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Comment by Blikkentrekker | Hacker News Reader

I used to donate, but no longer do, not for this, but because I'm tired about the Anglocentric, U.S.A.-centric style on Wikipedia with little efforts to fix it, as well as other neutrality issues.

When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw.

I've seen some articles at least add “English-language criticism" by now instead of simply “criticism” when talking about the critical reception of work that wasn't even in the English language so that's a start, but too often still that doesn't happen. It's obviously unavoidable that English-language Wikipedia incurs some Anglocentric bias, but there is almost no effort to fix it and not even a template seemingly to warn that an article might carry an Anglocentric bias, even those that report on matters that mostly pertain outside of the Anglosphære.

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To be clear, your complaints are:

1. Wikipedia is biased toward Anglo perspectives.

2. Wikipedia is trying to recruit contributors with a broader range of perspectives.

This doesn't seem like a problem with WMF.

They're not trying to recruit contributors outside of the Anglocentric perspective; they're not in any way trying to mitigate that problem.

How did "female contributors" become "contributors with a broader range of perspectives"?

> When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw.

What was this ad that was so objectionable?

I don't remember it, but I was assuming that they felt like it was still requesting white Americans.

The thing with those sorts of requests is that a lot of the push for diversity is literally skin deep - they want people who look different, but think the same. They're not trying to say "hey, we'd like more electrical engineers, nurses, priests, political conservatives, etc." to contribute.

People with actually different experiences and backgrounds, somewhat the way how the ideal model of science is set up - individual humans are fallible and partisan, get your work checked by someone who disagrees because they're the ones who most want it to not be true.

They want (woke) social liberals who look different, and at least in America wokeness is just about the most white woman thing you can do.

If you write about, say, the controversies around the Latin Mass in the Catholic Church, getting a liberal woman to check a liberal man's work is useless - they're both likely to either have a dim view of the conservative sects that prefer the Latin Mass, to be just utterly unable to understand the religious conservatives' POV and worldview, or both. I know I did until I actually befriended some, it was something you could liken to moral colorblindness - the modern secular liberal is aggressively morally colorblind and lacking in understanding of others - again, speaking from experience.

> They want (woke) social liberals who look different, and at least in America wokeness is just about the most white woman thing you can do.

You do know that any traction you are getting with these arguments goes out the window when you start using terms like "woke".

I really don't even care that much about skin colors.

White, black, purple Americans tend to have similar perspectives on things, so do white, black and purple Swedes.

The issue is that the articles on many international things are clearly written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, often citing purely English sources on events that happen in, say, France or Syria.

Mostly because I'm tired of these U.S.A. “diversity” efforts which come down to “more persons from the U.S.A.” overlooking most of the world.

That they apparently think gender defines perspectives more than ethnicity and cultural background is the problem. Apparently they can make an effort towards gender but not toward the issue that plagues English-Language Wikipedia that only English-language sources are used in the end, often even about subjects that are fundamentally not in English such as the critical response of non-English media, being phrased as though it's a global consensus.

Again, I've seen some places where his has recently improved, but it's annoying to, say, see on Wikipedia that for instance “criticism was mixed” on a French film that was overwhelmingly positively received in France because English-language criticism was more negative due to cultural differences.

Wikipedia definitely has a gender problem. And a racial problem. And numerous cultural problems.

That they decided to highlight the gender problem first doesn't mean that Wikipedia thinks the other problems are ok as is.

Someone having different priorities for fixing problems is not necessarily your enemy.

It is my perspective that gender and race are completely insignificant compared to culture and it annoys me how often Anglo-Saxons think otherwise, probably because of never really having interacted with a foreign culture.

In the end, from my perspective, Anglo-Saxons from whatever gender or color tend to think very much alike and very different from persons from entirely different countries. The country one is born in influences one's perspectives far more than one's gender or skin color, how could it not really?

That they prioritize such minutiæ over bigger problems is something I found a slap in the face, or rather, a reminder of the issue that they're probably barely aware of it and don't realize how different the perspective of other culture can be.

It's kind of sad of anglo-centric their pages are for some countries and historical events. I'm European, and even I can see some bias in there.

I could believe it. Next you see it, can you share a link here? It might be nice for discussion.

Indeed, that's a common issue too with historical events.

But even scientific things. I can't read Mandarin, but I've been told many times that many subjects on many linguistic concepts on the Chinese Wikipedia look very different and that seemingly English-language linguistics and Chinese-language linguistics can come to very different conclusions from the same data. That of course is troubling in and of itself, but it should be featured proportionally.

From what I understand, among English-language communication, the Altaic language hypothesis has essentially completely bee discredited, but many linguists in Asia apparently still consider it plausible. — I don't have the expertise to judge who is wrong and who is right here, but English-language Wikipedia should either give those voices a proportional weight, or, at least note that it is discredited among English-language linguists, as right now it arouses the impression that it's globally discredited.

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