Wikipedia:The logic behind Wikipedia policy
 | 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. |
What is the basic logic behind Wikipedia policy, particularly the neutral point of view policy?
Content policy
[edit]Wikipedia strives to be reliable encyclopedia. This goal leads to all the other aspects of our content policy:
When writing an article, Wikipedia editors should:
- Find the best sources of information.
- Accurately represent those sources.
To accurately represent our sources, editors have to do two things:
- Refrain from adding any of their own thinking to articles, beyond that necessary to describe what the sources already say.
- Edit from a neutral point of view. This means that editors do not present the sources with any type of bias. A person who reads a Wikipedia article should come away with the same general impression as a person who read the original sources.
In order to prove both to readers and other editors that we have been doing our job, all information added to Wikipedia should state where it came from. If you do not tell readers and other editors where you got the information that you put in Wikipedia, it may eventually be removed unless it is common knowledge.
Thus the goal of being a reliable encyclopedia naturally leads us to embrace our policies on reliable sources (RS), no original research (NOR), and the neutral point of view (NPOV), and to cite our sources.