[Wikipedia-l] Re: Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia

[Delirium]

Mark Williamson wrote:

>But, as noted by Henry, this is difficult even for established
>Wikipedias and community standards vary depending on the values of the
>community in question. Thus, what is NPOV to the Basque Wikipedia
>might seem very POV to the Chinese Wikipedia.
>  
>
I think this is the single biggest problem with minority-language 
Wikipedias ever being useful NPOV encyclopedias.  If all speakers of a 
language are relatively homogenous, in terms of location, culture, and 
values, then their encyclopedia will with high probability by quite biased.

By contrast, wikipedias like en:, de:, and fr: have people from multiple 
continents and backgrounds contributing.  An "American English" or 
"Australian English" Wikipedia would, I would hazard a prediction, be 
much inferior in terms of neutrality to the current English Wikipedia, 
simply as a result of the fact that all Americans (or Australians) 
editing a Wikipedia would represent a much narrower set of viewpoints 
than the current large and diverse group of editors.

I'm not sure this is surmountable for languages in which a large and 
diverse group of language speakers don't even exist.  Note that not only 
very tiny languages are affected by this: I imagine that the Turkish and 
Greek Wikipedias are less likely to present a reasonable account of the 
Turkish-Greek conflict than en:, fr:, or de: are.

-Mark