As regular readers of this blog knows, we are on week one of the Wikipedia World project. We have groups formed for English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Turkish, French and German. Hopefully in the next couple weeks we will have doubled that number.
I asked several of the groups if they would give me their opinion of skepticism and science topics on Wikipedia this moment in their language.
Nix Dorf sprang to the challenge and supplied us with a lot of information about what the Portuguese and Spanish pages look like. I'm really shocked about some of these pages, homeopathy in particular. The last 10:23 campaign was global, the videos created can easily be cited on the homeopathy page, we just need volunteers to help out.
The following is guest editorial by Nix, he asked me to correct his grammar, but I'm not touching a word.
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Portuguese presence in
Wikipedia as whole.
Nowadays Portuguese speakers are around
240 million native speakers in the World. Roughly 180 Million are
Brazilians and the rest are mainly Portuguese, Angolan, Mozambicans
and some other nations. But the bulk internet traffic comes from
Brazil and Portugal, which are the most industrialized countries in
this language. Brazil has about 81 million active Internet users,
which make them the 5th nation in the world by user
access. Portugal has 5.5 million more users.[3]
Portuguese isn't wide spread as English and Spanish.
Portuguese is 6th most spoken language. But Portuguese Wikipedia has
more than 742,000 [4] articles which is larger than WP in
Chinese, Hindi-Urundu and Arabic which have a larger speakers base.
Considering that Spanish WP has
approximately 900,000 articles while having roughly 400 million
native speakers (it is the 2nd or 3rd most
widespread language in the world [5]). That makes
Portuguese to have a higher speakers/articles ratio, if that is
really a valid way of measure anything. I’m just guessing based on
the WP data available. But it looks like that the more industrialized
the countries that speak a given language the more WP articles they
seem to have. So my conclusion is that’s why German, Japanese and
French have much more articles per speakers than Hindi or Chinese.
But this doesn’t explain why Polish speakers have 900,000 articles
with 40 million native speakers.
No language even compare to
the amount of articles available in English. Even so English is not
the most spoken language in the world as the number of native
speakers; there are lots of people that have English as its second
language and most English speaking countries are very industrialized
too. On top of that USA is a well-known leader on all that happens
online.
Skeptical presence on
Portuguese Wikipedia.
In general the articles for
uncontroversial subjects are often fine. The ones that are Brazil
specific can be very rich, while depending on the subject attention,
some other articles may vary a lot on how well written Portuguese
articles are compared to the English ones. Usually you see some few
claims that are ungrounded or biased like it is on other languages,
but the fact is that Portuguese Wikipedia probably may not have as
much editors as needed to keep it 100% clean (I guess no language
really can claim to have it).
But when we get to evolution,
homeopathy, religion, skeptics then it gets worse. Let’s go to a
few examples.
The Randi article is very bad, compared to the
English version. When I was changing it, I couldn’t resist and had
to change Randi's picture itself. The former one wasn’t very nice
and it had no bio info (birthdate, birth place, etc).
When you go to other skeptics, they
don't even appear. I was unable to get individual bio pages on Penn
and Teller for instance (there is a draft article for “Penn &
Teller” together[1]). Even HBO used to air Penn &
Teller Bullshit! on Brazil’s cable.
Michael Shermer[8] and Adam
Savage[6] are just drafts. I would say that Mythbusters is
a well-known show, at least in Brazil and I would guess in Portugal
too, since the show itself has a decent page. Joe Nickell doesn’t
even have a page.
Evolution pages have some discussions and
back and forth reversals on ID and some had been blocked for edition
sometimes. But the pages aren’t much biased. But they certainly
should be improved.
Homeopathy page[9] cites for
example a Word Health Organization "publication" called
"Homeopathy: review and analysis of reports on controlled
clinical trials" that was a draft from 2005 that was never
published (I believe that this report was heavily criticized by an
article on The Lancet and never made a respectful scientific Journal
[2]). Even though it is still there as a favorable point
towards Homeopathy, while it is not even cited on the Spanish and
English WP versions. The article is listed as a medical especially,
and not as an alternative medicine. So the article doesn’t seems to
be very pro Homeopathy but is too soft into criticize it in my
opinion. And it barely mentions Randi, what a shame!
