost. Either you think humans are inherently biased, or that they can be impartial. It seems you are basically arguing for the exact point that I am making: on the margins or in edge cases people are just bringing their own opinions to the table instead of looking at the evidentiary source record for the opinions of the experts or the expert sources, as opposed to their own politics. I don't often agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, but they are a good paper for reporting of rigorous facts. Similarly, the current RSN/RSP regime accepts such publications as Reason mag, the Telegraph, the Times of London, The Hill, the Globe and Mail, National Review, and the Economist. On the left there are also bad sources. Occupy Democrats, Raw Story, Drop Site News, Ground News, -- while left misinfo might not be as bad as the Daily Wire or Tucker Carlson, it exists. The idea that some sources are reliable and some aren't isn't inherently a political question. Or at least, it doesn't have to be. One day, if a sufficiently good case were made that certain sources which have so far been impervious to downgrading crossed the line one too many times, they would, I hope be downgraded. The fact that this hasn't already happened because said sources are therefore Teflon is not in evidence. But, if your goal is to de-Teflonify let's say the BBC or the New York Times, I think a better way of doing that would be through a source-based argument. What way are you proposing to do it "impartially"? You're essentially, I guess, arguing to do away with the entire system of reliable sources and vetting thereof. So what will fill that void? Andre🚐 05:38, 21 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Well, you start by seeing if the content is opinion analysis or fact. All sources are inherently reliable with respect to their own opinion. If sources have a difference of opinion on a subject, we do not adopt one opinion as the "correct" opinion and filter out sources that disagree with them. This is especially true of moral claims and assertions. And this needs to be analyzed carefully as moral claims and assertions can be buried within loaded language, and asserted as fact. This brings up the point that we have to look at the language the sources are using and determine if they are using the terminology in the same way. We should document the difference in the meaning of the term rather than putting them just side by side as if they meant the same thing. Things like prominence of belief would better be documented by organizations like the PEW research rather than advocacy groups and editor opinion. This would go a long way in determining what is actually majority, minority, and Fringe. There are special cases like criminal allegations where the only opinions that matter on the moral claim are the opinions of the Jurists, but crime is a special case. --Kyohyi (talk) 13:29, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I don't agree with that. Expert opinions from qualified experts are more important and valuable than non-experts. And experts are allowed to have opinions on crimes. Under your logic, the Leo Frank article would not state that he was wrongfully convicted. This isn't a route to solving the minority view problem, it's a route to FRINGE-ifying the encyclopedia. If practically all historians and experts agree about something, we don't need to throw a bone to a nonexistent opposition. The cases where we need to throw a bone are when political POVs are taking the place of facts. Andre🚐 16:10, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
And what are the metrics to qualify expertise? Especially on moral claims and assertions. Who is the moral authority, and why? The jurist reference was to current legal allegations, not historical cases, and under WP: BLPCRIME applications, juries are the only ones who can come to the authoritative opinion that a crime was committed. --Kyohyi (talk) 16:51, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What is an issue is when we are rushing to add opinions shortly after an event
In that immediate time frame, all opinions should be avoided even from experts, unless they are people or entities directly at the heart of the event, and even then, filtered though independent news sources. What is done now which harms article neutrality us this rush to add commentary and opinion from first party sources (social media more frequently but often also from op Ed pages) with dye to the nature of what is RSP, can inadvently favor one viewpoint over another. That's why we shouldn't be trying to provide a details reactions or opinion section so near an event.
Once you get far enough away from the event, then expert sources shpuld be evaluated with more weight thsn non experts in term ls of providing long term analysis of the event. This sources on the far future of an event are likely going to be covering all the significant viewpoints that we as an encyclopedia should talk about. Masem (t) 16:32, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Something like this was the original approach—we were often considering questions as to the proportions of opinions, which just by the way is usually impossible to ascertain with any certainty. Reference to the sheer presence of an opinion among the population appears required if neutrality is made independent of RS considerations, as it should be. Your approach would be an improvement, in any event. Larry Sanger (talk) 20:36, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What I think should be codified into the guideline is the idea that when you try to do a source survey, for example on history, you need to cluster the historians. You can't just choose all historians from the traditionalist school. You need some revisionists in there too. On many controversial topics, Wikipedia has determined that certain schools of thought are not significant minority viewpoints, but fringe ones. Andre🚐 03:29, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Even in 2002 they are "views" of someone, so "views" in 2002 implies a source that is relied on for that information. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:30, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Larry, you are correct that editors can (and do) disagree on the reliability of sources. We resolve such disagreements the way we resolve other disagreements - through discussion and consensus.
