 | This is an
essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been
thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
History
Articles can be notable, and violate the WP:Neutral Point of View at the same time. For a long time, most articles that were in that kind of shape were kept on the grounds that they are able to be improved, even if the article had a number of issues and little unproblematic content.
Reasons
This is problematic:
- Non-neutral articles are being kept, and not further maintained, leading to accepted long-term violations of our core content policy.
- While it seems to be the easy way to delete, and the right way to improve, doing neither, which happens most of the time, is even more detrimental if an article does not meet our standards on neutrality.
Deletions are the lazy way, but improvements can be more time-consuming, even more so than deleting and starting over, especially when the article is not written from a neutral point of view; because even if one tries to fix that, they might be overlooking aspects that are not neutral, for example a lack of negative feedback that is available in sources, or an otherwise positive or negative tone present in an article, which is not there if an article is written neutrally from the start. This also often leads to incomplete fixes, which means that the original author is successful in retaining parts that favour their point of view.
Improvement
If someone tries to improve a page or section that is slanted towards a point of view, they should take extreme care to not hide existing bias behind a good faith attempt to neutralize the article. They must consider all of the following before claiming a fix or removing neutrality templates:
- WP:Weight- Does the use of sources correlate with the weight that should apply to them?
- WP:Manual of Style/Words to watch- Are there any words that are wrongly used instead of a neutral term?
- WP:No original research; WP:Verifiability- Is everything in this text properly sourced?
It is very easy to make edits that fix one or two problems and then claim that the problems are all fixed, while removing a notability template or !voting for Keep, which actually allows other problems, especially weight problems to exist longer. Despite being made in good faith, those template removals and false fix statements could actually be disruptive, because they hide the problems.
Deletion
Retaining articles that have material contrary to core content policies harms the image and the usability of Wikipedia. These articles should be deleted or reverted to ensure that content that runs afoul our policies is not maintained, and that the next author wanting to write something about the topic can work without being influenced by the non-neutral work and the possibly slanted use of sources (which, for example, the next author might use to improve the article with sources that have undue weight, as a selection).
Complete deletion should be considered for any article that started with, and still has, violations of WP:Neutral Point of View in general.
Any article that cannot seem to recover from attempts to subvert WP:NPOV, but that has usable previous versions, should be considered for reversion to that point, even if this would cause valid information to be lost. It is better to ensure that neutrality is maintained and then to build the rest again, than to retain seemingly neutral parts that cause the article to not be neutral itself.
If the original author is deemed to have only inserted non-neutral material and/or used a biased source collection for a part of the article, then the removal should (obviously) only be done for that part instead for the whole page.
If the article is deleted by an administrator for these quality problems only, then they should indicate this in the deletion summary.
Restoration
Articles deleted only under the above reasoning should be restored in draft space if someone makes a credible claim that they can indeed fix the problem, and that they would like to work with the tainted copy instead of starting from scratch. Those who do should absolutely follow the instructions on improvements before moving the article back into article space.
| This is an
essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been
thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
History
Articles can be notable, and violate the WP:Neutral Point of View at the same time. For a long time, most articles that were in that kind of shape were kept on the grounds that they are able to be improved, even if the article had a number of issues and little unproblematic content.
Reasons
This is problematic:
- Non-neutral articles are being kept, and not further maintained, leading to accepted long-term violations of our core content policy.
- While it seems to be the easy way to delete, and the right way to improve, doing neither, which happens most of the time, is even more detrimental if an article does not meet our standards on neutrality.
Deletions are the lazy way, but improvements can be more time-consuming, even more so than deleting and starting over, especially when the article is not written from a neutral point of view; because even if one tries to fix that, they might be overlooking aspects that are not neutral, for example a lack of negative feedback that is available in sources, or an otherwise positive or negative tone present in an article, which is not there if an article is written neutrally from the start. This also often leads to incomplete fixes, which means that the original author is successful in retaining parts that favour their point of view.
Improvement
If someone tries to improve a page or section that is slanted towards a point of view, they should take extreme care to not hide existing bias behind a good faith attempt to neutralize the article. They must consider all of the following before claiming a fix or removing neutrality templates:
- WP:Weight- Does the use of sources correlate with the weight that should apply to them?
- WP:Manual of Style/Words to watch- Are there any words that are wrongly used instead of a neutral term?
- WP:No original research; WP:Verifiability- Is everything in this text properly sourced?
It is very easy to make edits that fix one or two problems and then claim that the problems are all fixed, while removing a notability template or !voting for Keep, which actually allows other problems, especially weight problems to exist longer. Despite being made in good faith, those template removals and false fix statements could actually be disruptive, because they hide the problems.
Deletion
Retaining articles that have material contrary to core content policies harms the image and the usability of Wikipedia. These articles should be deleted or reverted to ensure that content that runs afoul our policies is not maintained, and that the next author wanting to write something about the topic can work without being influenced by the non-neutral work and the possibly slanted use of sources (which, for example, the next author might use to improve the article with sources that have undue weight, as a selection).
Complete deletion should be considered for any article that started with, and still has, violations of WP:Neutral Point of View in general.
Any article that cannot seem to recover from attempts to subvert WP:NPOV, but that has usable previous versions, should be considered for reversion to that point, even if this would cause valid information to be lost. It is better to ensure that neutrality is maintained and then to build the rest again, than to retain seemingly neutral parts that cause the article to not be neutral itself.
If the original author is deemed to have only inserted non-neutral material and/or used a biased source collection for a part of the article, then the removal should (obviously) only be done for that part instead for the whole page.
If the article is deleted by an administrator for these quality problems only, then they should indicate this in the deletion summary.
Restoration
Articles deleted only under the above reasoning should be restored in draft space if someone makes a credible claim that they can indeed fix the problem, and that they would like to work with the tainted copy instead of starting from scratch. Those who do should absolutely follow the instructions on improvements before moving the article back into article space.