WMF to explore "common standards" for NPOV policies; implications for project autonomy remain unclear

In focus

WMF to explore "common standards" for NPOV policies; implications for project autonomy remain unclear

On 27 March, the Wikimedia Foundation posted on Diff an article named "Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view", writing:

To support the Wikimedia communities and reaffirm our commitment to neutrality, the Wikimedia Foundation will convene a working group of active editors, Trustees, researchers, and advisors to explore recommendations for common standards for NPOV policies that can protect Wikipedia, increase the integrity of the projects, and equip the volunteers trusted to administer these policies with more support.
These conversations will be grounded in the foundational principles underlying NPOV, designed to present a fair, neutral description of the facts without compromising the exploration of ideas, concepts, and perspectives. Reaffirming Wikipedia's neutrality in response to what we are seeing in the world makes this highly trusted resource even more resilient in its mission to serve accurate, reliable information.

A copy of the whole Diff article can be found at this issue's News from Diff column; a slightly different article on the same general theme was posted on Meta-Wiki.

This would mark the first time the WMF ever attempted to drive a review, or reform, of one of the Wikipedia community's core content policies across all languages. As referred to in the post itself, staff leadership of Wikimedia Foundation, trustees, and selected Wikimedia editors discussed the topic at a recent Wikimedia Foundation workshop in March, where editors with extended rights, those trusted by their communities with administering NPOV policies, described the challenges they face when these policies are unclear or underdeveloped in some languages.

As of press time, no mention of this initiative (or further plans) had been made to the English Wikipedia's NPOV noticeboard, although the ten Google results for the Diff post's headline included the above links as well as a Wikipediocracy thread and this very Signpost draft. Some discussion has occured at Meta-Wiki.

During the workshop, the participants agreed that they would best support Wikimedia projects in addressing issues related to neutral and verifiable information through establishing "global standards around neutral point of view/neutrality, and better cross-wiki learning about policies, such as spaces for policy-focused bilateral conversations between wikis, and a policy exchange led by volunteers, allowing the projects to learn from each other".

Continually refining and improving our processes, workflows and policies — even the most important ones — is a crucial part of what makes Wikipedia able to adapt itself for a changing world, and a changing editoriat. This much is clear. And, since this project appears to be in its early stages, some ambiguity in specific implementation details is natural. However, there remain some unresolved questions with respect to the intended relationship between the Foundation and community governance, which seem critical to its successful implementation.

When asked to clarify some of these points on the talk page of the Meta announcement, a Foundation staff member did not provide specific answers, but indicated that the WMF was planning to share more information at a later date:

I'm writing up a summary of this announcement for the Signpost in a couple days -- could I get some clarification on what this section of the post means? Is there any information on who the "advisors" are to be, and what role is envisioned for this working group (and its common standards) with respect to local project governance? Is this meant to provide resources for projects who request assistance, or is it compulsory?
— User:JPxG 00:20, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

.

Hi @JPxG:, the goal of this working group will be to review neutral point of view (NPOV) policies on the Wikimedia projects and propose recommendations for common standards. The first step will be an analysis on the state of neutrality policies and principles across Wikimedia projects. This will include opportunities for volunteers to share links and suggestions on what resources might be useful. Based on this analysis of existing policies and working closely with communities, the working group will develop specific recommendations for common standards. In terms of advisors, we will invite researchers - who share Wikipedia's goal of encyclopedic content written from a neutral point of view - to contribute to this work. We are planning to share more information in the next two weeks by mid-April.
— User:NSzafran-WMF 21:10, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Whether this latest move stands to reflect a major change in how neutrality is approached across the global Wikimedia movement, a meaningful shift in Foundation–community dynamics, or simply the very early stages of a still-forming planning effort remains to be seen.

Much depends on how the working group is put together, and what role it (as well as the community) ultimately envisions being filled. The Signpost will continue monitoring developments — particularly once the working group's scope and authority become clearer.

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It's possible that this NPOV project could have some utility for very small Wikipedias, but I can't see it generating anything useful for English Wikipedia, and if it's a stalking horse for imposition of WMF-created policies here, that would be very bad. Seems like a solution in search of a problem. Posted some thoughts here on the Meta talk page. —Ganesha811 (talk) 19:42, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm inclined to agree - and in general I don't see WMF joining the global shift toward consolidating authority as being a good sign.

If they want to change our policies, NPOV is probably not even the first thing I would go for, there are a handful of other things we could fix. That said, any changes to policy should include heavy community feedback - we will only lose even more good editors if they aren't involved.ASUKITE 20:04, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The WMF should not have any say in the content of the Wikipedia projects. The basic independence of each Wikipedia project is what makes it stronger and resilient against influence and manipulation. Centralizing control into one institution means making Wikipedia much more vulnerable to capture and influence, and is also against the spirit of the project itself Ita140188 (talk) 08:21, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fairly new to editing Wikipedia and tend to stick to small things like adding a source or whatever here and there, and I mostly agree with you but also I think the scale of Wikipedia may make it difficult to notice things that subtly go against the established policies.

I won't claim I know all of the established policies here but I generally view it the same as I view laws in real life, which is for the most part the difference between right and wrong is intuitive and those times where it isn't you should be able to find the answer relatively easily or otherwise err on the side of you probably shouldn't do the thing you are questioning. I also tend to be pretty non-confrontational, especially in real life, but will not back down from a belief as long as it is grounded in logic or what is right and wrong - and I am not afraid to voice that.

