"Larry Pieniazek" wrote
Well I'm not sure how to respond to that exactly, other than to say that we judged the entries that turned up based on the criteria we developed (which were in turn based on the goals, to demonstrate referencability...) Those entries were the best at it.
Not that it's relevant (so why did I mention it? Dunno) but of the three judges that actively judged entries, I was the only boy.
If one actually worries about systemic bias as pervasive, one also presumably reinforces the dictum that Voting is Evil. Because it generally adds to the middle-of-the-road of whatever is there, rather than addresses what is missing.
If you take copious referencing as a criterion, you will favour areas where reference books already proliferate. Now, I have nothing against military history, I hasten to add. I have worked myself on clean-up of Japanese military history (the bizarre Peruvian contributions). Good references there would be excellent. The reason I bothered is that coverage of certain things (e.g. the Second Sino-Japanese War) is just inherently going to be worse than that of each battle for a Pacific island, given the slant of what reference material exists in English.
Charles
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