# Mind Your POV: Convergence of Articles and Editors Towards Wikipedia's Neutrality Norm

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06951 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06951/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Plurals: A System for Guiding LLMs Via Simulated Social Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17213/) (2024)
- [Edisum: Summarizing and Explaining Wikipedia Edits at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03428/) (2024)
- [It's All Relative: Interpretable Models for Scoring Bias in Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08139/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Wikipedia has a strong norm of writing in a 'neutral point of view' (NPOV). Articles that violate this norm are tagged, and editors are encouraged to make corrections. But the impact of this tagging system has not been quantitatively measured. Does NPOV tagging help articles to converge to the desired style? Do NPOV corrections encourage editors to adopt this style? We study these questions using a corpus of NPOV-tagged articles and a set of lexicons associated with biased language. An interrupted time series analysis shows that after an article is tagged for NPOV, there is a significant decrease in biased language in the article, as measured by several lexicons. However, for individual editors, NPOV corrections and talk page discussions yield no significant change in the usage of words in most of these lexicons, including Wikipedia's own list of 'words to watch.' This suggests that NPOV tagging and discussion does improve content, but has less success enculturating editors to the site's linguistic norms.