[Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

[Delirium]

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:52:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
>[...]
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>>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)?
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>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.
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That's quite possibly true; I wasn't arguing the English Wikipedia is 
perfect on all topics, or anything remotely close to that.  I do think 
though, that if any Wikipedia is going to succeed in creating something 
approaching a NPOV description of the Middle East conflict, the English 
Wikipedia has a *much* better chance of doing so than, say, either the 
Hebrew or Arabic Wikipedias do.

-Mark