In the case of disagreements (or just questions) regarding the reliability of sources, we have our Reliability Noticeboard (WP:RSN), where we can discuss the source and reach a consensus on whether it should be considered reliable in a given context. Blueboar (talk) 22:06, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'm aware of all that, and this does not really have any bearing on the question whether the definition of 'neutral' should be made to depend on that of 'reliable source'. Larry Sanger (talk) 01:07, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
See "Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet". Key quotes:
  • "This paper shows that the English Wikipedia transformed its content over time through a gradual reinterpretation of its ambiguous Neutral Point of View (NPOV) guideline, the core rule regarding content on Wikipedia. This had meaningful consequences, turning an organization that used to lend credence and false balance to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and extremism into a proactive debunker, fact-checker and identifier of fringe discourse."
  • "Per Sanger, the NPOV rule was meant to include a broad spectrum of perspectives and adopt a report-on-the-controversy approach, rather than exclude perspectives"
  • "Sanger, who crafted the core NPOV rule, has condemned the interpretations of the guideline that emerged over time."
  • "A qualitative content analysis shows that Wikipedia transformed from a dubious source of information in its early years to an increasingly reliable one over time."
— Newslinger talk 23:25, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There is one point I can agree on here, in that in the last decade or more, editors have moved away from the report-on-the-controversy approach, and are instead trying as hard as possible to push one view as the majority and treat other views as minority or even fringe. This is particularly true with anything involving the current culture wars that started in the mid-2010s but includes many other topic areas too. Its editing with an implicit WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS approach, using the RS and NPOV policies to push WP to take a moral ground on some of these topics just because the RSes do that too. This is what leads to the twisting of NPOV policy that coupled with RSP can lead to major problems in neutrality and tone.
One of the biggest ways this happens is editors trying to do their own work to try to assert what is the majority view points by source counting from views directly involved with a controversy, rather than using high quality sources that are separated from the controversy but trying to document what the controversy is about. We are writing in commentary and opinions on topics far too soon before there has been for the situation to settle and to find sources that give a better picture of what the sides are and which might help identify what are minority views with reasoning. (eg we can do that with climate change denial, pointing out from sources how this goes against decades of science and observations). We can course correct from that but it will require editors to relearn how to write neutrally as how NPOV was initially given. Masem (t) 00:55, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I think this is true. There is more WP:ADVOCACY that people have a blind spot about. But in theory the policy already says not to do that. Andre🚐 03:31, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I would say that language has been increasingly weaponized during the 2010s. There has been more policing around language, more words are "forbidden", more concepts are "cancellable". We have probably become more of a text-based world due to the popularity of social media, which must have had some effect as well. And people in general seem less willing to settle disputes over dialogue, so they go to playing games of power. Guz13 (talk) 05:12, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
A lot of this is not actually a 2010s thing at all. It's just that marginalized people got loud enough that they couldn't be shut up and the monoculture fragmented under the power of the internet. This means both highly marginalized people who previously didn't have a voice (like disability advocates) now are able to enter into discourse and also we can't easily shut the Nazis in a little box of their own bile. I've actually written on this professionally: "digital town squares" have a fundamental paradox at their heart in that a universal community that serves both the disability advocate and the Nazi are incompossible. This is because any community that serves exterminist politics fundamentally cannot serve those who they would exterminate. Twitter chose Nazis over disability advocates. Wikipedia tries not to play that game while reluctantly siding against Nazis when push comes to shove. For this the Nazis all shout about how Wikipedia is a bunch of Marxists even though us actual Marxist Wikipedia editors are actually a remarkably small minority. Simonm223 (talk) 20:33, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
At least on my E perience, Gamergate showed how bad it could be, both from the external events and we handle it on WP, and it's only gotten worse from there, with much of the current culture wars taking inspiration from how GG was ran, and on WP, editors doubling down to make their make extremely well known via their mainspace edits. It was happening to an extent before GG (plenty of arbcom areas before that) but the combination of external and internal ones really took off after that. Masem (t) 21:19, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
For what it's worth, I agree with you pretty much entirely. This is what has driven my long-time critique of over-counting the reliability of journalistic sources as I do think it would often be better for Wikipedia to remain mute on current events and wait to see if they're relevant. That would prevent us from having encyclopedia pages on things like mass shootings and the neologisms proposed by political extremists (both of which I'd be happy to see gone) and would make Wikipedia more of an academic resource and less a repository of trivia such as which blue-haired anime character a mass shooter used as their PFP on Youtube or what the very silly man Joe Rogan heard the very silly man Elon Musk say on his podcast. Simonm223 (talk) 13:06, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Has any one ever proposed putting a moratorium on breaking news stories? Those articles are fun to edit, but I really don't believe an enclyopedia should feature breaking news. Guz13 (talk) 16:21, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I would oppose that. I do not think that is the problem at all. Andre🚐 16:29, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
