[Foundation-l] Update (was Re: The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews)

Nathan nawrich at gmail.com
Wed Sep 7 04:42:15 UTC 2011


I took a look at the talk page for the article you wrote; you didn't note in
your earlier message that your article was actually failed because you
didn't provide the notes that they're looking for, and because they wanted
someone with a familiarity with Japanese to review the Japanese sources. To
be fair to Pi zero, that's not quite the same thing as "It can't be
published because it happened in a foreign country."

Pi zero and Mikemoral, the two reviewers who looked at your article, both
agreed with you that Wikinews has a reviewer-availability problem. Pi zero
explained in some detail why an article with foreign language sources might
languish; I didn't see you offer alternatives for how the minimum quality of
an article can be verified before it goes live if there is no one available
to verify it who speaks the language of the source. That may not seem like a
very wiki-like policy, but Wikinews has some legitimate reasons for doing it
that way. It's possible the problem is insurmountable, as others have
suggested, but claiming to mount a relentless campaign for apologies and
user-rights is possibly not the best way of communicating that message.
Finally... Edit-warring with an administrator on a policy page is, on
Wikinews as on most WMF wikis, a good way to get blocked.


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