If you have spent time on Wikipedia—and especially if you’ve delved at all into the online encyclopedia’s inner workings—you will know that it is, in almost every aspect, the inverse of Trumpism. That’s not a statement about its politics. The thousands of volunteer editors who write, edit, and fact-check the site manage to adhere remarkably well, over all, to one of its core values: the neutral point of view. Like many of Wikipedia’s principles and procedures, the neutral point of view is the subject of a practical but sophisticated epistemological essay posted on Wikipedia. Among other things, the essay explains, N.P.O.V. means not stating opinions as facts, and also, just as important, not stating facts as opinions. (So, for example, the third sentence of the entry titled “Climate change” states, with no equivocation, that “the current rise in global temperatures is driven by human activities, especially fossil fuel burning since the Industrial Revolution.”)
