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Research:Guidance for NPOV Research on Wikipedia

We are inviting Wikipedia contributors and researchers to provide feedback to this research by August 31, 2025. Please go to the Draft guidance page to learn more and provide feedback. Thank you!

This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.


This project aims to provide guidance to researchers approaching the question of how to best research the concept of Neutral Point of View on Wikipedia as described by Common global standards for NPOV policies working group.

Executive Summary

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Writing Wikipedia with a neutral point of view is one of the five pillars of Wikipedia. Although the topic is core to Wikipedia, it is relatively understudied considering hundreds of research studies are published annually about the project. We hypothesize that part of the reason for the low research activity on the topic is that Wikipedia’s definition of neutrality and its importance are not well understood within the research community. Our aim with this paper is to accelerate high quality research in this space that can help Wikipedia communities continue to improve their work in writing the encyclopedia. We do this by helping researchers to learn what Neutral Point of View on Wikipedia means, identifying the most common challenges with studying NPOV and how to navigate them, and offering guidance on how researchers can communicate the results of their work for increased impact on the ground for the benefit of Wikipedia.

Timeline

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March 2025 The Common global standards for NPOV policies working group is announced. This initiative has four workstreams, of which one focuses on research related to NPOV. We begin drafting this guidance based on our collected experience and an extensive literature review of past research on Neutral Point of View and the measurement of bias in general.

July 2025 We have created this page and published the Draft guidance on Meta to begin to solicit feedback from researchers and Wikimedians.

Next steps:

  • We will collect feedback on the draft guidance through 31 August 2025. We will also be collecting feedback directly from folks at Wikimania.
  • We plan to publish a final guidance by the end of September that incorporates the feedback we receive in August.
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