Wikipedia: NPOV principle

Arguments made by Wikipedia community for the Neutral Point of View principle include

* Presenting the topic in a fair manner.

* Liberating the readers; They are trusted to critically think and formulate their own opinions and are therefore intellectually independent

* Adhering to the essense of wikipedia, being a collaborative effot to collect human knowledge, and thus all theories about a topic must be acknowledged and properly cited.

* Avoiding continuous edit wars and disputes.

Maintaining the NPOV principle may be important when thinking about the intention of Wikipedia: to make knowledge freely available to the public. The other option would be a big business controlling this knowledge, where then the business will surely impose its values and opinions, and may even incorporate them into the technology itself. Wikipedia is thus making an effort to increase the independence of the user and liberate him from perhaps hidden efforts to incline him towards a particular opinion. The NPOV principle fits smoothly with the other guidelines set by Wikipedia, like verifiability where all the point of views must be attributed to their sources.

In practice, maintaining NPOV may be challenging, even with every intention to adhere to it. This may appear where the access is restricted to a particular group with similar experiences and backgrounds. In the faculties of Humanities and Creative Industries in Queensland University of Technology, a project was conducted on the use of Wikis, where the wiki was restricted to students and teachers of the New Media Literacies course. The NPOV principle was not properly implemented basically because the group was relatively homogeneous, and contributors were unaware of other available views (Bruns 2005).To adhere to NPOV principle, participators/editors must do proper research on their topic.

This has its advantages in education where students step back from their opinion and study all the available (unbiased) views. This will encourage critical and logical thinking. In addition, NPOV will encourage collaboration between students since editing/adding information will not be regarded by peers as interference with personal views.

Before using a technology, we should know what the technology seeks to provide, and who the intended target users of the technology are. I believe that Wikipedia should be acknowledged for making its intentions and guidelines clear to the users. Although wikis may be difficult and monitor and track, the collaborative learning environment that they can provide for educational purposes cannot be undermined



References:
Bruns, Alex and Humphryes,Sal. "Wikis in Teaching and Assessment: The M/Cyclopedia Project" (2005)