
Wikipedia UnReliable Sources: Belief vs. NPOV, The Elephant in the Room
- By Judy Wilkerson --
- 16 Jan 2025 --
The formidable challenges of presenting an accurate view of religion and religious beliefs and practices under Wikipedia’s “Reliable Sources” and “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV) editorial policy
What is religion?
According to scholarly and reputable sources, there is an element in the very definition of religion that contradicts Wikipedia policy on the presentation of religion and belief: Wikipedia’s rigid and obdurate adherence to so-called reliable sources and its NPOV policy is impractical and unworkable when applied to religion, which is, by definition belief-driven and subjective.
Oxford English Dictionary:
• Definition: “The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.”
[Emphasizes religion as rooted in belief rather than empirical facts, involving faith in the unseen or supernatural.]
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
• Definition: “A personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices.”
[Highlights religion as a system of beliefs that may or may not be grounded in empirical evidence, focusing instead on tradition, doctrine, and practice.]
Sociologist Émile Durkheim
• Definition: “A unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”
[Durkheim places religion within a collective framework, stressing the shared beliefs about the sacred, regardless of their alignment with empirical facts.]
Psychologist William James:
• Definition: “The feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”
[Religion here is framed as a deeply personal relationship with the divine, where belief is subjective and independent of factual verification.]
Renowned Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
“For me, when I say spiritual, I’m referring to a feeling you would have that connects you to the universe in a way that it may defy simple vocabulary. We think about the universe as an intellectual playground, which it surely is, but the moment you learn something that touches an emotion rather than just something intellectual, I would call that a spiritual encounter with the universe.”
[Another statement of belief being the personal perspective of the individual]
What is a Neutral Point of View when it comes to faith and belief?
A Creation.com article on the subject of NPOV points out the fallacy in the policy when it is applied to religion:
“All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.
“Already you can see a potential here for bias since we have subjective terms such as ‘significant’ and ‘reliable’ being used. Who gets to determine what constitutes significant or reliable? Well, the editors themselves, as it turns out—that means you, me, and literally anyone with a computer who knows how to edit Wikipedia. But here’s the catch: anyone can also revert any changes made by another editor. This means ultimately that articles represent a ‘consensus.’ This would be bad enough in itself since we know that truth is not decided by a majority vote, and ‘consensus science’ is anti-science. But it is worse than it seems on the surface, since most Wikipedia articles are not being watched or edited by a very large number of people. Here, the ‘consensus’ is really only the agreement of a relative few people who, by chance, happen to be the only ones monitoring a given page at a given time. This means that the less popular a page is, the more likely it is to contain errors and bias, or, in the words of wiki expert Alexander Halavais, ‘The high-traffic areas are going to be the cleanest.’”
In a study published in Taylor & Francis Online, René König asks how those editing Wikipedia articles “negotiate ‘what actually happened’ and which knowledge should be represented in the Wikipedia entry. The conflicting points of view overload the discursive capacity of the contributors.
“The community reacts by marginalizing opposing knowledge [emphasis added] and protecting or immunizing the article against these disparate views. This is achieved by rigorously excluding knowledge which is not verified by external expert authorities.”
As pointed out in a recent article in this World Religion News series, Wikipedia has undergone a “systematic liberal polarization in the selection of news media sources.”
Does this affect, even by inadvertent or personal conviction, what the elite corps of Wikipedia admins and a select group of editors define as neutral?
In its own article on Wikipedia bias, the online encyclopedia writes, “Its editing model facilitates multiple systemic biases, namely selection bias, inclusion bias, participation bias, and group-think bias. The majority of the encyclopedia is written by male editors, leading to a gender bias in coverage, and the makeup of the editing community has prompted concerns about racial bias, spin bias, corporate bias, and national bias, among others. An ideological bias on Wikipedia has also been identified on both conscious and subconscious levels. A series of studies from Harvard Business School in 2012 and 2014 found Wikipedia “significantly more biased” than Encyclopædia Britannica but attributed the finding more to the length of the online encyclopedia as opposed to slanted editing.”
In August 2012, one of Wikipedia’s failed attempts at creating a more equitable way to present religion and religious beliefs proposed that “Within a religious article, a reliable source as to beliefs may include official or canonized sources, or accounts or writings of leaders or otherwise prominent persons within the religion.” This is truly unfortunate as third-party sources may present their interpretation of a religion’s beliefs with impunity since those with knowledge of its scripture are unable to temper the information with pertinent quotes.
This results, for example, in the article on Mormonism being devoid of a single citation to the Book of Mormon. The article on the Quran is slightly better as there are occasional links to the book in the text of the article, but of 348 citations, there are only 17 to the holy book.
We want to hear from you! If you are a religious leader, a parishioner, or a Wikipedia editor who has come across biased and skewed religious coverage in Wikipedia, we encourage you to submit an article or a write-up of how Wikipedia has misrepresented religion; send this to our editors at wrn-info@proton.me. Your insights are very valuable for ensuring accurate and comprehensive information is available to the public.
Photo credits: Baby Elephant on the Ball by Aqua Mechanical. CC BY 2.0 via flickr.com; Wikipedia Logo Puzzle from Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.