Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
It is not clear to me that NPOV could ever require a _single_ version of all policies and all articles. Certainly the concept does push in the direction of a general sort of consistency, but not every kind of difference is "succumbing to local cultural biases".
For example, we don't insist that the German wikipedia be written in English, so as to avoid the local cultural bias of "speaking in German".
Or, imagine that a particular battle in Europe during World War II had some unusual but local impact on Japan. We might quite naturally imagine that the Japanese article _without bias_ but _with an eye towards the needs and interests of the local audience_ would have a different degree of detail on that topic than say en or fr or de.
I used to have this viewpoint on NPOV and languages, but increasingly I'm not sure it makes sense. The fundamental reason we have separate languages for the encyclopedias is simply that there is no one language that all people can easily read, so it's a necessity. The German Wikipedia can't be in English or vice versa because many Germans can't read English and many Americans, Britons, and other English-speakers can't read German. Now these languages do correspond somewhat to cultures, but not always very well---in some cases, like English, pretty poorly (especially if you count people who speak English as a second language, it's hard to identify an "English-speaking culture").
So, if we really wanted encyclopedias whose focuses were geared towards local culture, we would actually need to split some languages into multiple encyclopedias---a U.S.-english and a European-english encyclopedial; Americas-spanish and Spain-spanish; France-french, Canada-french, and Africa-french; and so on. Otherwise, which countries get version with content geared towards local tastes and interests and which don't is based on historical accident---Italy gets a local version, because nobody else really speaks Italian, but the U.K. has to share its encyclopedia, because a lot of other people speak English.
I think, instead, we ought to treat languages as sort of a necessary evil, and strive to make them all as internationalist and *non*-local as possible. Japanese may not be spoken as widely as English, so will inherently tend towards more local biases and focus. That, IMO, simply means that the ja: Wikipedia needs to make more of a special effort to actively seek out other viewpoints, whereas the en: Wikipedia has a bit of an easier time because the other viewpoints come to it on their own.
I personally prefer as internationalist an encyclopedia as possible, and for that reason consider myself somewhat lucky that my main language is English---I think the en: Wikipedia would be much, much less interesting and informative if US-english had diverged enough to be considered its own language, and therefore there was a us: encyclopedia edited only by Americans. Not that a us: encyclopedia couldn't be useful or interesting, but I much prefer the current en: encyclopedia, even if it's often not geared towards my local culture. (If nothing else, when I'm surprised at the order of information, or the caveats and so on, it reminds me that a lot of things I take for granted aren't universal.)
Now whether it's possible to synthesize a NPOV encyclopedia that covers the entire world without any particular bias, and what that would mean, is an interesting issue the sociologists and philosophers will no doubt have volumes to say about. =]
-Mark