To be honest, the article on skepticism
itself is very poorly written and in my opinion it is has some bias
towards the skepticism. If we plan to keep ourselves unbiased we may
have to pay attention and fix this kind of bias too. It requires lots
of discipline to be actually “fair and balanced”.
My personal pet peeves are the
Articles on Spiritualism. With more than 3 million followers it is a
big religion in Brazil. One of the most important icons was very
famous woo woo called Chico Xavier[10], that is called by
Wikipedia as a medium (not a supposed medium) and is very mild on
criticism, while almost states that he was the true thing. When you
compare these spiritualist articles with Shermer’s, and Randi’s
you realize how big are the challenges that we may face.
Spanish
Wikipedia as whole.
Spanish is the second (or 3rd)
most spoken language in the world. It is hard to state that something
is the biggest, tallest, or whatever in the world because it depends
on so many variables, like native speakers, or national interests, or
on different census criteria, estimates, etc. But even though Spanish
is very important and is growing as a second language to many,
especially in US. It is hard to compare, but while Chinese Mandarin
and Hindi-Urdu are spoken by lots of people, they are mainly spoken
on their original countries while Spanish is the dominant language in
the American continent. Due the Spanish dominium on the seas during
the Spanish conquests during the XVI century it got very spread.
The main nations on Spanish by internet
millions of users are Mexico (31), Spain (30), Colombia (16),
Argentina (14), Peru (10), Venezuela (9) and Chile (7)[3].
With all the Spanish speaking nations it may add up to approximately
120 million. This is a low number if you compare it to more than 400
million native speakers[5]. To give you an idea, Japanese
native speakers are about 123 million (almost all on Japan) while
there are 102 million native users[5]. Once again I’m
working with the data available on Wikipedia and those numbers can
vary. But, Japan has an 80% of the population as Internet, while
several Spanish speaking nations are on underdeveloped countries.
Spanish Wikipedia has more than
900,000[4] articles and on uncontroversial articles it
seems pretty fine. It looks to have a richer content if you compare
it with the Portuguese WP, but less detail than the English version.
Skeptical presence on
Spanish Wikipedia
The Article about
evolution seems to be very complete and balanced and discussions and
reversals are frequent, but not as frequent as the ones that I have
seen on the Portuguese version. It lacks of a Evidence of Common
Decent as we have for the Portuguese version. This subject is treated
inside of the evolution
[11]. This section needs to become
an article and be expanded.
I’ve got the impression that the
majority of the Spanish speaking countries are Catholic, which
doesn’t require a belief on a literal truth of the bible, so
perhaps the fundamentalists on those countries aren’t so willing to
attack evolution. But my native Spanish speaking fellows might better
comment on that.
Even the Article on James Randi[12]
is much better than the Portuguese version; it still needs lots of
dedication and effort to be brought to the English standard. It lacks
of references and citations. The article on Penn and Teller is very
simple, almost a draft. Penn Jillette doesn’t have an article while
Teller[13] has one draft for some reason.
Michael Shermer [14] is
pretty decent, but needs to be expanded.
The Article on Creationism has been
edited and vandalized frequently on the last year. [15]
The article on Skepticism is really
good, broken down in religious, philosophical, ecological and
scientific types of skepticism. [16]
You can find pages for Ann Druyan ,
Harry Houdini, Susan Blackmore, Robert Todd Caroll, while Joe Nickell
is missing. Most of the articles need some expansion and they are
often drafts.
The article on Homeopathy[17]
is pretty good, providing lots of valuable information and it takes
the scientific side. It lacks of some of Randi’s confrontations, I
would expand on that.
It seems that some battle has been
taken place on the Talk and history pages. The article is protected
from anonymous edition.
In my opinion it looks like that the
greater number of editors is making the Spanish version better than
the Portuguese one. Since I’m not a frequent Spanish Wikipedia
visitor, I may be wrong. But some of the problematic pages on the
Portuguese version aren’t with the same problems on the Spanish
ones. The main issue is lack good information about skeptics.
