Wikinews:Education/Neutrality
Wikinews Training
The Core
Is the article neutral?
Wikinews articles have a neutral point of view.
- Strive for articles that document the important facts of a newsworthy story in an impartial manner.
- Avoid advocacy. Characterize information and issues rather than debate them. Attribute non-neutral positions to the people who express them in the article text.
- Avoid adjective laden text. This may make reading text boring, but if some one is the best at something or the worst at something, the facts should make this obvious to the reader who can draw their own conclusions.
- Organize the article into a different way. Instead of "Study says Japanese best and Spanish worst when it comes to education", write one article on how Japan is doing well in education and that they rank first in education. Write a second article that talks about how Spain is the worst in education and use the source to neutrally explain why.
- Approach the article from a specific perspective and then neutrally write about the topic. For example, you can write how the USA won their ice hockey series against Sweden. You can write how Sweden lost their ice hockey series against the USA. Both can be done neutrally if they are fact based, devoid of adjectives and do not advocate that coaches should have done something to have improved the performance.
Please note: All articles must be verifiable. For synthesis articles, that means including on-line, verifiable sources for all facts in the article. For original reporting, notes, video, audio and other materials must be provided to allow for verification of facts in the article. Unverifiable facts may either be removed or the article may be marked as not ready for publication.
