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