Neutral point of view

Wikipedia has a strict neutral point of view (NPOV) policy, which basically states that its mission as an encyclopedia 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.)

"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 Wikipedia article, 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.

Discussion of bias in Wikipedia

Wikipedia claims to be an encyclopedia based on the GFDL text corpus. That is, it claims to have the editorial standards of an encyclopedia. It further asserts by claiming it is applying the terms of the GFDL that anything written and released under GFDL, including those directly submitted via the Wikipedia user interface which is based on mediawiki, can be legally included in the Wikipedia corpus.

http://wikipedia.org is the largest GFDL access point. As is often pointed out, it is in technical violation of several points of the GFDL due to a combination of software deficiencies, mismatches of the software with the terms of the GFDL, and a developer and sysop power structure that is the opposite of democratic, and strongly favours insiders over outsiders. It is generally run better in the 22 languages other than English, since the guiltiest parties actually can't read those languages. The GodKing, Jim Wales, can't read or write any language other than English. This is probably good:

Wikipedias' struggle to resolves their internal contradictions (multi-language project run by a GodKing who speaks and reads only English, claims of neutrality with no outreach or mediation mechanism other than a technology that itself puts a sysop power structure of mostly developed-world people in charge of content, inability to examine its own community point of view) will provide both good and bad examples for the Consumerium Governance Organization, which would do well to avoid all the pitfalls it is falling into. See 142.X.X.X/Tim_Starling for a starting list of these, and references to longstanding issues and potential solutions that 'Wikipedians' ignore and censor, mostly at Meta-Wikipedia, e.g. m:regime change.

For instance the French Wikipedia is among the best run, although it had teething pains, it attracted competent people who knew to selectively ignore Wales' pronouncements. Probably the worst run today is the Simple English Wikipedia - which seems to have no framework even for deciding what "Simple" is to mean... what purposes (or even audiences) it is to serve and what level of English mastery they may have. It has actually discouraged any discussion or policy setting in these regards, the opposite of what a real basis for translation of articles would have done.