[WikiEN-l] Wired on the Spanish mutiny

[WereSpielChequers]

Re: The early days of the English Wikipedia featured a large
proportion of non-native speakers of English contributing.

Not just the early days, one can't spend long at new page patrol in
particular without coming across an amazing variety of nationalities
of authors. I suspect a couple of things drive this, firstly the
English Wikipedia as the first and largest and most widely read is
also in some ways a shared repository - people translate articles into
English from everywhere and I suspect they then get translated all
over wikimedia. Secondly I rather suspect that a lot of editors have
at least a secondary motivation of improving their writing skills in
the language they are editing in - I might try and get a question on
this into one of our user surveys.


WereSpielChequers

On 23 January 2011 13:39, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On 23/01/2011 05:13, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>> 'I must be very naive not to have realised, all this time, that the
>> so-called "English Wikipedia" was actually the "American Wikipedia".
>> Or could that nomenclature reveal a somewhat suspicious starting
>> point?'
>>
>> I don't see a problem with that choice of words. While there are large
>> numbers of non-American contributors much of the English Wikipedia is
>> about subjects of interest to American writers and written from a
>> largely American point of view. I would not be surprised if this were
>> even more pronounced in the early days.
> (Something odd about your citing here, Tony.) Actually I think that
> misrepresents the history. The early days of the English Wikipedia
> featured a large proportion of non-native speakers of English contributing.
>
> Anyway NPOV is not negotiable, as we know. There is  systemic bias
> towards American topics, as there is towards Anglospheric topics more
> generally, but that is another issue. (It is true that American
> sensibilities on 9/11 were treated with kid gloves for a while.)
>
> Charles
>
>