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

Nikola Smolenski smolensk at eunet.rs
Tue Sep 6 11:41:28 UTC 2011


On 06/09/11 13:32, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 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

I have been reading about this new "wiki" technology: http://c2.com/

Apparently, this "wiki" thing enables its visitors, even unregistered 
ones, to create new pages without any need for review! I therefore 
suggest that "wiki" is installed on Wikinews and that would solve all 
Shii's problems.



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