That's not the key problem, but isn't it ridiculous that we are an encyclopedia and yet we cover breaking news stories when there are little facts on the ground established? When did Wikipedia develop a culture of covering breaking news? Guz13 (talk) 16:34, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
How we cover news is an issue. WP is not a newspaper though we encourage editors to make sure WP is current is relevant information that likely has permanence (for example the sentencing of Yoon Suk Yeol fits this). But what this leads to is creating articles on events that yet to have shown to be topics of enduring or long lasting coverages, and flooding those with any form of reaction or commentary, which leads to the problems I mention abovr relative to NPOV, among other hosts of problems. I don't think we can nor should stop new article creation for events but we need as a whole better awareness of treating events as encyclopedic topics and not news, and not being in a rush to try to assertain where opinions sit on an event within days or weeks. Just like with any controversial topics, events should be covered objectively, hitting the five W's without tryi g to arbitrate how the event should be seen to keep the coverage within NPOV. Masem (t) 16:42, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Having something to discourage the creation of an article about the latest minutiae in the US culture war wouldn't be a bad thing. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:44, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
+1 Simonm223 (talk) 20:25, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely. Gigantic amounts of editor time are wasted tussling over 200 conflicting news reports -- often containing questionable details which reporters stuffed in because of the pressure to report something -- on things about which our readers will be better informed if they just turn on the telly. I've often thought of proposing a moratorium on creating an article on Apparently Notable New Thing X until at least 72 hours (7 days? a month?) has passed since the sources first appeared which establish notability. That way the dust will have settled, 90% of editor time will be saved, and we won't look like fools for having repeated "early reports indicate" or "a source claimed" stuff which turns out to be false or ultimately insignificant. And sometimes such things turn out not to be notable after all, in which case all that effort was 100% wasted.
I rush to point out that this addresses only new articles -- School Shooting X, Crash of Flight Z. Breaking news about an existing article subject isn't affected. Not to say there aren't problems here too, but at least in these cases there's already a background structure on which to hang the new developments. EEng 14:20, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There's some cases where the community has done a fantastic job of creating a quality article in a short amount of time after a breaking event, like with 9/11 or Jan 6, and we don't want to scuttle those efforts. But usually there, the editors are sticking to objective facts and avoiding including any opinions, speculation, etc, in part that there's a lot of factual information flowing in to sort out. Where the problem on neutrality arises are events that are cut and dry in terms of what actually happened, and so editors immediately start to turn to opinions and speculation, which is something that should be avoided in the first several days of an event. (There is a bunch more that we can do to address NOTNEWS but that goes beyond what NPOV is focused on). Masem (t) 14:36, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I also think there's another category implicit in what @ActivelyDisinterested mentioned above and that's culture war concepts. We really need to scale back the amount of time we give to Political Correctness / Wokeism / the silly notion that equity rules are inequitable / Suicidal Empathy / whatever other silly concept is all the rage in the Twitter / 4Chan set at the moment. A lot of this is literally just cruft. It drives newspapers because wealthy and connected people screech about it but, honestly, most of the coverage of these topics should either be tied to BLPs who are responsible for coining the concepts or to events that had a material impact on the world such as the passage of laws or adjustments of regulations on the basis of such memes. Simonm223 (talk) 15:13, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
To clarify this is a neutrality issue because we're giving too much attention to the memes rather than the encyclopedic topics that the memes are tied to. Simonm223 (talk) 15:14, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Gonna say this for the last time. I think there should be a WikiProject, like WP:WikiProject News, which lists all the current event articles that are yet to gain WP:SIGCOV in secondary sources. It can either be an incubator where the articles are in draftspace until meeting GNG, or we could tag articles that are based on breaking news stories with {{current event}} (which would explain issues with primary sources), and the WikiProject would serve to replace primary sources with secondary ones Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 22:38, 22 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Has anyone tried this before? Guz13 (talk) 01:41, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Not exactly, but there is Wikipedia:WikiProject Current events, Wikipedia:WikiProject Journalism, Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics, etc. Probably a better idea to reboot a defunct project than to start a net new one. Andre🚐 01:50, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
In a more ideal world, we have Wikinews which current event artiles should have been started in, and if the event is clearly shown notable after some time, we could then transclude/copy from Wikinews to en.wiki. However, last I've read, Wikinews is likely to be shut down because of low participation there.
