On 18/04/2008, Delirium delirium@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.