Chapter 1. 1 Protocols of Pluralization

Neutral Point of View

The main commonality protocol, which is shared by most language versions, is one of the encyclopedia’s founding pillars. Indeed, the neutral point of view is one of Wikipedia’s oldest governance principles. The idea of neutrality is described as the fact of “representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views” (“Wikipedia: Neutral Point of View,” 2026). Neutral point of view operates as a principle of exclusion, since its function is to rule out partisan contributions, personal opinions, seriously disputed assertions, and ultraminority points of view. At the same time, however, it is a principle of inclusion, since the objective of neutrality is served by presenting a multiplicity of viewpoints (in proportion to their relative weight in the reliable sources published on the subject). In this way, the principle of neutral point of view acts as a pluralization protocol: It aims to create a common space that invariably excludes nonencyclopedic points of view while including a multiplicity of points of view that are deemed relevant.

At the heart of the encyclopedia project, this principle has nevertheless been subjected to much criticism (Tkacz, 2014). The internal policies of the English-language Wikipedia present several objections frequently raised against this principle of neutrality. One of these relates to the encyclopedia’s “Anglo-American focus” (“Wikipedia: Neutral Point of View,” 2026). This dominant cultural perspective stems from the predominance of American and (to a lesser extent) British contributors and is cited as a provision that runs counter to the principle of neutrality, and that needs to be corrected. The page of the French-language edition describing this principle is descriptive and general and makes no mention of these limitations. On the other hand, the French-language Wikipedia contains a recommendation called principle of least surprise (principe de moindre surprise), which applies to a similar cultural issue although in a completely different way.

Principle of Least Surprise

This guideline is listed among the style conventions and mainly concerns the editorial style of articles and, in particular, the choice of headlines. It “aims to ensure that the information presented is easily understood by the reader,” based on arguments of coherence, clarity, and comprehension by the broadest possible readership (“Wikipédia: Principe de moindre surprise,” 2025). This principle of least surprise was initially mentioned in a Wikimedia Foundation resolution on controversial and offensive subjects and was then incorporated by Wikipedia into a manual to help edit articles (“Wikipédia: Principe de moindre surprise,” 2025). It was adopted by the French-language edition of Wikipedia and formalized in 2011 as an autonomous guideline following acrimonious discussions between people in France and Québec about the use of Québécois expressions, which are not commonly used in France. For example, in 2008, the (unsuccessful) attempt to rename the French article “Palet (Sport)” to “Rondelle”—a term used in Québec for ice hockey—led to a memorable editing war in the history of relations between editors from Québec and France within Wikipedia.

In the English-language edition of Wikipedia, the principle of least surprise is not intended to arbitrate conflicts linked to cultural differences in the relationship to knowledge, such as the different ways of article editing depending on the usage of the language in each country. In the French-language encyclopedia, on the other hand, this principle of least surprise has been formalized into a guideline that serves in practice to regulate the use of variations in the French language. More specifically, it leads to the use of “French as spoken in France” as the default common standard, to the detriment of other national or regional variants. Given that the majority of (French-language) Wikipedia readers are located in France, “the most common terminology [is] generally that used in France for statistical reasons” in order to cause the least surprise to the French readership. This principle of least surprise applies “to all readers, whatever their country and culture.” As a result, it establishes a protocol of linguistic commonality based on the distinctive character of France (“Wikipédia: Conventions de style,” 2025).

This principle of least surprise is widely applied for the France-based readership, but it is also regularly contested on the grounds that it imposes “Francocentrism” (a mindset focused on France and the French people), which critics view as a breach of the neutrality principle, insofar as it imposes a specifically French cultural lens on others. On the discussion pages where contributors debate this issue, one finds various arguments that nuance the “Francocentrism” of the least surprising principle, putting into practice exceptions to the rule. But these reflections and exceptions are not clearly indicated on the page setting out the guideline. They therefore remain relatively fragile when publishing conflicts arise, where the France-focused argument tends to prevail.

In the English-language version of Wikipedia, the guideline of less surprise is tempered by another convention called “not what first comes to [your] mind” (“Wikipedia: Disambiguation,” 2026). According to this convention, the terms that seem most common to us are inevitably interpreted according to our geographical location, and these partial readings can lead to systemic biases that are detrimental to the encyclopedia’s project.

More fundamentally, a series of guidelines from the English-language edition of Wikipedia states that no country or group has priority in terms of language: “The English Wikipedia does not prefer any national variety of English to any other.” The United States constitutes a statistical majority group but does not, in theory, have priority over other groups: It is specified that “American English spelling must not be transformed into British English spelling, and vice versa” (“Wikipedia: Manual of Style,” 2026).

A substantial difference can thus be observed between the English and French editions of Wikipedia with respect to their communal protocols. In the English-language edition, the Anglo-American orientation of the encyclopedia is immediately identified as a systemic bias to be corrected insofar as the prevalence of one cultural point of view over the others is seen as a breach of the cardinal principle of neutrality. In the French-language edition, the precedence of the French point of view is seen as a guarantee of neutrality in the name of a principle of least surprise for the majority of readers based in France.

