Which is to say that the neutral perspective is itself a bias. As the NPOV
policy is pretty explicit about.<<
Exactly. See my comment in my last post: "everything is biased...What about WP being NPOV- or truth-centric?".
This systemic bias, real as it may be, is unavoidable. As such, I am unable
to seriously consider it a problem.<<
As I said earlier, what is the point in discussing it if we cannot change the bias (with the possible exception of WP's being NPOV, which, although a bias in itself, actually results in less bias in the long run in the same way unbiasedness itself is a bias [e.g.: away from an encyclopedia that is a total random mixture of words regardless of their truth and whether they make any sense] although one may argue that the words, `biased' and `bias' do not cover this sort of "bias")? In fact why am I joining in this discussion? I'll stop now.
All the evidence put forward (e.g.: cultural bias) for this "systematic bias" applies equally well to any other encyclopedias or WWW sites in general (and probably to books, journals, newspapers and nearly all other forms of information). In fact, IMO, WP's system, transparency, freedom ,openess, &c mean it is far less biased than nearly all other sources of information available in the world. Some biases, will always exist regardless of the system; for instance, it is impossible to avoid some bias towards the language that the article was orignally written (or even translated into). The fact that we usea particular language (or the fact that language in general, as opposed to, say, pure mental ideas/thought streams is used) to communicate this stuff is a major bias in and of itself (or the fact that the information was typed or marked using wikimedia or or was made machine-readable or was written by a human or was previewed visually (or aurally or whatever assuming with have visually-impaire editors).
Although I'm all for removing particular biases where there is a suggested way to do this (e.g.: I think the markup needs to be even more semantic than it already is (and never visual only) I think we need to promote WP to speakers of languages were we don't have a WP or it is very small so they can add stuff; I think the edit-side WWW UI needs to made less visually-orientated; I think references to dollars and the list of billionaires &c needs to have it made clear they refer to the US and even better have other equivalents for other cultures available; &c) However, Mark seems to be moaning about the fact that nothing is 100% unbiased generally. Well, the fact is that nothing is perfectly or 100% anything in the real world and it is something you just have to live with as part of life.
Joe Ll. G. Blakesley
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