User:Bon courage/A POV that draws a source.
Appearance
(Redirected from Wikipedia:CARTBEFOREHORSE)
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. |
This page in a nutshell: Sources should determine the POVs found in Wikipedia, not vice versa. |
A POV that draws a source,
is like a cart that draws a horse.
Wikipedia's core neutrality policy says that articles shall represent "fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic".
The best way to find these views is carry out a disinterested search to find the WP:BESTSOURCES – the highest-quality reliable sources – and then to summarize them.
Sometimes however, editors will mistakenly start with a "view" and then select sources to support it. Such a selection of sources is unlikely to be the same as the WP:BESTSOURCES, and will tend to lead to an article with a WP:NPOV imbalance.