Wikibooks:Neutral point of view

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(Redirected from WB:NPOV)

This page documents an official Wikibooks policy. Policies are rules and principles that the Wikibooks community has accepted and Wikibookians must follow. Except for minor edits, please make use of the discussion page to propose changes to this policy.

Note: This policy does not apply to talk pages, your own user page, and any subpages thereof.

Wikibooks has a strict neutral point of view (NPOV) policy, which basically states that its mission as a book collection is best served not by advancing or detracting particular points of view on any given subject, but by trying to present a fair, neutral description of the facts -- among which are the facts that various interpretations and points of view exist. (Of course, there are limits to what POVs are considered worth mentioning, which can be an area of conflict.)

Consequently, modules should be written from a neutral point of view, which means that modules should represent differing views on a subject fairly and within the context particular to the Wikibook's scope (in other words, if the scope of the Wikibook is the consensus view of physics, then non-mainstream views on this subject are almost always irrelevant; but competing mainstream views can and should be presented).

"Neutral point of view" should not be confused with "point of view espoused by an international body such as the United Nations"; writing in NPOV style requires recognising that even widely held or widely respected points of view are not necessarily all-encompassing.

While NPOV is an ultimate goal in writing a Wikibooks module, it's difficult to achieve immediately as a single writer, and is thus sometimes regarded as an iterative process (as is wiki writing in general), by which opposing viewpoints compromise on language and presentation to produce a neutral description acceptable to all.

This might be viewed as an adversarial system, but hopefully a polite one. ;) One is expected to approximate NPOV to the best of one's ability and welcome improvements brought by others in good faith; a failure of the system can become an edit war, in which two or more parties dig in and refuse to compromise, instead reverting each other's changes outright.