From: Daniel Mayer Thursday, December 04, 2003 10:50 PM Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all ! Especially on anything related to Middle East conflict, it almost invariantly has Israeli bias, probably because of relatively large number of American Jewish contributors, compared to hardly any Arab contributors.
This is more of a side-effect of the fact that our continued
overwhelming
reliance only on informal methods of conflict resolution results in
the
selection of POV by people who are very motivated about certain
subjects
and the selecting out or marginalizing of the POV of people who are less motivated.
We could handle that when we were small (everybody could help with the handful of slow-moving disputes we used to have), but it is much more difficult to do this now that we are large (there seems to be dozens of disputes at
any
moment now and people are generally less civil and more quick to
revert
than they were when all the heavy users knew each other).
Hmm. I don't really see Wikipedia being less civil/more quick to revert than it was in the past. I'd say it's still pretty much the same, where 99% of what happens is uninterestingly fine. Since there's more participation, that 1% is larger in an absolute sense, but not in a relative sense.
For example, even though deletion and merging has gotten out of hand, those problems are only affecting a small portion of the entire Wikipedia.
Thus we need to set-up mediation and arbitration procedures to deal
with
the caseload.
That's one opinion, not a necessary conclusion. There are other, and better tactics.