[Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

[M. Williamson]

Note that Google News, a popular news aggregator, often includes a link to
the Wikipedia article about breaking news and recent events, but never links
to Wikinews. Wikipedia is already largely accomplishing in many high-profile
cases what Wikinews aims to do. Also note that Chile is considered by many
to be a Western country; within a handful of years it will probably be in
the list of countries with "Very High" HDIs (barring any unforseen event),
joining the Western European countries, US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Hong
Kong and a couple of gulf states. It seems the criteria for "the west" are
that you are a developed country in Europe or the Americas, and Chile is
both a developed country and it is located in the Americas. Despite the
often monolithic characterization of Latin America, it's not the case that
all Latin American countries are the same; some are struggling with grinding
poverty, such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Bolivia, while others are
high-income countries with developed economies, such as Chile, Argentina,
and Uruguay. I would definitely consider Chile, Argentina and Uruguay to be
part of "the west".

2011/9/6 Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com>

> English Wikinews has been broken for a while. The entire system is
> predicated on the judgement of reviewers, and a handful of rather rude
> admins. I saw some rather aggressive posture and a pretty threatening
> demeanor employed towards others when I tried contributing early last year.
>
> I once tried to submit an article on Wiknews a couple of years ago. It was
> something about a Blue moon on New year's eve at the end of 2009, the story
> at the time had a thousand legitimate sources on google news which
> apparently wasn't deemed notable enough by a reviewer, several hours later
> when the event itself had passed.
>
> Now, compared to contributing on English Wikipedia which has a much higher
> visibility rate, activity, and a giant repository of related articles,
> Wikinews seemed less and less relevant. The entire policy of editorial
> content on Wikinews is counter-productive when anyone can go and contribute
> to the larger sister project much easily.
>
> It's pitiful when you realize what it can be in the age of micro-blogging
> with a diverse contributor base like ours. We already have more reporter
> and
> contributors in every country than any news/wire service. We just can't
> figure out how to use it.
>
> Theo
>
> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org> wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday, September 6, 2011, Fajro wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 2:21 AM, Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org
> > <javascript:;>>
> > > wrote:
> > > > non-Western topics: see http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Chile
> > >
> > > Chile non-western?
> > > Fixed!
> > >
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chile&diff=prev&oldid=448703219
> > >
> > >
> > Oh, I took it to mean Western as in (Europe + USA). Cultural imperialist,
> I
> > know.
> >
> > --
> > Tom Morris
> > <http://tommorris.org/>
> >
> >
> > --
> > Tom Morris
> > <http://tommorris.org/>
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> >
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