[WikiEN-l] American diplomatic listings

james duffy jtdirl at hotmail.com
Thu May 29 03:53:34 UTC 2003


I notice a lot of pages of countries which reply on information from the CIA 
factsbook include information US diplomatic representation to that country 
and that country's diplomatic representation to the US. Two things strike 
me:

1. That sort of information changes very quickly, much quicker than details 
about who is in government, etc, because diplomatic postings are regularly 
changed. So it is something that can very very easily be out of date even 
when being put on wiki, or within a small time afterwards.

2. It hardly creates a fair and balanced article if its focuses exclusively 
on issues to do with that country's diplomatic relationship with the US. Is 
there a single article on wiki that mentions with the British ambassador is 
to a country and what the UK embassy address is? What about the Italian 
Ambassador? Brazilian ambassador? Irish ambassador? Rwandan ambassador, etc. 
It all adds a regrettable and unnecessary degree of americo-centrism to 
articles.

Given this fact, and that the information is likely to change rapidly, is it 
not time that such unnecessary and americo-centrist information was left 
out? The entire world doesn't need to know who the US ambassador to Germany 
is, or who the Germany ambassador to the US is, do they?

If it is thought worth keeping, it should all be moved to a specific article 
on [[United States Embassies and Ambassadors]] and [[International 
Ambassadors to the United States]]. There it can be easily updated and 
avoids making articles appear too americocentric.

JT

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