Re: The early days of the English Wikipedia featured a large proportion of non-native speakers of English contributing.
Not just the early days, one can't spend long at new page patrol in particular without coming across an amazing variety of nationalities of authors. I suspect a couple of things drive this, firstly the English Wikipedia as the first and largest and most widely read is also in some ways a shared repository - people translate articles into English from everywhere and I suspect they then get translated all over wikimedia. Secondly I rather suspect that a lot of editors have at least a secondary motivation of improving their writing skills in the language they are editing in - I might try and get a question on this into one of our user surveys. WereSpielChequers On 23 January 2011 13:39, Charles Matthews <[email protected]> wrote: > On 23/01/2011 05:13, Tony Sidaway wrote: >> 'I must be very naive not to have realised, all this time, that the >> so-called "English Wikipedia" was actually the "American Wikipedia". >> Or could that nomenclature reveal a somewhat suspicious starting >> point?' >> >> I don't see a problem with that choice of words. While there are large >> numbers of non-American contributors much of the English Wikipedia is >> about subjects of interest to American writers and written from a >> largely American point of view. I would not be surprised if this were >> even more pronounced in the early days. > (Something odd about your citing here, Tony.) Actually I think that > misrepresents the history. The early days of the English Wikipedia > featured a large proportion of non-native speakers of English contributing. > > Anyway NPOV is not negotiable, as we know. There is systemic bias > towards American topics, as there is towards Anglospheric topics more > generally, but that is another issue. (It is true that American > sensibilities on 9/11 were treated with kid gloves for a while.) > > Charles > > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
