Family parties, company projects, news and historical events are a collection of people’s voices, each of which adds their own depth of experiences to the story.

Often information sources claim to have a neutral perspective, when in reality there is always a slant. Sometimes it’s blatantly obvious like Fox News or MSNBC. More often it’s not very clear, like in the case of Wikipedia.

While Wikipedia strives for a “neutral point of view” for all of their articles—a noble effort— the numbers show that’s not the case. A study done by them last year revealed that only 9% of their editors worldwide are female… that’s not even 1 in 10 writers.

Can a true neutral perspective exist if the voice of such a huge segment of the population is excluded? And that’s not even diving into other biases that may exist like: cultural, language, religion, etc.

Outside of scientific facts, very few stories can have a true neutral perspective. At Heipile, instead of striving for an imperfect “neutral point of view,” we will clearly label perspectives so that the user can put it into context.

More importantly, it’s about bringing all the perspectives to the table. Wikipedia’s own Sue Gardner put it best when she said, “…everyone brings their crumb of information to the table, if they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.”

 

---

[UPDATE]  On April 28th, the NY Times published an interesting op-ed on this subject: Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists.

Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, addressed the issue on Quora: What does Jimmy Wales think of Wikipedia’s alleged sexism towards female novelists?

Wikimedia Executive Director, Sue Gardner, posted this piece on the issue: What’s missing from the media discussions of Wikipedia categories and sexism