On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 17:04:18 +1100, csherlock@ljh.com.au csherlock@ljh.com.au wrote:
Anthere wrote:
Some already ponctually corrected a couple of things. But generally, they do not believe in Wikipedia neutrality though they see the efforts to try to be neutral. You may not expect french people who really write a bad english to go correct all what is biaised in the english wikipedia.
This is a good question : why did not they fix it ?
It took me three months to dare edit the english wikipedia after I met it. I feared criticism of my english like hell; And still fear it very much, as there are regularly unpleasant comments made about it. Recently, I had to block 2 times an editor who was being extremely rude with non english people on meta. A place where international people ARE welcome. When editors rudely handle non english in a place such as meta, you might guess how nice these editors can be on the english wikipedia itself.
Amongst french people, I am generally considered quite good in english. Still, editing in good english is difficult for me and takes a lot of time. Arguments which start on talk page and last dozens and dozens of screens put me off. It takes too much time to read it all and try to understand it all.
Many french scientists read english, because nearly all science is in english, so of course, it is their main source of information. But most french scientists do not manage english well enough to become editors.
It needs courage you may not realise. It needs efforts, and it needs to overcome the comment of some people who do not think we belong there.
So, they look at the article, they may correct a typo, but do not go any further.
Anthere,
If you find people being rude to non-English people I think you need to let an admin know so we can leave a message on their talk page warning them not to make personal attacks. I have personally never seen this, but if I did the used doing this would get a stern warning from me.
Ta bu shi da yu
en.wikipedia suffers greatly from bias in parts. I say in parts, as obviously those topics receiving more of both US and European attention are usually edited for NPOV/compromise (or often unfortunately erupt into an edit war or bitter recriminations).
It's a huge problem I think, and one of Wikipedia's biggest to overcome. And denying that it is there is absurd.
And I'm not laying the blame solely with US wikipedians, far from it - US bias is just more apparant (to non-US editors) because there are more US editors than not (or than any other single category). I have no doubt there are a minority of articles biased against the US which have perhaps only received non-US editors. And speaking for myself I can for sure point out one or two Irish articles which have been biased by Irish editors for example.
NPOV isn't a nonsense, it's an admirable goal, but it is highly fraudulent to pretend that having an NPOV policy makes us neutral. It doesn't. In fairness, we are probably only of *comparable* neutrality to dead-wood encyclopaedias - and I'm sorry, but I do think that US editors can't see this as much, as inherently more things will be US biased.
Zoney