[Wikipedia-l] Re: Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia

Thu Nov 25 06:19:29 UTC 2004

> > I think the big thing to understand is that each wiki takes time,
> > effort, and money to maintain. Each wiki is a security risk, both
> > technically and legally; an active community can offset this risk as
> > well or better than fancy technological security measures.
> 
> I fully agree with Evan here. But I want to add some other points which
> are largely neglected so far. Maintaining a wiki is not only about
> getting some people to work there, we also need to ensure that local
> communities get to know and share the fundamental values and principles
> of wikipedia: neutrality, openess, freedom of content.
> 
> During the creation of arabic wikipedia I acted as advisor - and I
> experienced how many questions arise for intelligent and good-willing
> people not involved with wikipedia before (How do I deal with a copyvio?
> How to deal with total crap? How to deal with a POV article? What about
> naming conventions? Which policies do we need? etc...)
> 
> There's a lot of knowledge about wikipedia customs and processes needed
> to get a new wiki started. So far we let people find out on their own -
> or not.
> 
> Yesterday a friend translated a sentence on the main page of the tatar
> wikipedia for me: "Tatarlar Böyek! Yäşäsen Törki Dönya!" - "Die Tataren
> sind groß! Es lebe die türkische Welt!" (in german, since I don't know
> how to translate this in english). But the equivalent would be the
> french putting "Vive la France" on their main page. All three sysops
> there edited the page later, noone removed the sentence.

All the different Wikipedias have things like this that others would
not find NPOV. This comes from the fact that any given language will
have a different proportion of people with any given point of view
than any other language, and as you may have observed, people often
see reality through POV-coloured glasses, even if they try their best
to be NPOV. For example, given recent disputes involving the Balkan
area on en.wikipedia, I think there is a very good chance that, for
example, the sr.wikipedia equivalents of some of these hotly-disputed
articles (as well as those at any other areal language Wikipedia) may
be tainted with a local POV.

I'm sure people such as Unitifler from the Tatar Wikipedia have known
for quite awhile about NPOV policy, but they did not see what they did
as a problem, just as fr.wikipedia now has holiday themes for diverse
holidays but I still object to it on the grounds that I believe that
any such display is POV (but really, that issue is not important to
me, especially if nobody at fr.wikipedia cares, and also since while I
can read French to a certain degree, my written French is at best the
laughingstock of all French speakers who read it).

The problem here stems from people thinking something is or is not POV
when really there is no absolute standard by which we can definitively
decide for all cases without some degree of judgement on the personal
level. If we really think the previously-noted demographics issue is
such a problem, perhaps we should attempt to foster article
synchronisation between Wikipedias and less fluidity in the changing
of articles, so that if somebody sees something wrong they can make an
objection and it can be discussed first. However, I do not think this
is such a problem as eventually all the sharp corners will be shaved
off in some way or another, at least I believe as much.

So I think there is a good chance that there are a few articles on
de.wikipedia which have community consensus to being NPOV that I
personally would find tainted with POV, or that might raise objections
in some other-language Wikipedia.

Ultimately this stems from having different Wikipedias for different
languages, even from different content for different languages.
However, at present I see no reasonable workable solution, and since
we do not have communities agreeing that an article with the text
"'''Wisians''' are a very mean peoples, from Wisia. They like to lie
and steal and cheat, and they all deserve to die." is NPOV, I don't
think it's big enough that me /must/ take action immediately.

Mark