[WikiEN-l] systemic bias

[Raphael Wegmann]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 05/05/06, Molu <loom91 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> That was an extraordinary case, such a thing is not likely to happen
 >> again within some time now. Wikipedia's systemic bias is not exposed
 >> in such a candid way very often. We can not use it as a benchmark.
> 
> Sorry, but what did this example have to do with Wikipedia's
> *systemic* bias? Our systemic bias stems from the fact that most of
> our contributors are young American men interested in technology and
> the internet. What does that have to do with one person apparently
> soliciting "votes" from Republican voters for an AfD?
> 

The systemic bias, which stems from the fact that most contributors
are living in anglophone countries, where islamist terrorist attacks
occured, which resulted in widespread anti-islam bias, is IMHO bad
enough. You don't believe me? Well, read it up on [[Islamophobia]]
and it's talk page.

The JP cartoon poll results have been no surprise to me at all,
nor have been the hundreds of cartoon deletions ever since.

I can even agree to the many bans, which have applied on editors,
which continuously removed the cartoons without inserting a link
to them, on the basis of vandalism. The cartoons, even if they are
offensive, are indeed highly relevant material, and removing them
without inserting a link can be considered a deliberate attempt to
reduce the quality of the encyclopedia.

But I strongly disagree, that replacing the cartoons with a link
to them, is vandalism, because the motivation of those, who do
so, is not to reduce the quality. Instead those who do so (incl.
myself) do in fact want to increase the quality of the article,
because they think, that an article on a controvery needs to have
editors on both sides of this controversy. The current state of
this article and the editors backing it, already drove away
resp. banned countless editors, who could have added valuable
information regarding the muslim POV on this issue.

As if common anti-islam bias among the editors weren't enough,
even administrators, who outed themselves as free speech extremists
on the Image-Display talk page, which has been created for this
content dispute, abuse their administrator privilege by simply
blocking editors they disagree with.

-- 
Raphael