What's also interesting is the bias that appears when the same topic is covered in different languages. Take the English and Spanish articles about the Battle of Vitoria:
You don't need to be able to speak Spanish - just check out the list of the battle commanders. (And if you do speak Spanish, you can see how the description of the battle differs quite radically too...)
I'm not sure what the solution to this and the main article's problem is, though, other than vigilance.
> I'm not sure what the solution to this and the main article's problem is, though, other than vigilance.
Generally, it helps to not rely on a single point of information. The more sources and viewpoins you consider, the more accurate the picture becomes. Even reading very biased sources can help you get a clearer picture when you intersect their information with a source from the "other" side. Also, as long as you speak only one language, you will miss out a lot as the media copy from each other and there often is bias in the language itself. For example, consider how different the meaning of "liberal" has become in English and German, even though it meant the same originally. Or consider the fact that Germans tend to use faecal terms to curse while in English, sexual terms are more common. This can subtly influence the way we think about things. Generally, the easier it is to express a viewpoint in a language, the more prevalent that viewpoint becomes. For example, before the term "political correctness" was added to the English language, it was much harder to comlain about it.
I diverted a little from the original point. Considering multiple sources in multiple languages helps a lot.
"Shit" isn't uncommon, though. It seems to me that English-language cursing is pretty broad-spectrum. For the toe-stubbing situation, for instance, you have the scatological ("Shit!"), the religious ("Christ!", "Damn!"), the sexual ("Fuck!"), the anatomical ("Arse!", at least in the UK; I don't think "ass" is used that way in the US), the weird-hybrid-between-sexual-and-religious-and-ethnic-minority-abuse ("Bugger!"; look its etymology up some time).
Also a fair point, it was interesting to read "An Army At Dawn" by Rick Atkinson: generally most of the books on WWII that I'd read were by British authors, and there was a definite change of viewpoint (or bias) when reading an American author.
> I'm not sure what the solution to this and the main article's problem is, though, other than vigilance.
People with a mission to tell The Truth have a lot more patience and determination than a bunch of regular wikipedia editors.
Burn out happens a lot, and part of the reason is the constant bickering around every single edit to an article for years. Some edits are inconsequential, but poke the wikipedians making or defending those edits as biased and you're helping your biases stay. Goad and provoke those wikipedians and you get to disrupt ANI pages as well. (Luckily, most WP editors realise the hot button topics and tread carefully; leaving us with megabytes of meta discussion over -, --, --- etc.)
I guess WP could employ a small core of people to edit the articles, using a carefully crafted selection of sources; and to deal with propagandists. They'd be trained to use troll-defeating tactics and conflict resolution.
> People with a mission to tell The Truth have a lot more patience and determination
The Truth™ is usually biased. I'm not sure if that's what you wanted to express with your comment, but it's exactly those people who want to get out the(ir) truth who have the most patience and determination.
The current way certainly isn't working, and has left some areas of Wikipedia devoid of editors willing to put in the effort required to keep editing in the face of determined trolling.
Why would you consider this bias? Every country has its own viewpoint on history. The details of the American war for Independence are hardly interesting for every other country.
Spanish historians know more about spanish battle commanders.
Because it quite patently is. The English language article about the battle makes little mention of any Spanish contribution, and portrays it as basically Wellington and the British vs. the French; the Spanish article highlights the Spanish contribution, almost describing the battle as a Spanish victory with some help from the other allied forces. My gut feeling is that the English language article is more reliable - it includes a numerical breakdown of the allied army which (if correct) shows the relative unimportance of the Spanish contribution, the map of the battle shows the commanders were all British, etc. But of course, I'm English, and I bring my own bias to the table...
A good question, and one for a historian to answer - not me! The example I picked shows bias, but as I stated earlier I'm unsure as to which article is closer to the truth.
Just for the record, though, the English article includes 9 citations, including a primary source (Wellington's notes), while the Spanish article mentions 4 history books (and 3 novels and a comic) yet doesn't specifically cite them in the text. Again, I suspect the English article is probably more accurate, but as use of citations is also a characteristic of fraudulent scientific papers this difference certainly isn't a completely dependable indicator.
Theoretically you're right, and for a subject such as mathematics you may even be correct in many cases. But in practise (as my example shows) you're wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vitoria
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batalla_de_Vitoria
You don't need to be able to speak Spanish - just check out the list of the battle commanders. (And if you do speak Spanish, you can see how the description of the battle differs quite radically too...)
I'm not sure what the solution to this and the main article's problem is, though, other than vigilance.