On Sat, 1 Jan 2005 14:17:59 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)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