Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/8/06, Raphael Wegmann raphael@psi.co.at wrote:
I certainly know Al Jazeera and http://www.archive.org/details/mosaic but IMHO the news reports of a media networks are far less interesting than a "public Wikiconsensus" on "generic" topics like Islam, 9/11, Terrorism, Israel, etc. Apart from being exciting, those translations whould show how culturally biased Wikipedia actually is.
Yeah, but there are so many factors that lead to the way a wikipedia article is the way it is, and cultural bias is only one of them. The expertises of the authors, controversialness of the topic, general interest in the topic, etc all have a huge part to play. You could end up comparing an article written in the spare time of two retired academics against an article bitterly fought over for months by leagues of "pro" and "anti" editors, being forced to source every edit.
Well, the controversialness of the topics I mentioned and the general interest in them are probably high in both cultures, so I wouldn't expect any of those articles be written only by two editors. OTOH the POVs of the administrators can/probably have an disproportionate weight on the bias as well.