[Wikipedia-l] NPOV again. [was Re: Non-English Wikipedias]

Thu Dec 4 21:59:29 UTC 2003

> From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski
> Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:50 PM
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias
> 
> On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:52:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
> [...]
> > So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that
Wikipedias
> > in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one
> > particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything
even
> > remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are
> > spoken by a wide range of people?  Is having contributors from a
wide
> > range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I
suggest)?
> 
> But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all !
> Especially on anything related to Middle East conflict, it almost
> invariantly has Israeli bias, probably because of relatively large
number
> of American Jewish contributors, compared to hardly any Arab
contributors.

*Nothing* on Wikipedia is NPOV. It can't be. For one thing NPOV stands
for "Neutral point of view" and the sentence "Wikipedia is neutral point
of view" is nonsensical.

But I'll put that fight against newspeak aside. 

It's impossible for any given entry on Wikipedia to have a truly neutral
point of view.

What we can do, what we can measure, is what is the direction of
Wikipedia's coverage of a subject. If the coverage is becoming more
comprehensive, more grounded in references, more based on detail and
reportage and fact, then we can say that the coverage is approaching a
neutral point of view.

NPOV should be a measure of change and direction, a way to judge the
Wikipedia process, not an avenue to attack an instant in Wikipedia's
history.