A possible solution is that all current event articles created in the days of a major event should be pushed to draft space and pass through a specialized version of Articles for Creation to specifically evaluation if the event has some likelihood of long-term coverage. Masem (t) 02:50, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Steinsson's analysis divides the world into anti-fringe vs pro-fringe without ever defining "fringe", so it's worth looking at the examples in the supplementary materials (examples start at page 14). He sampled a bunch of controversial articles at different times and documented the changes in POV. Surprisingly, fringe seems to be as much or more about about politics than science. Very interesting reading. - Palpable (talk) 15:55, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I mean I could be really Foucauldian about it and suggest there is no clear division between science and politics. So I will. See The Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish for additional details. Simonm223 (talk) 16:02, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, that is another issue. WP:FRINGE is meant to apply to areas where there is a minority take trying to fight against established science, like pseudoscience or alternative medicine. It is important there to typically identify the fringe view as wrong, maybe not in wikivoice but with clear established sourcing that says the view is wrong and without merit to avoid seeming like we are promoting it.
But political opinions are not the same thing, minority views are just that, minority views, but in the type of editing I've been describing above, I've seen editors push those as FRINGE and the need to espouse the majority view as the "right" view. That's bad. There's no way to prove what the "correct" view is in most political cases, just what views are prevailing, so there is really no fringe in politics. Masem (t) 16:04, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Which is why we should include minority viewpoints with attribution and maintain NPOV. Guz13 (talk) 18:07, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
We should include minority viewpoints, but when sourced by reliable sources that are discussing those minority viewpoints as well as the major ones, not directly from the sources making those points themselves. This is a major failure we have right now and leads to drowning out valid minority viewpoint or overly promoting the majority one. As said above, when the topic is controversial we should be documenting the views, not deciding a priori which view is right and focusing only on that one. Masem (t) 21:33, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree with Masem. This is the current problem. But the solution I disagree on. Breaking news reporting isn't a bad thing and it's an inevitable part of what Wikipedia has become. We should flock toward the behavior of volunteers and not push against it. Consensus isn't supposed to mean majority rule. Consensu means the reasoned argument carries the day but that presupposes a critical mass of reasonable contributors! I once believed there was such a critical mass, but it has become clear that nobody is really driving the car. Andre🚐 05:43, 21 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Agree. More specifically, we should look at fixing policies/ guidelines which enable people to exclude those. North8000 (talk) 22:17, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  • One of the problems is two very different uses of "reliable source". It got its legitimacy as a criteria for wp:ver. But then applying it to exclude content based on wp:weight, and combining that with biased judgement when deciding to deprecate sources is one of the main systemic causes of the problem. Like many things, neutrality is hard to define precisely enough to use on edge cases, and we probably don't need to worry about that quite as much. But when it gets extreme enough that the policy can be use to cause articles to be problematic enough to where there is distorted coverage with significant omissions, it harms the encyclopedia mission and in many cases hurts Wikipedia's reputation and creates hostility towards Wikipedia. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 17:33, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

WP:NPOV's application under objective qualities

Recently after some scrolling through the policy section of the village pump, and seeing a topic relating to Wikipedia:NPOV, it raised me a question that the main article fails to answer. How does NPOV affect articles and discussion of people, events, and other wiki content about subjects that are, from a neutral and objective point of view, objectively "Bad" in a sense of morality? I think we all can agree that Jeffery Epstein did some horrible things, even from a stance of neutrality and objectiveness. How would NPOV govern such a circumstance? ~2026-11404-95 (talk) 14:32, 24 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Neutral_point_of_view