Diversifying the Subjects of Articles (Eligibility)

In addition to recognizing the obstacles to cultural pluralization, Wikipedia contains a series of protocols that encourage the expression of particular cultural characteristics. The first of these concerns the creation of articles in the encyclopedia. These protocols aim to diversify the subjects of articles by mitigating some of the effects of the notability guideline, which is considered to be detrimental to cultural diversity. This guideline was first introduced in 2006 in the English-language edition of Wikipedia to exclude irrelevant subjects. It is closely linked to the verifiability policy and stipulates that only topics “that have received sufficient attention” should be included, taking into account “evidence from reliable and independent sources” (“Wikipedia: Notability,” 2026).

While the guideline is broadly accepted in principle, its implementation has been the subject of ongoing debate. The controversies pit an “inclusionist” party, which advocates a broad retention of poorly supported articles, against a “deletionist” party,2 which advocates strict selection criteria for articles, resulting in the deletion of several articles dealing with minority cultures. In fact, the eligibility of articles dealing with these cultures is more difficult to establish because of the lesser availability of reference sources in English or the lack of sources altogether. In French, the inclusion of a diversity of international perspectives is perceived by some contributors as an even greater challenge: According to one contributor, “In many fields involving distant cultural horizons, there are few French-language sources compared with English-language resources” (“Discussion Wikipédia: Internationalisation,” 2025). The effects of the unequal availability and legitimacy of reference sources have been widely documented by academic studies that conclude that certain marginalized subjects and voices are excluded (Lemieux et al., 2023; McDowell & Vetter, 2021).

Subjects dealing with Canada tend to be overrepresented in the English and French Wikipedias in relation to the country’s overall demographic weight. However, their proportion is still very much in the minority compared with that of the United States and France, which respectively dominate the number of articles per country in the two encyclopedias. But there are still some debates about the coverage of subjects relating to internal cultural diversity in Canada. As a multicultural and multilingual country,3 Canada is itself characterized by great cultural diversity within its borders. For example, there have been requests that several articles on the history of Chinese immigration to different Canadian provinces or municipalities be deleted or merged, on the grounds that the subject was already covered by other articles and that the sources cited were insufficient or biased. For example, the article “Chinese Canadians in Greater Vancouver” was retained after a lengthy debate, based on the existence of four scholarly works and a master’s degree on the subject (2024).

In the French edition of Wikipedia, the guideline on notoriety sets an additional requirement—namely, that reliable sources must above all be sources “of national or international scope” so as to exclude “subjects whose notoriety would be purely local or restricted to a specific group of people” (“Wikipédia: Notoriété,” 2025). This clause makes it questionable to quote Québec sources, because they do not have a readership across the country, even though Québec itself is defined as a nation, with “national” media. The difficulty this requirement presents is even greater for subnational cultures, as, for instance, in the case of the article “Franco-Ontarian literature” (“Littérature franco-ontarienne”) (2025; Casemajor & Couture, 2020). A French user proposed the deletion of this article on the grounds that Franco-Ontarian literature was not distinctive enough to deserve its own article separately from the article “French-Canadian literature” (“Littérature canadienne-française”). Ultimately, the article was retained, not for political or epistemological reasons relating to the recognition of minority cultures but because quality sources were cited to justify its continued inclusion in the encyclopedia. More generally, the many debates surrounding the deletion of articles dealing with minority cultures show that there is often a lack of legitimate sources concerning them, given their marginality and poor representation in Canadian cultural, academic, and political institutions.

Some protocols have been established to overcome these difficulties. They take the form of notability conventions applicable to a single country or cultural group. In the English edition of Wikipedia, this is the case of the style manual guideline for Canadian subjects (the “Wikipedia: Manual of Style/Canada-Related Articles” page), which contains guidelines on notability specific to that country. Similarly, in the French edition of Wikipedia, the Swiss WikiProject has drawn up a guideline to the effect that “because of the language regions, no media organizations cover the whole country. The Swiss project therefore considers the language regions (German-speaking Switzerland, French-speaking Switzerland, Italian-speaking Switzerland and Rhaeto-Romanic Switzerland) to be equivalent to national in scope” (“Projet: Suisse/Admissibilité,” 2025). As a result, locality protocols applicable to the notoriety of encyclopedia subjects exist to encourage the inclusion of articles whose admissibility could be debated. In so doing, these locality protocols contribute to cultural pluralization by recognizing the encyclopedic legitimacy of subjects linked to cultures located in a particular territory.

As for the Wikipedia in Atikamekw Nehiromowin, its conventions of notability and verifiability of sources are not very formalized. They do, however, include some original provisions, adapted to the intrinsic character of Indigenous cultures and their relationship to knowledge (Casemajor et al., 2019). For example, during the discussions that accompanied the public launch of this edition of the encyclopedia, participants opted to exclude a priori subjects relating to sacred rituals and medicinal plants. The primary aim of this notability provision is to protect certain areas of Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok knowledge that are traditionally passed on only from an elder to their apprentice and not in written form to everyone. This arrangement is also influenced by a certain mistrust engendered by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their resources in the history of colonization.

