Gerard Meijssen wrote:
We are creating a resource in English, French and name
all the other
languages. These resources are culturally biased. When people want to
create their own wikipedia, a wikipedia in their own language, we
should support that. If there is one thing, we have time and money to
work on our projects. We can make them as NPOV as our community allows
us to be.
When a new project is started, it has to get momentum but when you
watch the subjects that THEY choose to write about, you know that it
is significantly different from what the emphasis is on the en fr nl
projects. African wikipedia do not start writing about America, France
the Netherlands. They write about their country, their language, their
government, their issues. Even with all the good intentions that we
have, we cannot write a proper encyclopedia that is relevant in
another culture. What we can do is enable people to write an
encyclopedia in their own language.
I would argue those would be *much more* biased than the en: Wikipedia,
and therefore worse resources. It's true that the en Wikipedia has
cultural bias, but it's rapidly being averaged out due to the wide
diversity of contributors. The articles on Hong Kong, for example, are
largely written by people from Hong Kong. A Wikipedia in a language
spoken only in Africa will not have this benefit, as few people in Hong
Kong speak any African languages.
Even as a Greek person, would I go to the Greek Wikipedia for neutral
information on the Greek-Turkey conflict? Probably not.
-Mark