The Information Society, 27: 40–51, 2011 Copyright c  Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0197-2243 print / 1087-6537 online DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2011.534368 PERSPECTIVE Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View”: Settling Conflict through Ambiguity Sorin Adam Matei Department of Communication, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA Caius Dobrescu Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania This article discusses how one of the most important Wikipedia policies, the “neutral point of view” (NPOV), is appropriated and interpreted by the participants in the Wikipedia project. By an- alyzing a set of constitutive documents for the Wikipedian uni- verse, including discussion about NPOV, the authors conclude that ambiguity is at the heart of the policy process on Wikipedia. The overarching conclusion is that ambiguity on Wikipedia is not extra- neous, but a central ingredient of this wiki project’s policymaking. Ambiguity naturally develops from the pluralist and nonhierar- chic values of the culture that brought Wikipedia to life, and this conclusion requires that we reconsider the nature of “neutrality” practiced on Wikipedia. Keywords ambiguity, collaboration, conflict, editor, policy, power, social media, wiki, Wikipedia The wiki model of “open content” publishing (Feller 2005; Leuf and Cunningham 2001), made famous by Wikipedia and known in the popular lore as “the ency- clopedia anyone can edit,” enables members of apparently uncoordinated groups to collaborate in creating and dis- seminating various types of knowledge and content. Ac- cess to content is free, and technological barriers to entry Received 1 March 2010; accepted 8 March 2010. This research project was support in part by the CNCSIS project ID 760 (Cultural discourse and cultural legitimacy in the XXth cen- tury) financed by UEFISCSU (contract number 863/19.01.2009) and coordinated by Dr. Rodica Ilie. Address correspondence to Sorin Adam Matei, Purdue University, BRNG 2132, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. E-mail: sorin@matei.org are low; thus, anyone with minimal computer skills can start editing wiki articles immediately. Wiki production systems raise a number of important questions. Some of these issues have increasingly attracted the attention of the scholarly community (Bryant, Forte, and Bruckman 2005; Emigh and Herring 2005; Herring et al. 2004; Lih 2004, 2009; Viegas, Wattenberg, and Kushal 2004; Stvilia et al. 2005); however, much remains to be explored. Among the issues that demand more attention is the manner in which nonhierarchical content generation en- vironments deal with plurality of vision or with defining and choosing facts, evaluating them, and assigning them meaning (Forte and Bruckman 2008). Also important is the study of the strategies used in collaborative environ- ments to convert conflict into socially useful interactions (Kollock and Smith 1996). Elucidating these issues is par- ticularly important when striving to understand open con- tent production environments that deal with social and humanistic subjects, such as wiki encyclopedias (Emigh and Herring 2005). Lack of centralized management might create in such environments the expectation that all voices should be heard and all meanings considered in producing a specific outcome. This article focuses on the role played by conflict and by one of the strategies employed to minimize it, am- biguity, in Wikipedia. We are particularly interested in understanding how conflict and ambiguity influence the manner in which active Wikipedia members understand the making and implementation of the “neutral point of view” (NPOV) policy. 1 Our study examines claims made in Wikipedia’s edito- rial policies that neutral, factual, value-free knowledge is 40