Re: The early days of the English Wikipedia featured a large
proportion of non-native speakers of English contributing.
Not just the early days, one can't spend long at new page patrol in
particular without coming across an amazing variety of nationalities
of authors. I suspect a couple of things drive this, firstly the
English Wikipedia as the first and largest and most widely read is
also in some ways a shared repository - people translate articles into
English from everywhere and I suspect they then get translated all
over wikimedia. Secondly I rather suspect that a lot of editors have
at least a secondary motivation of improving their writing skills in
the language they are editing in - I might try and get a question on
this into one of our user surveys.
WereSpielChequers
On 23 January 2011 13:39, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 23/01/2011 05:13, Tony Sidaway wrote:
'I must be very naive not to have realised,
all this time, that the
so-called "English Wikipedia" was actually the "American Wikipedia".
Or could that nomenclature reveal a somewhat suspicious starting
point?'
I don't see a problem with that choice of words. While there are large
numbers of non-American contributors much of the English Wikipedia is
about subjects of interest to American writers and written from a
largely American point of view. I would not be surprised if this were
even more pronounced in the early days.
(Something odd about your citing here,
Tony.) Actually I think that
misrepresents the history. The early days of the English Wikipedia
featured a large proportion of non-native speakers of English contributing.
Anyway NPOV is not negotiable, as we know. There is systemic bias
towards American topics, as there is towards Anglospheric topics more
generally, but that is another issue. (It is true that American
sensibilities on 9/11 were treated with kid gloves for a while.)
Charles