Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Please talk about the problematic areas, too. Often (I'm talking about the German version) articles are just listings and another problem is, that many a lot home land lovers (Heimatliebhaber) are active - thus most of the time you will read only good things within their articles and worse, they don'e hesitate to manipulate history.
This sort of tangentially raises an issue that's been in the back of my mind for a while: to what extent can the non-English Wikipedias be expected to reach the same levels of NPOV as the English one? For a few other widely spoken languages, including most likely German, and perhaps a few others, it may be achievable (so my point isn't directly related to yours). However, it strikes me as one of the major benefits of the English Wikipedia that its contributors come from dozens of countries and many many backgrounds, and it seems unlikely that some of the lesser-spoken languages will have this advantage. What are the chances, for example, that the Greek Wikipedia (assuming it ever gets off the ground) will have a history of the Greek-Turkish (or Greek-FYROM) conflict with NPOV standards similar to the descriptions of those conflicts in the English Wikipedia? Or, for that matter, what are the chances of those same conflicts being described in a NPOV manner on the Turkish Wikipedia? Or the Serbian Wikipedia's articles on the Kosovo conflict? etc.
On the English Wikipedia, some of the more contentious issues are hammered out in a way that, ideally, will allow all partisans to accept the article as essentially neutral (even if sometimes grudgingly). But on, say, the Turkish Wikipedia, there are unlikely to be many Greek partisans throwing their opinion into the debate, so it seems that an NPOV will converge on a consensus Turkish view: something that could be held as "neutral" by the majority of Turks, but would likely be considered pretty far from neutral by a Greek (and vice versa). This, in my view, would be equivalent to what would happen if there were an English Wikipedia only edited by people from, say, the United States: the NPOV we'd converge on would not be the same (and would be inferior, I'd argue) to the NPOV we currently converge on with an English Wikipedia edited by people from all over the world. But, given that not many people who are not of Turkish background speak Turkish, that seems unlikely to happen there. Similar situations exist for many other languages.
So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that Wikipedias in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything even remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a wide range of people? Is having contributors from a wide range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I suggest)?
-Mark