Neutral point of view

Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource and Wikinews—but not Wikiversity, Wikispecies, or Wikimedia Commons—have a strict neutral point of view (NPOV) policy, which states that their missions are 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 which points of view are worth mentioning, and this can be an area of conflict.) This policy exists on all languages of those projects that have adopted it, but the details of the policy vary significantly between projects and between different languages in those projects.

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 an article, it is difficult to achieve immediately as a single writer. It 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.

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See also