User:Axon/Spreading the POV
It has come to my attention that Wikipedia suffers a considerable neutrality problem. Despite the fundamental policy of NPOV, POV pervades most articles related to anything political or controversial, and many related articles.
It is these related articles that I find disturbing: not only do you find POV on the pages you would expect to, but also in related pages where you would not normally expect to. I call this Spreading the POV: a technique where editors - acting out of good faith and against the policy of NPOV - attempt to promote their POV as much as possible by adding it not only to controversial pages but to obscure pages or pages loosely related to the controversial topic.
Spreding the POV on global warming[edit]
An example of this was the proliferation of pages related to the topic of global warming. This highly controversial topic had multiple pages, many of which had been created by a small number of editors with a strong bias and investment in the issue. These pages included:
- Global warming alarmist
- Global warming alarmism
- Alarmism
- Environmental alarmism
- Global warming skepticism
- Attribution of recent climate change
- Scientific opinion on climate change
- Global warming survey
- Global warming theory
It was not always readily apparent that these pages even existed to editors of the Global warming page. Simlarly, controversial, POV edits spilled out onto pages that were related but not inherently controversial in and off themselves, specifically Scientific consensus. When some editors took steps to balance the content on this page, the POV moved onto another, obscure page Scientific consensus and global warming (now deleted and merged).