NPOV
From Encyc
NPOV or Neutral Point of View is an imaginary concept that was created by Larry Sanger for Wikipedia. It is one of the main cornerstones of Wikipedia. It is a key point in criticism of Wikipedia, because of its philosophical impossibility.
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Why NPOV is impossible
Every single person in the world is biased. If you have knowledge of a subject, therefore you are biased in relation to it. Your own personal experiences, your own philosophies and belief systems and in some cases your own physical reality and situation make you biased towards one version of truth. Someone is considered to be less biased if they are less knowledgeable - the 2 go hand in hand.
For someone to be "relatively neutral" with regards to a topic means that they are largely ignorant of the topic. Hence by aiming for NPOV they are also aiming for ignorance.
Why NPOV is a bad idea
On any topic the best critics are also horribly biased. For example, if writing about Osama bin Laden, the best sources would be people who love him as well as people who hate him. Newspapers who write about him are not good sources, because they are not directly knowledgeable of him. Reading from Osama bin Laden himself you would know that some of it is inaccurate, and some of it is horribly biased, but you can easily account for this. It nonetheless provides the most insight.
By refusing to allow anything that is biased, Wikipedia also refuses to allow people to write about themselves. A person may not contribute to his or her own autobiography, or about any company or product that they are involved with. Lack of bias is considered to be more important than truth.
Lack of NPOV is normal
All encyclopaedias are biased. If you read any major encyclopaedia, you know who wrote it and hence you can research them and work out any biases. They usually have national bias and political bias, as well as often racial bias and religious bias. If the encyclopaedia is written in USA, they will have a pro-USA bias, or at least an Americocentric bias, such that they do not consider anything related to other countries as being as important.
This does not make encyclopaedias useless! It is easy to account for this bias.
Why NPOV leads to less accuracy
Depending on the type of topic depends on the level of problem that NPOV causes to an article. Essentially, NPOV becomes more harmful the larger number of major points of view that there are. Henceforth, highly controversial topics become the least accurate and least useful articles.
Ordinarily, an encyclopaedic article would be accurate yet biased, and that bias could be accounted for. But on Wikipedia, an article could be a combination of 20 different biases. One sentence could be written from one point of view and the next sentence from an entirely different perspective.
Additionally, many times one bias is totally ignored. For example, in the Port Arthur massacre article on Wikipedia, they refuse to mention in any serious way that it is even a controversial topic. In spite of over 90% of all sources saying that what the police/government said happened isn't theoretically possible, and in spite of over half of the editors to the article refuting Wikipedia's verson of the topic, they do not mention a single problem with the official story. Instead, they make mention of some of the least well publicised alternatives and then rubbish them using weasel words. Wikipedia has changed truth on that topic, such that what Wikipedia said, which was not backed up, has since been accepted as fact.
In the Wikipedia Review article on Wikipedia, they amusingly refuse to mention any criticism of Wikipedia Review, in spite of the vast majority of articles about WR criticising it.
Wikipedia's own Criticism of Wikipedia refuses to mention any serious criticism, and until recently they refused to mention Wikipedia Review's criticism. They still refuse to mention the criticism that Wikipedia can change truth.
