This policy seems to be abused a lot by the system gamers. For example, here is a typical case. Will Beback wants to have the article on the Tea Party movement say bad things about the movement. There are newspaper stories that say individual members who were not acting in an official capacity did something embarrassing. Will says that therefore these incidents must be included in the article. North8000 says, But these articles are not about the movement per se. Will says too bad, if the movement is in any mentioned in the story, it must be included. Will as usual seems to be assuming the leadership of the "Wikipedia as an attack platform" faction. However, North8000 seems to be, to my way of thinking, more in line with the spirit of the Undue Weight policy.

This is one of several area of Wikipedia where the amateur crowd-sourced model breaks down entirely. Whether a topic is covered in an article with due or undue emphasis is an entirely editorial decision. That decision may be informed by the amount or type of coverage in the contemporary media, but need not be. In historical terms, the overall emphasis of elements of an encyclopedia article will properly be determined by scholars, not journalists.

Wikipedia is, overall, one big ball of undue weight, emphasizing ephemera over important topics, and emphasizing news coverage over academic thought.

So, as with "Neutral Point of View", Wikipedia has an official-sounding policy that in practice merely allows the powerful and biased to get their way.

"Undue weight" is emphasized because it is the only "policy" available that cracks the stupidity of holding "NPOV" as a sacrosanct ideal. Demanding "neutrality" is not the way good encyclopedia articles are written. The best encyclopedia articles are written from the point-of-view of a world-class expert or at least a decent pedagogue.

Instead of expert editorial control, Wikipedia gives power to those who can play the game the best. Since there is no guarantee that good game-players are good article-writers, the Wikipedia community invented "NPOV" to make sure that the prose didn't become too outrageous. This rapidly turned into an unquestioned standard which is laughably ironic since the internet is full of goobers who will insist that their own fantastical interpretation or conspiracy theory deserves equal consideration in a neutral venue. As such, relying on NPOV as a pillar of an open-source encyclopedia is a disastrous way to run the show. "Undue weight" was added as an out from insipid NPOV requirements that otherwise forces incessant arguments about whether or not Earth is flat: a get-out-of-jail-free card to violate NPOV. What is left is a policy that says, "write an article balancing all perspectives unless you see one that has no business being in the article in which case marginalize or eliminate it".

Content policies of Wikipedia are all written with the intent to glorify the understanding of the ignorant and the obsessed who dominate the website. There is zero acknowledgement that there might exist subject-matter experts out there who could do a better job than the cloud. If one were to write an encyclopedia of open-sourced software, Wikipedia might arguably be the way to go. But in almost every other subject the experts are not the ones found in the open-sourced or "psychophant" communities.

Will is certainly using it as a "get out of jail free card," but not in the way you suggest. He is using it to say that anything that appears in a newspaper should appear in Wikipedia.

Sorry if this joke has been made before...

I can think of two WP admins who have "undue weight."

Once a get-out-of-jail-free card is offered, everyone will try to avail themselves of it. Absent some authority that can determine when a statement is worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia article or not, there is no conclusive way to decide when someone is right or wrong in its application. Wikipedia's policy-based system encourages its own subversion since virtual warfare is the only means by which that website determines the best way to write an article.

I think that the NPOV policy was a well-intentioned way of trying to keep out bias. However, it was a very uninformed, amateur way to do it. It takes more than just saying to make everything neutral. There must be some methodology to the madness.

I can think of quite a bit more than two.

I figured someone might say that.