On 4/11/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/11/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, the existence of Georgia, the SSR was almost unknown.
Oh what nonsense. Stalin himself was a Georgian and this was common knowledge in the Soviet era.
Common knowledge to whom? You are making assumptions, that everyone knows what you knew. As an American, I know somewhere in the back of my head that Georgia is a country, but mostly to me it is a state that grows peaches and established as a colony for debtors.
Please do NOT go all ignorant American on me. It's a matter of perspective. It does not make me "ignorant." The name "Salem" to me denotes "Salem, Massachusetts," not the capital of Oregon, which could be argued to be more prominent (also prominent: it being a common town/city name meaning "city on a hill", a common place name in the Middle East (which I, as an American, must know nothing about)). This isn't because of the media or movies and "witchcraft." It is because I live very close to Salem, and have never heard "Salem" used to refer to Oregon. This doesn't mean I am ignorant to its existence, it's just not what comes to mind.
Similarly, Georgia the state is much closer to me than the country, and as such, it is more important to my own life. I can't speak for the American media because I don't watch the news, but Georgia (country) has not been mentioned in my life. Does that make all of the US ignorant plebes? No, we just are concerned with different things. Is it wrong to assume that many people on English Wikipedia could possibly be from the US? No, approximately 298,000,000 people live in the US, 97% of whom speak English very well, and "74.9% of Americans living in households with a fixed line phone have home access to the Internet. This amounts to 204.307 million Americans out of the projected 272.81 million who are at least two years old."
It's very possible that these 204.307 million people access Wikipedia. Especially since the schools I've attended reccommend it. So the "common" name could very well be the American idea of it. Shrug.