The Fallacy of Wikipedia : Where Wikipedia Gets It Wrong

Wikipedia’s NPOV policy

One of Wikipedia’s (no doubt rightly) vaunted policies is its attempt to remove all traces of bias and unsupported opinion from its pages, so to speak. While this is a laudable goal, it’s unfortunately completely misguided as the resulting effort is the work of human hands and minds. Each person even those who claim pure neutrality are bound by their own perceptions and experiences. Bias is an unavoidable outcome of being such an individual. Consensus among many differing viewpoints is possible but not uniformity. The attempt to remove the author from the equation is a dodge of their responsibility for what’s been created. And for what will be created from their work. The idea should not to be to scrub viewpoints from the record but to embrace them and encompass them.

Of course, the wikinauts – like all good paper pushers - have a ready response to my objections to their hallowed values here: There is no such thing as objectivity.

Ignoring that it’s begging the question and wordplay taken to the grossest extreme (Not that I’d ever do something like that myself, no) I have a response of my own: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Simply put, the actions of the observer cannot help but affect the observed. And the observed cannot help but affect the observer – the information about what the observed has just done is transmitted, somehow, to the observer and creates a quantifiable, empirical difference in the structure of their mind. There is no way to remove oneself from the equation. The mere act of commenting on something turns you into observed and observer at once intertwined in a collaborative process. The observer must realize their actions and the biases that create them and embrace them in an attempt to embrace those of everyone else – what most people call “being fair”. True neutrality is a nice goal but like true perfection a fortunately unreachable one for humanity. And the ever growing list of rules, exceptions, policies, and their uneven implementation at the Wikipedia, I’d think, would make for pretty good empirical evidence of the fact.