Wikipedia:Pages with neutrality problems

Pages with neutrality problems

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 lots of problems and little unproblematic content.

Reasons

This was problematic:

• Non-neutral articles were kept, and not further maintained, leading to accepted violations of our core content policy.
• While seems indeed to be the easy way to delete, and the right way to improve, doing neither, which happened most of the time, is even more detrimetal if an article does not meet our standards, especially on neutrality.

Deletions are the lazy way, but improvements can be more time-consuming, even than deleting and starting over, especially when the article was 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 avaliable 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 his or her point of view.

Improvement

If someone tries to improve a page or section that is slanted towards a point of view should take extreme care that they don't hide existing bias behind a good faith try to neutralize the article. They must consider the all of the following:

• 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, but that allow other problems, especially weight problems to exist. Despite being made in good faith, those edits actually can be disruptive, because they hide the problems.

Deletion

Retaining articles that run contrary to core content policies harms the image and the usability of Wikipedia. These articles should normally be deleted 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 retains seemingly neutral parts that cause the article to be not 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.