Weight, inside Wikipedia's neutral-point-of-view policy, means proportion: how much space a fact or a controversy earns in an article, measured against how much reliable, independent coverage it actually received. A three-sentence mention of a lawsuit inside a profile of a forty-year career reads like restraint, but it is usually just arithmetic — a tally of how many of those forty years' worth of coverage actually discussed the lawsuit.
A regional bank executive profiled nine times across a twelve-year career makes the arithmetic concrete. Six of those profiles covered an expansion strategy; two covered an industry award; one, a business weekly's two-paragraph item, covered a shareholder lawsuit that settled quietly. A draft built from that record gave the lawsuit its own subheading, four sentences long, sitting below a two-sentence summary of the expansion that had drawn six times the coverage. Every word in the subheading traced to a source. The proportion was still wrong, and a reviewer tagged the section {{undue weight}}.
The same test runs in the other direction just as often. A software company once asked that a product-recall section be trimmed to a single sentence, arguing that a two-year-old lawsuit had no bearing on a company shipping on schedule since. The recall, though, had drawn eleven articles across four trade outlets over six months — more coverage than the company's founding round ever received. Cutting it to one sentence would not have restored balance; it would have reversed it, giving the founding round more room in the article than it ever held in the record. The section stayed at four paragraphs, matching what independent sources had actually written.
Editors have a name for the first failure: a coatrack, an article that uses a technically notable subject as a hook for content that belongs to a different story — usually a controversy with more to say about an industry, a regulator, or a lawsuit than about the person or company named in the title. The guideline covering both directions is WP:DUE, part of the neutral-point-of-view policy, and it weighs flattering and unflattering material by the same scale: not by what a subject would prefer, not by how serious a matter feels, but by how much space reliable, published sources gave it.
An article should not give undue weight to any aspect of a subject, but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight appropriate to its treatment in the body of reliable, published sources.
The practical habit is counting before drafting. Before a section earns a subheading, a rough tally — how many outlets, how many separate publication dates, how much space relative to every other section — says more about its proper length than instinct does. A paragraph that feels too long because it's uncomfortable to read can still be exactly the length the sourcing supports. A paragraph that would need its own encyclopedia entry to justify three outlets' passing mentions almost always needs trimming instead.
