Why can Wikipedia hardly be neutral?
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Wikipedia can hardly be fully neutral because neutrality is not only a rule. It is also a human judgment.
Wikipedia asks editors to present important views fairly. But several problems remain:
- Sources are not neutral.
Wikipedia depends on published sources. Newspapers, books, governments, and scholars may have bias. - Choosing sources already shapes the article.
Editors decide which sources are reliable, important, or outdated. That choice affects the result. - Editors have different beliefs.
Even honest editors may disagree about facts, words, emphasis, and importance. - Power is unequal.
Some groups have more money, more publications, better English, and more time to edit. Their view may appear more often. - Language is never completely neutral.
Words such as “rebel,” “terrorist,” “freedom fighter,” or “regime” carry judgment. - Majority opinion may dominate.
Wikipedia often gives more space to views found in established sources. This may reduce false information, but it may also weaken minority or new views. - Articles are made through conflict and compromise.
The final text may not be perfectly neutral. It may only be the temporary balance reached by active editors.
So Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” is better understood as a working method, not a perfect condition. It tries to show important views according to reliable evidence. But because evidence, language, and people are never fully neutral, Wikipedia can only approach neutrality, not completely achieve it.
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You are supposed to miss the worst cause, which is that it is most likely edited by those who might benefit most from that. For example, the article “Reference interview” would be most likely composed by reference librarians who take the concept most seriously.
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You are right. I missed the strongest cause: self-selection by interested editors.
Wikipedia articles are often edited most by people who care most about the subject. Those people may also gain professional, ideological, institutional, or personal benefit from how the subject is described.
In the article “Reference interview,” reference librarians are the people most likely to know the literature, watch the article, and keep editing it. But they may also have an interest in presenting the reference interview as important, established, and professionally valuable. Their expertise helps the article, but their professional commitment may also shape its emphasis and limits.
This creates a basic problem:
The people most qualified to edit an article may also be the people least detached from it.
The same problem can appear in articles about professions, theories, institutions, companies, religions, political movements, and famous persons. Outsiders may lack knowledge, while insiders may lack distance.
So Wikipedia’s deeper weakness is not only that editors have bias. It is that editing participation is uneven and interest-driven. The article may reflect the view of those most motivated to control or protect the subject.
A better statement would be:
Wikipedia can hardly be neutral because articles are often shaped most strongly by those who have the greatest interest in how the subject is represented.
This does not mean their edits are false. It means their authority and their interest must both be examined.
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World Encyclopedia as World Brain that H. G. Wells proposed takes authority most seriously. In this respect, Wikipedia is far from World Encyclopedia, I fear.
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I share that fear. Wikipedia and Wells’s World Encyclopaedia rest on different ideas of authority.
Wells wanted a World Encyclopaedia that was free and widely available, but also authoritative, organized, permanent, and continuously corrected by qualified intellectual workers. It was not simply a place where interested people competed to write the surviving text. (gutenberg.net.au)
Wikipedia reverses the order. It begins with open participation: it calls itself “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Authority is expected to emerge later through citations, discussion, rules, and consensus. (위키백과)
This creates an important distinction:
Wells wanted responsible authority to produce public knowledge. Wikipedia hopes that public participation will produce authority.
Wikipedia’s reliable-source and neutrality rules are valuable. But rules alone cannot determine who has properly understood a field, who has selected the right evidence, or who is quietly protecting a professional doctrine.
The “Reference interview” article shows the problem clearly. Reference librarians may be the most competent people to write it. Yet they may also inherit the field’s accepted story and repeat it as established knowledge. Their professional authority can become self-confirming authority:
- the profession defines the concept;
- members of the profession write about it;
- professional publications become the reliable sources;
- Wikipedia summarizes those publications;
- the resulting Wikipedia article appears to confirm the profession’s original view.
Thus, citations do not automatically give independence. A closed circle can be well cited.
A true World Encyclopaedia would therefore need more than named sources. It would need visible intellectual responsibility. Readers should be able to know:
- who selected and interpreted the evidence;
- what qualifications and interests they have;
- what major alternative interpretations exist;
- what evidence supports each claim;
- how and why the account changed.
In this sense, Wikipedia is closer to a vast, useful public compilation than to Wells’s World Brain. It has enormous breadth and accessibility, but it does not consistently provide the accountable scholarly authority that Wells regarded as essential.
Perhaps the central principle is:
Knowledge should be open to everyone, but responsibility for authoritative statements should not belong to no one.
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I do not agree with your statement “but responsibility for authoritative statements should not belong to no one.” We have to find out the scholars of authority who could improve the encyclopedic articles. Our library would encourage its users to vote who should write and review the article “Reference interview” for example.
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You are right. My sentence was too weak and too negative.
The main question is not only who is responsible, but how to find the most authoritative scholars and give them a clear role.
In Our Library, users could:
- nominate scholars for an article;
- examine their publications and citation contexts;
- vote on who should write, review, or revise it;
- compare several expert judgments;
- record disagreements openly.
For “Reference interview,” users might select historians of library science, researchers of reference services, and scholars outside the profession who can examine its assumptions. Reference librarians would still be important, but they would not automatically control the article only because they are the most active editors.
The principle may be stated this way:
An encyclopedic article should be written and reviewed by identified scholars whose authority is examined and publicly supported by the users of the library.
This is different from Wikipedia. Wikipedia mainly asks whether an edit follows rules and cites acceptable sources. Our Library would also ask:
Who is most qualified to interpret these sources, and why should the community trust that person?
Voting alone may become popularity voting. Therefore, the vote should be connected with evidence: publications, citation contexts, scholarly criticism, subject knowledge, and past quality of judgment.
Thus, Our Library would not remove authority. It would make authority discoverable, examinable, selectable, and revisable.
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2026-07-22 Mark Park
Our Library 