It is indeed true that areas relating to "the home country" are very likely to be influenced, at least to some degree, by people whose first language is not English.
You make an interesting point, too. There is widespread unconcious discrimination on Wikipedia.
Mr. Randombtr will be trusted less about Chinese history than Mr. Uneducatedchinesefarmer, even though there is a possibility that Mr. Randombtr has his Ph.D in Chinese history and has lived in China for 20 years - after all, Mr. Uneducatedchinesefarmer is actually Chinese. Even if he never saw a history textbook, or if he moved to the UK at age 3 and never learnt much about Chinese history than some half truth, half legend that his grandparents taught him (probably more likely - uneducated Chinese farmers are unlikely to be editing on en:), he is trusted disproportionately more because "he is Chinese".
This can be found in the real world as well, but more often than not it is based on the colour of one's skin and the shape of one's eyes rather than heritage and so a man of Japanese heritage born and raised in London will be trusted more regarding Chinese history than will a BTR woman who was born and raised in Beijing and completed university there simply because she doesn't look "Asian" but he does.
But that is getting off topic and I don't think anybody denies it to a large degree, so back to the topic at hand.
Since on most smaller Wikipedias there is usually nobody with enough knowledge about "home countries" other than their own to write much about them, articles such as that are often translations of the English or teh French version.
If a man on the Cantonese Wikipedia (which doesn't actually exist... yet) were to write an article on "Vienna U-Bahn" (that's Vienna Underground, isn't it?), excluding the possibility that he lives or lived at one point in Vienna and knows more than a little bit about the U-Bahn, he will most likely translate from the English or French version, or (perhaps a bit less common) research it on Google to write an original article; in many cases he will use a mixture of the English version and information from Google and completely organise it into what seems like an original article but contains mostly the same information.
Because of this, articles about "the home country" tend to vary little between Wikipedias (especially smaller ones), and since they are by far en:'s articles most influenced by people whose first language is not English, the "POV balancing" and "fact correction" that occurs in articles by non first language-speakers on en: is spread around across projects like butter on bread. Thus, the degree of inherent POV in all Wikipedias is very similar because of this repeated exchange of a narrow range of articles.
Mark (am I "the other Mark"?)
On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 01:48:33 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
All these factors combined mean that en: is still very much shaped by the collective cultural experiences of its editors, and thus while we try to remove systemic bias we still miss some important POV holdouts because they don't jump out at us, and en: is still very much an encyclopaedia written from an American-Australian-NewZealandic-Canadian-British perspective/POV with only relatively minor counterbalances from those whose cultural experiences fall outside those of the aforementioned English-native group.
This depends a lot on where on en: Wikipedia you look. Many of the articles related to mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have been edited by people who actually live there, and their opinions tend to be given somewhat disproportionate weight, as they're presumed to know what they're talking about (not exclusive weight, but more than my opinions on Hong Kong would be given). There was even a class in Hong Kong whose teacher had his students go around on en: adding articles on different places, companies, etc. in the city.
Just now I clicked on "Random page", and I got [[Vienna U-Bahn]], written by [[User:ThomasK]], whose user page indicates he lives in Vienna. Etc.
Percentage-wise, non-English-world users might not make up a large proportion of the editors, but their influence is fairly strong, especially on subjects related to their home country.
-Mark
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