From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:50 PM To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias
On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:52:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote: [...]
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)?
But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all ! Especially on anything related to Middle East conflict, it almost invariantly has Israeli bias, probably because of relatively large
number
of American Jewish contributors, compared to hardly any Arab
contributors.
*Nothing* on Wikipedia is NPOV. It can't be. For one thing NPOV stands for "Neutral point of view" and the sentence "Wikipedia is neutral point of view" is nonsensical.
But I'll put that fight against newspeak aside.
It's impossible for any given entry on Wikipedia to have a truly neutral point of view.
What we can do, what we can measure, is what is the direction of Wikipedia's coverage of a subject. If the coverage is becoming more comprehensive, more grounded in references, more based on detail and reportage and fact, then we can say that the coverage is approaching a neutral point of view.
NPOV should be a measure of change and direction, a way to judge the Wikipedia process, not an avenue to attack an instant in Wikipedia's history.