User:Marco21

Hi there.

I am French and now living in France, though I have spent 9 years living and working in Asia and the US, and I value different views brought by international sources (BBC News, CNN, NY Times...). I know how difficult communication between different cultures is, even about what looks like simple ideas, and I know how much one should be able to question one's own convictions once in a while.

I registered because I have been surprised by the way foreign medias have communicated on the "2005 civil unrest in France" and what understanding readers got out of it: pure facts have been mixed with interpretation, leaving to the reader the freedom of picking what is fact and what is not... this problem has been reproduced into the wikipedia article "2005 civil unrest in France" to an even worse extent.

Journalists are supposed to investigate directly on the field (and here it means interviewing the French themselves by the way) to have their own understanding, and produce words that will fairly report and explain to their targetted readers. At the same time, the same information with the same words will be understood differently by each individual, according to its own prior understanding and environment.

The danger in wikipedia is that secondary readers of secondary sources can become primary editors! Though I think it is a much bigger challenge to write in wikipedia than it is to write in the New York Times: you don't know your readers and what is their prior knowledge and understanding of your subject, and that's particularly true in the English version of wikipedia that will be used by any person in the entire planet as a reference!

Truth lies in the eye of the beholder! Since that article and many others after, my faith in wikipedia as a reliable source with universal value has been questionned, and I can't trust the "anyone can edit" principle anymore. That was a nice dream, though.