[Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putsch

[Lars Aronsson]

The Cunctator wrote:
> A few points: that's not what we do on Wikipedia. We write [[Macintosh
> OS X]] with the goal of writing it from an omniscient perspective for an
> unknown audience.

Sorry, this is plain nonsense, since the audience is not unknown.  We
know that the readers of the English Wikipedia understand English, and
this implies that they have already heard of Shakespeare (an English
playwright) and Bristol (a town in England).

To achieve neutrality, you would have to stop people on the English
Wikipedia from describing any details about cities or counties in
Pennsylvania and Ohio, because those details can be as irrelevant to a
Russian reader as are details about Russian places of the same size to
an English-speaking audience.  Since Russia and the U.S. are about the
same size (population anyway), you can only describe as many U.S.
cities as Russian ones, whether that is ten or a thousand.

Still, the existing (and natural) bias towards readers of the target
language can be an interesting observation.  One could make a list of
all cities of the world with a population of more than half a million,
only to make readers realize they easily recognize cities where their
language is spoken, while they've never heard of the other ones.

Note that the rather famous city of Bristol only has 381,000
inhabitants, while the city of Szczecin has 419,000, but how many
English speakers know where Szczecin is?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/