[Wikipedia-l] Collective POV ("systemic bias") rampant, difficult to combat [was: Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia]

[Mark Williamson]

It may seem to you that en.wikipedia is totally devoid of this sort of
systemic bias, but in fact no Wikipedia is.

While one the one hand English speakers come from diverse environments
and have diverse cultural experiences, the majority of en.wikipedians
are American (from the USA), and after that are British, Australians,
and Canadians. While this may not be a single nation or a single
culture, the collective cultural experience of the populations of each
of those countries are very similar, especially when compared to that
of, say, Laos or the Maldives. But even the cultures of Laos, the
Maldives, and the aforementioned Anglophone nations seem very similar
when compared with the cultures of the Navajo, Apache, and Hopi (which
are also very distinct from one another, to the same degree that
American culture is different from Laotian culture), part of the
reason being that the former 6 cultures are patriarchal and patrilocal
(the patrilocal part I am not sure of for Laos and the Maldives, in
the Anglophone countries it is, nowadays, the norm for most people to
establish their own home but traditionally they are patrilocal), while
the latter three are matrilocal and matriarchal. If you ask a Laotian,
Maldivian, American, Brit, Australian, or Canadian who he or she is,
after you get a first name, if you say "Yes, but /who/ are you?"
chances are the reply after that will have something to do with a name
inherited from the father and his father in turn and so on (thus they
are patronymic, which seems to be the convention for all UN
memberstates, but I am not sure), while if you ask a Navajo, Apache,
or Hopi you will get a response which includes a name inherited
maternally for generations untold (thus they are "matronymic"; I
believe Tibetan culture is matriarchal but I am not sure, I do know
though that it does allow polyandry in some situations which is fairly
rare among world cultures and usually only occurs in matriarchal
societies, just as polygyny rarely occurs in matriarchal societies).

In addition to this most fundamental cultural experiential difference,
there are plenty more differences which mean that ANY Wikipedia will
have some form of systemic bias.

In en.wikipedia, many articles about strictly American concepts do not
note that fact, and many articles - especially those from 1911 EB -
speak negatively of taboo subjects such as incest, cannibalism,
pederasty, and other things which should be dealt with neutrally. For
example, before I made edits to it, the Ainu article was very racist
and offensive in that it said the Ainu were "primitive" - human
cultures are not primitive if they achieve the requirements a culture
must achieve: telling people where they came from, explaining natural
processes (some cultures, more recently, have replaced this with an
*independent* concept of religion, for example French culture has no
single explanation for the origin of the world and individual natural
processes: some people believe the world was created by a single god,
others may believe it was created by gnomes, others believe in more
complex modern western scientific theory, some may believe it was
sculpted out of clay) - it talked about how hairy they are; note that
not only is this a stereotype, it is from a British point of view: the
Ainu of the time might've described the authors of that article as
bald or almost completely bare, or lacking of any significant amount
of body hair, etc. while they may have actually been what I personally
would consider to be relatively hairy.

Little words like "unfortunately", "fortunately", "tragically",
"interestingly", "peculiarly", "strangely" and short phrases like "one
strange thing about ___ is that it ___" are one of the largest sources
of systemic bias in en.wikipedia. If we are describing a language and
we say one feature is peculiar and interesting, people for whom that
is the native language will beg to differ because to them it is
completely ordinary. We might say it is fortunate that nobody was on a
bridge when it collapsed, but another culture may believe that people
who are standing on a bridge when it collapsed fall not to their death
but to an island paradise. We might say somebody's death is tragic,
but some cultures may see it as a blessing (some cultures view death
positively).

And if you find yourself wanting to respond to any of this with "but
______ IS _____" (for example, "death IS tragic!"), that just shows
the extent of the problem. So even experienced, well-respected
Wikipedians may let through their POV filters things that do not
strike them as POV, because of their collective cultural experiences
and because of their own POV.

Thus this is not just a problem for minority language Wikipedias, it
is a problem for ALL Wikipedias which cannot be completely solved in
the near future (though we can begin to combat it by for example
searching for all occurances of the words noted above and remove them,
as I began to do [removed about 20 occurances of "fortunately" and
"unfortunately"] but it is very repetitive and I had to constantly go
forward and backward between Google and Wikipedia, though this does
not mean I won't do it in the future)

-Mark (just to make things more confusing for you all)

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:50:24 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
 > 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