Wikipedia:Cherrypicking

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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This page in a nutshell: Do not cherrypick. When selecting information from a source, include contradictory and significant qualifying information from the same source.

In the context of editing an article, cherrypicking, in a negative sense, means selecting information without including contradictory or significant qualifying information from the same source and consequently misrepresenting what the source says. This applies both to quotations and to paraphrasings.

If you are familiar with multiple credible sources on a subject and they are significantly different from each other, you may realize that Wikipedia's policies and guidelines support reporting from some or all of the sources, and you should edit accordingly. If one editor is not familiar with some sources, another editor who is can edit accordingly. Irrespective of one editor's views, an article as a whole needs to conform to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.

Outside of Wikipedia, cherrypicking often means selecting from the general range of sources on a topic so as to misrepresent a consensus or to misrepresent what has been published. For that, the remedy is to edit to reflect what another editor missed, because we don't expect an editor to know all the sources on a topic or even all of a consensus. Our concern within Wikipedia is about cherrypicking from within a source or closely-related multiple sources, and an editor should be careful in handling that.

Do not cherrypick.