5. Impartiality
When selecting suitable open educational resources based on Mediawiki software (OER WMS), objectivity and a neutral point of view play an important role. The resource should not ignore any perspective on the issue if these opinions are equally represented in public debate.
Objectivity, i.e. impartial objective discourse on a specific problem, is important for educational reasons and especially in the process of university education, during which students should study from resources that are not created for advertising or the promotion of a certain opinion at the expense of another that is just as relevant for the given purposes. At the same time, OER WMS are at significant risk from their creators and their efforts to promote their own opinions, and can intentionally deviate in content from an objective field towards their own convictions. Editing a text is relatively simple, and thus it tempts many individuals to use it for such purposes.
Objectivity is therefore one of the basic requirements for something like creating articles on Wikipedia. Articles that do not fulfill neutrality requirements should be rewritten. Just like Wikipedia, it is generally true that other OER WMS should also not be used as a space for the propagation of baseless opinions. On the contrary, all opinions that are not “common knowledge” (or universally known) should be backed by serious sources, ideally with the results of relevant scientific research (primarily in the field of use for university purposes).
Objectivity does not mean that all opinions on a given issue should be contained within the OER WMS. This applies especially to opinions that are wholly marginal in public debate and are not supported by facts. For example, in an article on the curvature of the Earth, it is not necessary to state that this fact is doubted by a certain group of individuals who deny that the Earth is round and are convinced that it is flat.
In order to preserve objectivity, it is important at least partially to summarize knowledge from sources that are widely acknowledged and respected in the given issue (for example, with scientific articles, their overall frequency of citation can be used, as the most widely cited works usually form the basis and core of the field – similarly to the authors of these works). Just how extensive this summary should be significantly varies, and depends primarily on the target group that the resource has been created for.