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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 6 September 2011 05:53, Shii <shii at shii.org> wrote:
> I am an American Wikipedia administrator living in Japan. Recently, as
> you may have seen on the news (but not Wikinews), Japan got a new
> prime minister. I watched his press conference and decided to grace
> Wikinews with this breaking story within minutes after it happened.
> The review process might delay it a few hours, but as it was 4AM EST,
> I figured Wikinews would probably still scoop Reuters and the AP.
>
> Five hours later (hmm, 9AM EST...), a reviewer finally looked at my
> article and failed me on one count: THE FACT THAT THE EVENT TOOK PLACE
> IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY. No joke. He informed me that because the people
> at the press conference were not speaking English, and the reporting
> on the article was not in English, it was likely the article would not
> pass anyone's review. I asked for clarification on this astounding
> statement, requested another review for the article, and waited.

While I agree this isn't a good situation to be in, I'm not sure what
the alternative is. The reviewers need to be able to understand the
sources and there probably aren't many (any?) reviewers on the English
Wikinews that speak Japanese. They could do away with the review
system entirely (what purpose does it serve? Wikipedia doesn't require
things to be reviewed before being published and it seems to be doing
rather better...), but that's the only option I can see. I doubt
they'll be able to find reviewers that speak fluent English and
understand all the languages sources could possibly be in well enough
to review articles based on them.