Delirium wrote:
You seem to be arguing a cultural relativist position,
which I think
frankly is nonsense, even if it sometimes is popular in "critical
theory" academic circles.
To expand on this, I think that every language's viewpoint should bridge
*all* cultures, to the extent possible, not just all cultures that speak
that language.
That is, the Greek Wikipedia should not only be a consensus of
Greek-speaking people (i.e. Greeks and Cypriots). It should attempt, as
much as possible, to present things neutrally, so that even a Turk who
reads Greek (and there are quite a few) could read an article on the
Greek-Turkish conflict on the Greek Wikipedia and agree that it's a
neutral article, not an article from the Greek perspective.
This is of course easier to do in languages which have more diverse
cultures speaking them---the en: Wikipedia is constantly moving away
from being a U.S. perspective through the efforts of English speakers
from other countries. With languages like Greek, this is harder, but I
don't think impossible.
Going the other way, I also disagree that languages should have more
content on their local cultures. This will happen initially just
because of what people are interested in, but there's no reason it has
to stay that way. I personally am planning to go through and translate
hundreds of articles on local German universities to en:, so that
eventually en:'s coverage of small Germany universities will be on par
with de:'s, and on par with en:'s coverage of U.S. and U.K. universities.
-Mark