[Wikipedia-l] Collective POV ("systemic bias") rampant

[Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley]

>>Which is to say that the neutral perspective is itself a bias. As the NPOV
policy is pretty explicit about.<<

Exactly. See my comment in my last post: "everything is
biased...What about WP being NPOV- or truth-centric?".


>>This systemic bias, real as it may be, is unavoidable. As such, I am unable
to
seriously consider it a problem.<<

As I said earlier, what is the point in discussing it if we cannot change the
bias (with the possible exception of WP's being NPOV, which, although a bias in
itself, actually results in less bias in the long run in the same way
unbiasedness itself is a bias [e.g.: away from an encyclopedia that is a total
random mixture of words regardless of their truth and whether they make any
sense] although one may argue that the words, `biased' and `bias' do not cover
this sort of "bias")?  In fact why am I joining in this discussion?  I'll stop
now.


All the evidence put forward (e.g.: cultural bias) for this "systematic bias"
applies equally well to any other encyclopedias or WWW sites in general (and
probably to books, journals, newspapers and nearly all other forms of
information).  In fact, IMO, WP's system, transparency, freedom ,openess, &c
mean it is far less biased than nearly all other sources of information
available in the world.  Some biases, will always exist regardless of the
system; for instance, it is impossible to avoid some bias towards the language
that the article was orignally written (or even translated into).  The fact
that we usea particular language (or the fact that language in general, as
opposed to, say, pure mental ideas/thought streams is used) to communicate this
stuff is a major bias in and of itself (or the fact that the information was
typed or
marked using wikimedia or or was made machine-readable or was written by a human
or was previewed visually (or aurally or whatever assuming with have
visually-impaire editors).

Although I'm all for removing particular biases where there is a suggested way
to do this (e.g.: I think the markup needs to be even more semantic than it
already is (and never visual only) I think we need to promote WP to speakers of
languages were we don't have a WP or it is very small so they can add stuff; I
think the edit-side WWW UI needs to made less visually-orientated;  I think
references to dollars and the list of billionaires &c needs to have it made
clear they refer to the US and even better have other equivalents for other
cultures available; &c)  However, Mark seems to be moaning about the fact that
nothing is 100% unbiased generally.  Well, the fact is that nothing is
perfectly or 100% anything in the real world and it is something you just have
to live with as part of life.

Joe Ll. G. Blakesley

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