I think in the end the people of the world will want both. We can choose to serve that want or not. NPOV can function in both environments but can subtly change in different cultures.
Fred
From: Delirium delirium@hackish.org Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 10:07:34 -0500 To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: NPOV
Jack Lutz wrote:
On a similar note, see Bill Gates' essay on Encarta titled "The facts depend on where you are coming from". Ultimately he suggests it "present opposing points of view where appropriate", but notice how the different language editions are having their facts and emphasis warped to meet culture, because "readers will get upset about content that may fly in the face of their reality."
This sounds exactly contrary to NPOV, a lot more like "write biased encyclopedias that will be more locally popular". If the Serbian Wikipedia is biased towards the Serbian viewpoint when it comes to regional conflicts, and the Bosnian Wikipedia is biased towards the Bosnian viewpoint, then they're _useless_ when it comes to providing NPOV information, and any Serbian or Bosnian interested in such information would have to turn to one of the other Wikipedias (en, fr, de, ...) for it.
I'd think we'd want people to be able to get globally neutral information in their local language, not just the locally-biased version.
-Mark
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