Another protocol specific to the Atikamekw Nehiromowin language edition of Wikipedia concerns the policy of verifiability of sources. In this encyclopedia, oral sources are among the most legitimate, given the primordial value placed on the word of elders in the transmission of knowledge, which traditionally takes the form of oral accounts. Compared with other language editions of Wikipedia, these protocols are highly unusual, since they specifically adapted to the ways in which knowledge is transmitted that characterize Indigenous peoples while at the same time fitting into the modern encyclopedia format that is characteristic of the Western world.

Internationalize and Particularize

A second series of locality protocols concerns existing articles. Some of these protocols aim to introduce diverse cultural and linguistic viewpoints within a single article with an international scope. A case in point is the article “Médecin” (Doctor). In the French edition of Wikipedia, this article has been criticized for representing only the state of the medical profession in France. This debate has led to a split between an article focusing on the French point of view, entitled “Médecin (France),” and a generic article with an international focus, “Médecin,” which mentions that “the training of doctors varies considerably around the world.” This latter article also includes a specific section on Canada.

The case of the article “Médecin (France)” illustrates the privilege given to a single point of view, which is legitimate in the case of a subject of strictly national interest. In this case, an issue arises concerning the recognition of the particular interest of an article for a culture or a country and, consequently, favouring a particular cultural point of view. In the English edition of Wikipedia, when an article has a “strong national link with the subject,” it may also be written in the national (or regional) variant of the language characteristic of the group concerned (“Wikipedia: Manual of Style,” 2026). However, identifying this strong national link is not always easy. It is often the subject of negotiation, which may be consensual or conflictual.

The article now entitled “Canada Jay” serves as a good example of this kind of negotiation. The article was originally entitled “Gray Jay” (the American spelling) and was then renamed “Grey Jay” (the Canadian spelling) after this bird was designated as Canada’s national symbol by the magazine of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. After further discussions lasting 2 years, the bird was renamed “Canada jay,” but only once the International Ornithological Committee, the authority on bird names, had officially adopted this nomenclature. This example highlights a limitation of Wikipedia’s locality protocols: For subjects where there is a well-established scientific nomenclature with international standards (chemistry, zoology), it is this external standard that tends to prevail over internal Wikipedia policy negotiations.

In the English Wikipedia, a whole series of tools has been created to indicate and document the use of the main variants of English. As mentioned earlier, there is a recommended style guide specific to Canadian English and a banner to display in articles: “This article is written in Canadian English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, centre, travelled, realize, analyze), and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus” (“Template: Canadian English,” 2026).

The Canadian style guide page describes in great detail a set of conventions and consensuses in force on how to name and write articles that concern Canadian subjects. These guidelines go further than mere stylistic advice: They offer a “Canadian” interpretation of the encyclopedia’s general policies and guidelines. As such, the guide is a crucial means of locating knowledge: It institutionalizes recognition of the cultural and linguistic specificity of Canadian content while at the same time giving Canadian editors a degree of power to act in terms of governance over the subjects that concern them (“Wikipedia: Manual of Style/Canada-Related Articles,” 2025).

There is no equivalent to this specifically Canadian style guide in the French-language edition of Wikipedia. The guideline on style conventions simply includes a section on “geographical variants” of vocabulary, which states that “as certain terms of the French language may vary according to the country or region where they are used, the version best suited to the context should be preferred” (“Wikipédia: Conventions de style,” 2025). For example, in an article relating specifically to Québec, the Québec term will be preferred, and in all other cases, the French spoken in France would be preferred. The French edition of Wikipedia has tried to adopt more formal conventions on how to include linguistic variants, but this attempt has failed. A survey carried out in 2008 concluded that a majority of Wikipedians thought it necessary to adopt such rules, but they were unable to agree on the nature of these conventions. The field of sports was the only one to benefit from a clear decision in 2006. The decision in this respect states that “articles on North American sports clubs will have a title in Canadian French.” Accordingly, the article on the “Celtics de Boston” reflects French usage in Québec, unlike usage in France, where the English form “Boston Celtics” is more common.

Even so, the French linguistic variant generally remains the default choice, reflecting France’s political and symbolic weight in the French-speaking world.

In the case of the Atikamekw Nehiromowin edition of Wikipedia, once again, an original protocol has been put in place to recognize and include language variants. The three communities that make up the nation each have their own linguistic usages. This fact was taken into account very early on in the discussions leading up to the public launch of the encyclopedia. It was agreed that the articles would compose three different sections, each dedicated to a community that would be free to write content reflecting its point of view and use of the language, or to merge the content. For example, the article “Kwekweciw” (Canada jay) has a single merged section for the communities of Manawan and Wemotaci and another for Opitciwan (“Kwekweciw,” 2022). This content structure reflects the political structure of the Atikamekw nation insofar as Manawan and Wemotaci participate together in the Atikamekw Nation Council, while Opitciwan has withdrawn from it.