Charlotte Webb wrote:
On 10/5/08, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Some of that could be improved by making each of the articles themselves provide higher-level orientation. For example, most of our articles on German cities place them as a dot on the map of *all of Germany*, rather than only on a map of the state they're in, letting the reader who knows "I know it's somewhere in western Germany" quickly figure out if they're even in the right part of the country.
The different treatment is alll about familiarity, a.k.a. systemic bias. Try asking a hundred Americans to name two states in Germany.
To some extent, but some also seems to be due to the various sub-communities editing in each geographic area, which often is a single person who happened to generate all the maps, sometimes a long time ago. For example, I just now stumbled across [[Charleroi]], which gives me a location map -- not within Europe, or Belgium, or even Wallonia -- but within the province of Hainaut. Even as a fairly geographically literate American I could not locate that for you on a map. =]
-Mark