This is the reason that it is necessary for anyone who is able to edit on a Wiki outside their country of residence. The English wikipedia is a representative of people who speak English all over the world. The fact that the vast majority of those users are American does not, in my mind, change the fact that a English-speaking person in France can correct point-of-view problems on an article regarding Denmark, or any other combination. There will always be an inherent bias towards wherever the most editors hail from. This simply heightens the need for those who do not live there to provide what could be considered outside input.
On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 16:22:24 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
This is not possible.
While ultimately the English and French versions may or may not be /less/ biased in this way, there is no such thing as 0 bias and NPOV is subjective based on the collective cultural experience of the group.
Mark
On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 10:07:34 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
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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