On Sat, 1 Jan 2005 14:17:59 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
But then wouldn't these local pages start to become biased? There would undoubtedly be many more Canadian editors at the Canada article than Americans, not in small part because of the redirect.
I really think there should be some way to integrate national news into the mainpage so it remains edited by all...
While I agree that the local pages would attract disporportionate representation from people from the country in question, I don't think this is a big problem. Anyone can edit the pages in question, and I'd hope that Wikinews would discourage any trend of only allowing, say, Canadians to edit http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Canada.
My argument is that at some point, you have to specialize to be useful. Articles of global interest, like American foreign policy or the Asian tsunami, obviously should be on the front page. But there are many stories of particular interest to specific groups of people which wouldn't belong there.
For example: Canada's national news broadcaster (the CBC) is currently running a story (see [1]) about some nurses at an English-speaking hospital in the (mostly French-speaking) province of Quebec who were fired for failing a French proficiency test.
The issue relates to a number recurring themes in Canadian politics: language relations, controversy over the promotion of French by the Quebec government, discontent in Quebec's anglophone minority. While this probably touches on analogous themes in other bilingual nations, I wouldn't expect a lot of non-Canadians to care, so I it wouldn't belong on the Wikinews front page. But I would argue it's important enough to Canadians to belong on the proposed http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Canada.
Steve
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/01/05/quebec-nurses050105.html