On 1/31/06, Giuseppe DAngelo pippudoz@yahoo.it wrote:
It's been clear to me for a while that the large wikipedias are as much about furthering western hegemony as anything else. NPOV generally means making western civilisation look like the absolute pinnacle, POV is when one dares challenge this hegemony. Write about vikings or celts and you can say anything you want without ever being challenged, dare suggest that something originated in the mediterranean, and all hell breaks loose.
My participation has generally been limited to the English Wikipedia. 20th Century Science Fiction and fantasy media including pulp magazines comic books and comic strips. I also did one stub on a prominent Wiccan which was amended because he was also a gay activist, and I just did a stub for the late activist Stew Albert based on two Newspaper accounts and Jerry Rubin's book Do It!. I'm not saying this just to toot my own horn, but to specify one of two limited areas I have experience in. The other is Nigerian Literature (don't ask).
Within these limited areas I see a very different Wikipedia from the one which you describe. Influential but obsure writers such as the Nigerian Cyprian Ekwensi have their stubs, and the Mexican comic book Fantomas is described fairly in the larger Fantomas article.
Off-hand, I would say that while the English Wikipedia often uses the language of Western Hegemony, it is actually very good and constantly improving in its presentation of Third World Issues as they appear to the people who live with them on a day-to-day basis.
I don't believe in objectivity, even as the Wikipedia defines it, which is why I've posted in my user profile the specific request that anyone who reads my posts be aggressive in their rewriting. Most people from third world countries and cultures I've met (including family) use the language I grew up with and which you are attacking quite comfortably. I find myself having fewer qualms about using it myself as I get older. However, when I listen to them or to myself, I find we are all saying things which are quite new. I don't believe in objectivity but I do believe in some kinds of courtesy and accuracy which for the most part I do see in the Wikipedia.
From this perspective, points of view exist and cannot be excised totally,
but this is as true of efforts to edit the Wikipedia as it is of specific contributions.
Such sweeping statements don't help because they identify specific markers as representing a point of view (Imperialist). My experience, following mainly African and Latin American voices who are exerting more and more of a voice on American Culture, specifically and also within the Wikipedia itself, is that many of those who are directly exposed to the effects of this Hegemony, and who are not happy with it, express themselves very well using phrases which, if I understand you correctly, you would have a problem with because of their historical identification with the North.