Mark Williamson wrote:
But, as noted by Henry, this is difficult even for established Wikipedias and community standards vary depending on the values of the community in question. Thus, what is NPOV to the Basque Wikipedia might seem very POV to the Chinese Wikipedia.
I think this is the single biggest problem with minority-language Wikipedias ever being useful NPOV encyclopedias. If all speakers of a language are relatively homogenous, in terms of location, culture, and values, then their encyclopedia will with high probability by quite biased.
By contrast, wikipedias like en:, de:, and fr: have people from multiple continents and backgrounds contributing. An "American English" or "Australian English" Wikipedia would, I would hazard a prediction, be much inferior in terms of neutrality to the current English Wikipedia, simply as a result of the fact that all Americans (or Australians) editing a Wikipedia would represent a much narrower set of viewpoints than the current large and diverse group of editors.
I'm not sure this is surmountable for languages in which a large and diverse group of language speakers don't even exist. Note that not only very tiny languages are affected by this: I imagine that the Turkish and Greek Wikipedias are less likely to present a reasonable account of the Turkish-Greek conflict than en:, fr:, or de: are.
-Mark