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