G'day Matt,
On 10/4/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:> A relevant quotation: "Remember, in Italy they drive on the wrong side
of the road."
Um, but Italy drives on the same side of the road as the US does. That statement would have to have been uttered by a resident of a nation that drives on the left.
It's a quotation from /The Italian Job/, showing the boorishness of the film's characters. A British gangster, standing in Italy, reminds his group that the weirdos in this foreign country do things wrong.
This sort of thing occurs with every nationality, which is why I chose a quotation from a British film. It's not that the USA is the only nation whose people are stunningly ignorant and rude when confronting those of different viewpoints, just that: a) A far greater proportion of Americans seem to show this attitude than seen in other countries today b) The USA is more powerful and more resented, so ordinary, everyday ignorance which would be overlooked in a Canadian becomes a grievous sin when displayed by an American c) On Wikipedia, America is King. The rest of the world finds itself having to explain why such-and-such article should be written from a NPOV rather than an American one. This is not deliberate, there is no organised campaign by Americans to corrupt the encyclopaedia, it's entirely unintentional ... and that's even worse.
The Internet is a global medium. Articles on the Internet, and particularly on Wikipedia, that talk about "domestic" vs "international" (where America is domestic and everyone else is weird); or "the phenomenon" vs "the version of the phenomenon seen in other countries" (where America is the norm and everyone else is weird); or even "This is what occurs in the world" (while speaking exclusively of American issues - see old versions of our articles on sound mergers or whatever the term is for examples, e.g. cot-caught merger) are no better than a non-Italian man standing in Torino and announcing that, "In Italy they drive on the wrong side of the road."
(I'd be grateful if David could pick up this thread by talking about how other phrases, like "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off", "I used a machine gun", and "Hang on a minute lads, I've got a great idea!", have deep cultural meaning.)
Cheers,
Gallagher Mark George wrote:
c) On Wikipedia, America is King. The rest of the world finds itself having to explain why such-and-such article should be written from a NPOV rather than an American one. This is not deliberate, there is no organised campaign by Americans to corrupt the encyclopaedia, it's entirely unintentional ... and that's even worse.
It may be which articles I read/edit, but I tend to see more of an Anglocentric POV rather than an US-centric one, which is perhaps unsurprising since more English-speakers than non-English-speakers edit the English Wikipedia. In particular, having way more detail on the UK than there should be in a general article is nearly as common as having way more detail on the US than there should be (though not *quite* as common). This is particularly true in anything related to legal topics---there's typically piles of text on the UK and the US legal systems, sometimes with a separate section about how Canada has its own take on the topic, followed by a token nod that other legal systems also exist and might do things differently.
-Mark
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Delirium wrote:
It may be which articles I read/edit, but I tend to see more of an Anglocentric POV rather than an US-centric one, which is perhaps unsurprising since more English-speakers than non-English-speakers edit the English Wikipedia. In particular, having way more detail on the UK than there should be in a general article is nearly as common as having way more detail on the US than there should be (though not *quite* as common). This is particularly true in anything related to legal topics---there's typically piles of text on the UK and the US legal systems, sometimes with a separate section about how Canada has its own take on the topic, followed by a token nod that other legal systems also exist and might do things differently.
-Mark
People can only write about what they know about. Of course a Wikipedia in a particular language will have a greater coverage of topics related to countries which use that language - for example (it isn't the best one, but it was quick to check) the dewiki article on Berlin is longer than than enwiki article on Berlin. Just because we can't write good articles about, say, the Russian legal system (which, in an ideal world, we would have) doesn't mean that we should be upset that we have good articles about, say, the English or Scottish or American or Canadian legal systems.
A short-term solution would be to translate from other language wikis. A machine translation (Google, Babelfish, whatever, take your pick) might not be good enough to transfer an entire article from another language, but it should be more than enough (at least if the person doing it is vaguely familiar with the topic) to provide a couple of sentences to a paragraph in an '... in the xx legal system' so that we have more than the 'token nod that other legal systems also exist and might do things differently' which you mention.
Cynical