[Wikipedia-l] Re: NPOV

[Mark Williamson]

This is not possible.

While ultimately the English and French versions may or may not be
/less/ biased in this way, there is no such thing as 0 bias and NPOV
is subjective based on the collective cultural experience of the
group.

Mark

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 10:07:34 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Jack Lutz wrote:
> 
> >On a similar note, see Bill Gates' essay on Encarta titled "The facts depend
> >on where you are coming from". Ultimately he suggests it "present opposing
> >points of view where appropriate", but notice how the different language
> >editions are having their facts and emphasis warped to meet culture, because
> >"readers will get upset about content that may fly in the face of their
> >reality."
> >
> >
> This sounds exactly contrary to NPOV, a lot more like "write biased
> encyclopedias that will be more locally popular".  If the Serbian
> Wikipedia is biased towards the Serbian viewpoint when it comes to
> regional conflicts, and the Bosnian Wikipedia is biased towards the
> Bosnian viewpoint, then they're _useless_ when it comes to providing
> NPOV information, and any Serbian or Bosnian interested in such
> information would have to turn to one of the other Wikipedias (en, fr,
> de, ...) for it.
> 
> I'd think we'd want people to be able to get globally neutral
> information in their local language, not just the locally-biased version.
> 
> -Mark
> 
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