Recommended Practices for NPOV Research on Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper tackles the scarcity of rigorous research on Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy by synthesizing a contextual framework and offering practical guidance for researchers. It defines NPOV, its two core facets (tone and due weight), and the role of baselines, time, language diversity, and organizational governance in evaluating neutrality. The authors propose a structured, multi-method approach to baseline development and assessment, emphasizing context, comparability, and openness, and provide best practices for communicating findings back to the Wikimedia community and beyond. The work aims to accelerate high-quality, impactful NPOV research that can inform editors, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the broader research community, ultimately contributing to more robust and reliable content across Wikipedia’s many language editions.

Abstract

Writing Wikipedia with a neutral point of view is one of the five pillars of Wikipedia. Although the topic is core to Wikipedia, it is relatively understudied considering hundreds of research studies are published annually about the project. We hypothesize that part of the reason for the low research activity on the topic is that Wikipedia's definition of neutrality and its importance are not well understood within the research community. Neutrality is also an inherently challenging and contested concept. Our aim with this paper is to accelerate high quality research in this space that can help Wikipedia communities continue to improve their work in writing the encyclopedia. We do this by helping researchers to learn what Neutral Point of View means in the context of Wikipedia, identifying some common challenges with studying NPOV and how to navigate them, and offering guidance on how researchers can communicate the results of their work for increased impact on the ground for the benefit of Wikipedia.