Yann Forget wrote:
Your argumentation assumes that because the contributors of the English WP come from "all over the world", it is more NPOV. On my POV, the English is not more NPOV than others (at least the French one which I know), because the fact is that there are very few contributors from Arab, African and Asian coutries. In fact, most of the contributors come from rich countries and very few from Third World countries.
But that also true for other WP. And that OK as long as you don't pretend that it is perfectly NPOV. It is NPOV for English contributors from rich countries. Not exactly the same. ;o)
I don't think that's accurate: there are a *lot* of contributors to the English Wikipedia who are not from English-speaking countries, and many of them don't even speak English very well at all (which is fine--as long as their information is good, others can correct their phrasing and grammar). There are in fact *many* contributors from Asian countries on the English Wikipedia, something which I think cannot be said for, say, the French or German or Spanish Wikipedias. Many of our articles on Hong Kong and Japan, in particular, are written by people who live in Hong Kong and Japan. Our articles on India are often contributed to by people from India. And so on.
This is what I think is a primary strength of the English Wikipedia: people from the countries we're writing about are actually here to participate. Do we have any idea number in all areas? No. But do we at least have some, and certainly orders of magnitude more than any other language's Wikipedia? Yes.
To get decently towards NPOV, I think a Wikipedia needs contributors from as many countries and backgrounds as possible. To my knowledge, the English Wikipedia has contributors from: the United States, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Greece, Italy, Russia, the Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Israel, Brazil, Australia, India, China (incl. Hong Kong), Japan, South Korea, Ireland, Nepal, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, and likely a lot of others I've forgotten to list.
I'm skeptical that any other Wikipedias come even close to this, and I'm also skeptical that many of them ever will: what are the chances that people from each of the above countries will ever participate in, say, the Hindi Wikipedia?
My point, more succinctly: to have any chance at all at NPOV, an encyclopedia needs to be an international project, and so must be written in a language spoken by many people internationally. English so far appears to be the best-off in that regard, though I'm not saying it's necessarily the only possibility (French, Spanish, and German seem like good candidates as well). But I'm skeptical that, say, 300 Wikipedias is a good idea, or likely to lead to anything other than 5-7 good ones, and a hundred incredibly biased ones.
-Mark