[WikiEN-l] Autofellatio - NO to that image

Sun Feb 13 17:56:15 UTC 2005

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>It is not clear to me that NPOV could ever require a _single_ version
>of all policies and all articles.  Certainly the concept does push in
>the direction of a general sort of consistency, but not every kind of
>difference is "succumbing to local cultural biases".
>
>For example, we don't insist that the German wikipedia be written in
>English, so as to avoid the local cultural bias of "speaking in
>German".
>
>Or, imagine that a particular battle in Europe during World War II had
>some unusual but local impact on Japan.  We might quite naturally
>imagine that the Japanese article _without bias_ but _with an eye
>towards the needs and interests of the local audience_ would have a
>different degree of detail on that topic than say en or fr or de.
>  
>
I used to have this viewpoint on NPOV and languages, but increasingly 
I'm not sure it makes sense.  The fundamental reason we have separate 
languages for the encyclopedias is simply that there is no one language 
that all people can easily read, so it's a necessity.  The German 
Wikipedia can't be in English or vice versa because many Germans can't 
read English and many Americans, Britons, and other English-speakers 
can't read German.  Now these languages do correspond somewhat to 
cultures, but not always very well---in some cases, like English, pretty 
poorly (especially if you count people who speak English as a second 
language, it's hard to identify an "English-speaking culture").

So, if we really wanted encyclopedias whose focuses were geared towards 
local culture, we would actually need to split some languages into 
multiple encyclopedias---a U.S.-english and a European-english 
encyclopedial; Americas-spanish and Spain-spanish; France-french, 
Canada-french, and Africa-french; and so on.  Otherwise, which countries 
get version with content geared towards local tastes and interests and 
which don't is based on historical accident---Italy gets a local 
version, because nobody else really speaks Italian, but the U.K. has to 
share its encyclopedia, because a lot of other people speak English.

I think, instead, we ought to treat languages as sort of a necessary 
evil, and strive to make them all as internationalist and *non*-local as 
possible.  Japanese may not be spoken as widely as English, so will 
inherently tend towards more local biases and focus.  That, IMO, simply 
means that the ja: Wikipedia needs to make more of a special effort to 
actively seek out other viewpoints, whereas the en: Wikipedia has a bit 
of an easier time because the other viewpoints come to it on their own.

I personally prefer as internationalist an encyclopedia as possible, and 
for that reason consider myself somewhat lucky that my main language is 
English---I think the en: Wikipedia would be much, much less interesting 
and informative if US-english had diverged enough to be considered its 
own language, and therefore there was a us: encyclopedia edited only by 
Americans.  Not that a us: encyclopedia couldn't be useful or 
interesting, but I much prefer the current en: encyclopedia, even if 
it's often not geared towards my local culture.  (If nothing else, when 
I'm surprised at the order of information, or the caveats and so on, it 
reminds me that a lot of things I take for granted aren't universal.)

Now whether it's possible to synthesize a NPOV encyclopedia that covers 
the entire world without any particular bias, and what that would mean, 
is an interesting issue the sociologists and philosophers will no doubt 
have volumes to say about. =]

-Mark