On 31 Dec 2004, at 04:14, Stephen Forrest wrote:
On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 03:52:48 +0100, Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
'''Oppose.''' Beware of balkanization. The above proposal would lead to a situation where people would not only just read about the so-called "locally relevant" issues that interest them, but it would probably very soon also lead to the respective wikis mostly containing the locally predominant POV
Please don't leap to conclusions. If you read what I wrote (which is what James was replying to), I *did not* suggest having wikinews sites specific to a country *and* language. Aside from the obvious POV issues, this would be a complete waste of time simply because of duplication of effort.
My suggestion was that, for example, en.wikinews.ca could redirect to a particular page about Canadian news in the English wikinews site, such as http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Canada.
These locale index pages would just be regular wikinews pages. Their purpose would be to serve as a collection of links to news stories relevant to a particular country or locale. The stories they linked to would not themselves be tied to the locale in any way (and therefore subject to locale-specific POV issues); they would just be regular pages on en.wikinews.org.
I appreciate the need to avoid POV issues, but surely maintaining a collection of links to stories relevant to a specific locale serves a useful purpose.
Sorry, I think my hasty skim-reading of the thread caught me there. I did indeed mistakenly believe that there was a proposal in the works to divide stuff into country-specific wikis.
However: I am still not too hot on the idea of "localized news renditions", even if achieved purely through portal pages which link to articles in one or more language-based wikis. It's always annoyed me beyond measure that a copy of TIME magazine, NEWSWEEK (and even, I hear, THE ECONOMIST) purchased in, say, the US is not identical to one available in Europe. IMHO this is a Very Bad Thing because Globalization Is Good For You and nobody buys TIME magazine with the expectation of reading a European magazine anyway, so half-hearted efforts towards "filtering" offerings so they're more palatable/attractive/"relevant" to the local populace are pretty pointless and damaging. How does this apply to us? Well, the Internet is global and it equally annoys me if entities come up with different offerings for different physical places. That said, you're of course free to create any individual article you wish (including portal articles) and if enough people support the idea, they will stay and grow. But count me out.
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com