User:Buster7/Balanced article

From various article talk pages

Giving "equal validity" can create a false balance

• What some may consider positive, others may see as negative, and vice versa. Does a call for WP:FALSEBALANCE go against policy?
• WP:FALSEBALANCE states that "Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, speculative history, or plausible but unaccepted theories should not be legitimized." For example, we shouldn't try to legitimize the Flat Earth conspiracy theory by giving it equal weight through comparison to widely accepted science. Flat v Globe
• "Your argument seems to misunderstand and mis-state how balance works when working on an article. The job of WE (wikipedia editors) is to reflect the overall tone, focus, and weight of the highest-quality sources available. If those sources are overwhelmingly and accumulatively negative, then it goes without saying that a balanced lead will also be overwhelmingly negative ..."
• The catchphrase "that's the way the cookie crumbles", which means "that's just the way things happen".
• WP:FALSEBALANCE is a part of WP:NPOV. It leads with While it is important to account for all significant viewpoints on any topic, Wikipedia policy does not state or imply that every minority view, fringe theory, or extraordinary claim needs to be presented along with commonly accepted mainstream scholarship as if they were of equal validity. Balancing negatives with positives to make it less negative is FALSEBALANCE. We go by WP:DUE. M

WP:Fair balance

When considering "due impartiality" ... [we are] careful when reporting on science to make a distinction between an opinion and a fact. When there is a consensus of opinion on scientific matters, providing an opposite view without consideration of "due weight" can lead to "false balance", meaning that viewers might perceive an issue to be more controversial than it actually is. This does not mean that scientists cannot be questioned or challenged, but that their contributions must be properly scrutinised. Including an opposite view may well be appropriate, but [it] must clearly communicate the degree of credibility that the view carries.

—BBC Trust's policy on science reporting 2011
See updated report from 2014.

While it is important to account for all significant viewpoints on any topic, Wikipedia policy does not state or imply that every minority view, fringe theory, or extraordinary claim needs to be presented along with commonly accepted mainstream scholarship as if they were of equal validity. There are many such beliefs in the world, some popular and some little-known: claims that the Earth is flat, that the Knights Templar possessed the Holy Grail, that the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax, and similar ones. Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, speculative history, or plausible but unaccepted theories should not be legitimized through comparison to accepted academic scholarship. We do not take a stand on these issues as encyclopedia writers, for or against; we merely omit this information where including it would unduly legitimize it, and otherwise include and describe these ideas in their proper context concerning established scholarship and the beliefs of the wider world.