Point being, I think Wikipedia possibly has similar issues to a lot of other places, which is the sheer scale makes it easy to miss things and the complexity of established rules makes it so actually there are few rules except that those who know where to reference things and can argue their points well are the ones in charge and due to the complexity of the rules, those who are inexperienced or know they don't know all of the rules have a "chilling effect" of erring on the side of not doing the thing. The US legal system is the parallel example I am thinking of here, and actually, because this type of thing is seemingly happening in many places both in the physical and online world at the same time, and globally, they are all intersecting and making the problems worse elsewhere. Eg, since the laws in the real world are not being upheld evenly, people online are able to metaphorically "get away with murder" because if people aren't even enforcing blatant things in real life they aren't going to enforce things that aren't even technically illegal online, and the ones who "have the resources" referring to money and knowledge are able to do even worse.

In just my short time editing on Wikipedia I have seen multiple examples of this.

Earlier today on a talk page there is a back and forth about NPOV exactly where these issues of real life issues intersect with online problems on Wikipedia, as if it happened specifically so I could make this comment. I have also had issues in the past with the other example where those who know the rules of Wikipedia and how things work basically just run the show and have zero care about explaining things or any kind of working together with someone who may not agree with their points. I won't link to that because I'm not going to bother digging through multiple archived talk pages to find it but to put it simply I listed multiple issues with a page - as in, I didn't edit, but raised points on the talk page as it is advised to do - and a well established editor came in, archived the talk page, left some automated message about my complaints, then when I complained about them deleting my message on the talk page they... just did another automated message and removed my talk page comment again.

Like I said, I am not afraid to speak up for what I believe, and I realize I may tend to "poke the bear" sometimes but I generally am pretty amicable and easy to get along with yet somehow I keep finding examples of people "in charge" being hostile to anyone raising issues with their decisions - both online and not. I keep finding my problem is I stand up for what I believe and don't take a load of nonsense because someone with a fancy title says they know the correct way to do things. So I mean, I am trying to write this in a way that doesn't raise too many issues, just like I do with issues IRL, and just like I do in basically every interaction in my entire life. I am at my core a peacemaker. Yet I am increasingly at the point where nobody else is saying anything and I know I am not the only one both seeing and experiencing major issues, again, both online and in real life. When the peacemakers are the ones causing problems, it seems likely there are large unresolved issues. Relevantusername2020 (talk) 09:42, 12 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We have seen time and time again that volunteers have a strong track record of successfully managing neutrality on contentious subjects. That is of course nonsense, but if that's their position, what's the point of whatever it is they're doing? Coretheapple (talk) 20:22, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia has a remarkable degree of neutrality compared to any other source of information, especially considering the breadth of topics and content Ita140188 (talk) 08:23, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For people who speak more than one language, something that where I live means many people, Wikimedia is a very confusing place. They go to the supermarket and buy some pollastre, or pollo, or frango. And they get chicken, as they expect: different languages, same result. But not in Wikimedia. What is taken for granted in language A may be forbidden in language B, optional in language C or a restricted use version in language D. Two hundred and eigthy times that! So while I wouldn't start with neutral point of view policies (oh boy!: I wrote the whole thing, like a regular human being) I think that setting common standards is a real need. B25es (talk) 05:30, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We like to think that we have the "neutrality" issue pretty well resolved on Wikipedia, and for larger projects (including English) this is mostly true. But there are some major challenges that other projects face. For example: non-neutral, biased, low quality, or even very limited reference sources in the specific language; lack of policy structure that supports neutrality; no actual neutrality policy, or only a copy/paste of a neutrality policy from another language; questionable image selection; community-supported political statements or representations (such as flags) in the base interface. Should new Wikipedia projects be required to have at minimum a policy statement about neutrality before being moved from the incubator? How do we ensure that the best available quality image is used in articles, Wikisource, and other places? On which Wikimedia projects is an element of bias acceptable? (I'm thinking maybe Wikivoyage, where editorial choices determine which hotels, tourist attractions, etc. are included.) Many people forget that the WMF Board of Trustees made a very powerful statement about expectations related to biographies of living people back in 2009, and expanded it to address media about living people in 2013; it had the effect of setting minimum standards for all projects to follow, without directly impacting the content decisions of those projects.
We like to think that we maintain a pretty unbiased (i.e., neutral) project as English Wikipedia. Realistically, we have a massive infrastructure that works toward that goal. Look at the decisions made by Arbcom over the last 20 years: most of them have to do (directly or indirectly) with ensuring that this encyclopedia's content remains neutral by penalizing or removing editors who fail to work within the constraints of this core policy. We have extensive lists of reliable sources, and an entire noticeboard that directly addresses this issue. No other Wikimedia project has this extensive support structure. Many other Wikimedia projects, and indeed the global Wikimedia movement, have made use of the hard work and policy development that has taken place here to use as a baseline for project-specific or global policies and procedures. In the big picture, creating a minimum standard (likely based on the existing principles and policies from large Wikipedias) is more likely to be helpful to smaller projects or those that have limited resources. There is a lot to think about here. Disclosure: I've been tapped to work on the "neutrality" question as part of a working group of the WMF Board. Hence why I've been thinking about this already. Risker (talk) 20:53, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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