The press concentrate on the wiki method and editability as the most amazing thing about Wikipedia.
But I think NPOV is possibly a more important innovation. Other sources aim to explain the view they hold or to be authoritative; NPOV describes the views and has whatever authority that confers.
I'm sorely lacking in snappy quotes, though. I ask your assistance: Explain NPOV in a sentence.
Two sentences if you have to. But we need something that's not only accurate and complete, but shows it's obviously the right thing once explained.
This is what I said in an email interview a few months ago. Note it's horribly long-winded because I couldn't think of a short way to put it. Your suggestions are most welcomed.
"One of the keys to Wikipedia's success in my mind is the Neutral Point of View. I think this is actually our 'secret sauce.' Rather than advocate something or hold it to be the Truth (capital T), it tries to describe views of the truth per their relevance. This is an editorial judgement call, and perfect neutrality is of course an unachievable goal, but I do think it provides a good editorial compass for us. And neutral-point-of-view writing on subjects seems to be drastically rare. That's something Wikipedia does that no-one else in fact has as a key goal. One of my specialist subjects is Scientology (I am apparently what passes for an expert critic) and there's nearly no neutral writing on the subject outside Wikipedia - critical sites are detailed but really impassioned, Church sites are low-key but miss lots of stuff the critics consider important; the coverage in Wikipedia, by writing neutrally with high-quality and verifiable references, is often very good. It's far from perfect, but it's an interesting thing we do, other than the wiki work method, that is actually *new*. NPOV is basically how 20,000 active editors with wildly divergent views can keep from being at each others' throats. (Most of the time ;-)"
- d.