Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 3/Achieving NPOV – Overview

So how do we achieve this Neutral Point of View? Wikipedia does not have an opinion. So how do we achieve the neutral point of view? There are many details and nuances to what makes a neutral point of view, but today we will focus on four broad principles that are key. We'll spend a fair amount of time on the first one and then cover the last three more briefly.

The first one is to *be encyclopedic*. Obviously. Wikipedia's voice, the encyclopedia's voice, should be encyclopedic, which means *fair and accurate*, and we will break it down and see that it's actually a lot more than just not picking sides, as some of you may have thought: "Oh, to be neutral, of course, we just need to not pick sides." It's not as simple as that.

So we *will* not pick sides: we will write for the entire world. The entire world, meaning not just people from our country, not just people from our language or our religion or any other grouping or subset; we are writing for the entire world. And that is also a question of neutrality.

And we will avoid undue weight. We will avoid giving inappropriate space for things that don't deserve such a space. And we will break this down and talk about each in order.