Wikipedia:Another Look at Neutrality of Sources

Another Look at Neutrality of Sources

Some contentious topics, including Armenia and Azerbaijan, involve the overlap between two Wikipedia policies that are both recognized as non-negotiable and as fundamental policies, and that are normally considered separately, but overlap when there is battleground editing and nationalistic editing, typically because the area of the Earth has been a real battleground. Reliability of sources in order to ensure verifiability is fundamental, as is neutral point of view. The two policies are normally considered separately, as unrelated or loosely related policies. Normally, neutrality is considered to be a characteristic of the encyclopedic content that is derived from the source, and reliability is considered to be a characteristic of the source. However, historical sources, including academic historians, reflect national historiographic patterns. Armenian historiography and Azerbaijani historiography usually take very different views of the border region between those countries and of its history, and often very different views of history of the two nations. Identifying reliable sources in historical areas that are contentious topics is complicated because the sources and their authors reflect national historiographic practice.

This problem has affected other content disputes, including some that have required arbitration. An issue in the dispute over the War of the Pacific, which required arbitration, was the fact that Chilean historiography and Peruvian historiography have different views of the causes of the war. Numerous other disputes about historical articles have involved different national viewpoints by historians, including academic historians. If an author is an academic historian, his or her work can almost always be considered reliable for purposes of verifiability, but there can be and often are arguments about whether particular historians take a neutral point of view. History consists not only of past events, about which historians of different nationalities and different outlooks usually agree, but also, and often even more importantly, interpretation of the connections between events. When there have been controversies about sources in contentious areas, the overlap between two equally important but different policies, verifiability and neutrality, has not always been recognized, and so has contributed to further difficulty in addressing already difficult subject matter.

The topic WP:Neutrality of sources is currently a redirect to a paragraph in the policy on reliable sources concerning biased sources, which states that sources are not required to be neutral if they are reliable. This policy paragraph should be expanded, and may need to be revised, either to state even more clearly that bias is not a reason for rejection of a source, or to state that sometimes biased sources should not be used because they interfere with neutral point of view.

The Wikipedia community should discuss how the policies on neutral point of view and reliable sources should be revised to recognize the need to consider the neutrality of sources, as well as their reliability.