Cross Cultural
From Devwiki
Cross-cultural dialogue through Wikipedia - Dror Kamir
Two of Wikipedia's fundamental principles - the collaborative work and the open community policy - make this project a crossroad for people of different cultures and of different, even opposing, political views. Not only is it a crossroad, but it often forces such people to work together directly, if they want the project to succeed. This workshop is an open discussion intended to bring forward a description of the process in which people of different views succeed or fail in working collaboratively for writing Wikipedia articles, and how this process changes their world view. The case of an Israeli writing in the Arabic Wikipedia will be brought as a test case, but the audience is encouraged to bring other examples in order to achieve a generalization.
Wikipedia is committed to several basic principles, two of them are: writing the articles in a collaborative work, and opening the community of writers to everyone, as long as s/he accepts its basic priciples. These two principles are, in fact, common to all Wikimedia projects, but they are especially prominent in the various editions of Wikipedia, as Wikipedia aims at creating original texts describing phenomena, ideas, historical events, political views etc. The very creation of new texts makes the collaborative work especially intensive, and furthermore, most of these subjects can easily reveal the writer's world view unless s/he is very aware of another of Wikipedia's basic principle, namely the neutral point of view (NPOV). Awareness to the NPOV rule is not enough, as the writers are often unaware of the fact that their view is incomplete or biased, especially if they all come from a similar cultural background. Here, the open community principle comes into effect, as any new comer can challenge the common view and introduce changes to certain articles which s/he deems biased. What happens when such a new comer arrives? What happens when a group of people of different cultural background joins in? What will be the nature of interaction between them? How often will it result in edit wars, or does it moderate and enrich the world views of both parties? I would like to present my experiences as an Israeli writing in the Arabic Wikipedia. Arabic is not my native tongue, but I learned it for many years. I joined the Arabic Wikipedia in an attempt to challenge my language skills, and I soon found myself in an interesting often stormy situation where I tried to introduce changes which seemed to me essential, while other regarded my changes as damaging the integrity of the Arabic Wikipedia. In some cases, a productive dialogue resulted in better more complete articles (at least in my opinion), however other cases resulted in war edits. I would like to open a discussion in which other participants will present similar experiences in other Wikipedias, and perhaps other writers in the Arabic Wikipedias will present my experiences from their own point of view. At the end I hope to reach a description of the process of interaction between Wikipedians of different views and/or cultural background and to see whether this process moderates the world views of the Wikipedians involved in this interaction.
