Recommended Practices for NPOV Research on Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper provides guidance for researchers studying Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View, clarifying its meaning, addressing challenges, and promoting high-quality, impactful research to improve Wikipedia's neutrality practices.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of NPOV, identifies research challenges, and proposes best practices to enhance research quality and impact on Wikipedia.

Findings

Clarifies Wikipedia's NPOV concept and its importance.

Identifies common research challenges in studying NPOV.

Provides guidelines for effective communication of research results.

Abstract

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. Neutrality is also an inherently challenging and contested concept. 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 means in the context of Wikipedia, identifying some 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.