[Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

Fri Dec 5 03:49:42 UTC 2003

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>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. 

This is more of a side-effect of the fact that our continued overwhelming 
reliance only on informal methods of conflict resolution results in the 
selection of POV by people who are very motivated about certain subjects and 
the selecting out or marginalizing of the POV of people who are less 
motivated. 

We could handle that when we were small (everybody could help with the handful 
of slow-moving disputes we used to have), but it is much more difficult to do 
this now that we are large (there seems to be dozens of disputes at any 
moment now and people are generally less civil and more quick to revert than 
they were when all the heavy users knew each other). 

Thus we need to set-up mediation and arbitration procedures to deal with the 
caseload. 

Growing pains, that's all. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) 