Wikipedia Solves Neutrality Debate

So, we're talking about Wiki-ness in COM632 tonight, and of course, this leads us to the big question of "Neutrality." I am of the opinion that neutrality is a goal, but is not possible due to the specific rhetorical situation of the entity wikipedia.com. But you knew that already, so let's look at my specific qualms.

Wikipedia lists several "areas" where bias can occur. The first listed is "Class bias," defined as "favoring one social class and bias ignoring social or class divisions." I am impressed that they added the second half, about *ignoring*--but any good Foucauldian knows that these ignorances are built into our very language, our terministic screen (yay capitalism!). "Ignoring" isn't so much the phrase--more like...reification through omission. Wikipedia is always/already middle class, middle educated--particularly when it makes claims to and aspires to neutrality.

More specifically, Wikipedia is a) on the Internet (accessible to many in the US, but fewer in 3rd world countries), b) for the purpose of research and information-gathering (which is important mainly to people in an information economy, in late capitalism, who are both computer literate and textually literate) and c)written in a language style accessible mainly to the educated sectors (at least the English part is).

Later, the list continues to include "Linguistic" bias--favoring one language over another. Of course, because Wikipedia has set up different sectors for different languages, each entry will be biased toward the language it is written in; however, they are not considering the dialect bias that their policy itself instigates when it asks for sophisticated, educated, language.

Not that I have any problems with sophisticated, educated language.

Other biases include "Species" bias (because humans aren't any better than other animals, and the mice might get offended?), Geographical bias (No making fun of Canada), and race/gender/religion bias. No one mentions "ability" bias (The article on "Human" for example, is highly normative in that names how many fingers humans SHOULD have, how the human mind SHOULD work). But I was glad to see that under "Gender" they have included "heteronormativity" as a no-no.

Now if we could just work heteronormativity out of our daily language as easily as Wikipedia thinks it can eliminate it from our written......