After dabbling in Wikipedia for several months, it has finally become clear to me exactly what is wrong with its neutral point-of-view (NPOV) policy, reflecting a similar problem that pervades modern liberal discourse. In order for an article to maintain NPOV, every popular position on an issue needs to be presented, often at the expense of properly expressing their relative likelihood or importance. Not only does this make articles read like haphazard assortments of facts, but the discussion is vulnerable to the demands of every advocacy group. When a structured article does occur, it is often because one advocacy group has won the day and imposed its editorial judgments about what is important.
Editing, in the traditional sense, has been one of Wikipedia’s weakest points, because there many Indians and no chiefs, and the NPOV is often interpreted to preclude making editorial judgments about what is significant. When I read an encyclopedia, I expect more than a collection of facts. I expect the author to have exercised judgment in using his limited space to provide me the most relevant facts in a meaningful structure. That is what makes an encyclopedia a useful springboard for research. I am not advocating opinionated articles, but simply pointing out the practical necessity of editorial judgments that necessarily come in conflict with NPOV as commonly interpreted.
More broadly, liberal discourse suffers from self-stultification through its aversion to making judgments about what is significant and relevant, out of concern for radical egalitarianism. This relativizing tendency ignores the inescapable fact that all genuine intellectual activity involves making judgments. Anything less is just data collection, without understanding the data’s meaning. This debases human discourse and lends credence to notions like artificial intelligence and collective intelligence, only because the notion of human intelligence has been dumbed down.