 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Advocacy articles as used in this essay refers to a subset of articles on controversial subjects which, by their nature, include strong opinions as a substantial basis for the article, and are not therefore based on determinable facts. The generalities in the essay WP:Advocacy deal with a general concept, but do not deal with the specific subgroup of articles discussed below, nor do they present questions as to how WP should deal with such articles.
Such articles form a huge percentage of POV and other editing issues, as well as the bulk of the ArbCom workload.
Currently, NPOV and other tags are used to temporarily denote specific issues in articles as including unbalanced points of view. These tags are generally removed by consensus of those editors who hold the majority position on an issue, thus hiding the real problems with the articles.
The articles which are the subject here are those for which placement of a temporary NPOV tag is substantially insufficient to alert users of Wikipedia that there are major issues concerning the content of an article.