On 6/8/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Note: This post is a long ramble about not much.
On 6/8/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
I would disagree. The "dablinks" Steve seems to be referring to are metadata that just happens to be included in the article text for lack of a better technical solution. Without looking at the actual articles in question, I'd say a link at the top of [[en:President]] that says in effect "If you came here looking for [[George W. Bush]], he's thataway." would be perfectly reasonable if readers of that particular project in fact with some frequency do so (which I find plausible enough).
As things turn out, this is not currently the case. However, I note that [[President]], while being one of our more "internationally balanced" articles, still has an excessive US bias: There is a whole paragraph on electoral colleges in the US, while most other countries don't get more than their name mentioned. There is another paragraph beginning "The head of a university or non-profit corporation, particularly in the United States of America, is often known as president." A paragraph on the fact that the head of the mormons is known as the president...I doubt very much this would be interest to anyone reading the hypothetic Urdu version, for instance.
In fact most of the article is centred around the US and France, with a bit of Spain. For a Wikipedia article, that's not too bad, and is a good start. But it's certainly skewed in favour of providing more information on topics likely to interest anglophone (and in particular, American) readers.
Is this bad? To me, not particularly, though other information on other countries, perhaps including the presidential referendum in Australia, would have been welcome.
Steve
Personally, as an American, I'd be more interested in presidents of countries other than the US. More specifically, it'd be interesting to me to read what the world as a whole considers the most important information about presidents. If I wanted to read specifically about the [[President of the United States]] (a topic about which I already know plenty), I could always go to that article.
And like Raphael, I'd be very interested in reading about things like [[terrorism]], [[George W. Bush]] and [[United States]] in non-English versions of Wikipedia. Are there other avenues of getting some of the same information? Sure, though none of them would provide precisely the same information (what does this particular slice *of Wikipedians* think is an appropriate article). Many of the other avenues would require significantly more work to answer a particular question. And many of the other avenues would introduce their own particular bias.
Anthony