[WikiEN-l] Neutral point of view

[David Gerard]

On 18/04/2008, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> An interesting question then is, to the extent that this is successfully
>  captured in the articles we consider good ones, which is the
>  "mainstream" that we're giving an overview of? In many cases we bias to
>  specific types of sources---for example, supporting scientific sources
>  over theological ones---in ways that a survey of the public at large
>  might not. On the other hand, we don't tilt as strongly towards academic
>  views as some encyclopedias do. I'd suspect that what we're summarizing
>  is in effect the consensus view of the sorts of people who happen to
>  edit Wikipedia in a particular area, which is itself a somewhat biased
>  sample. This becomes particularly clear in certain sub-areas, and in
>  looking at how articles differ across language versions.


Indeed. en:wp's size, and English being the current lingua franca, can
actually be helpful in this regard - we get a much wider range of
contributors. This sort of thing is a worry for the Chinese Wikipedia
- PRC POVs are important to have access to, and now they don't.


- d.