[Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:51:33 +0900, KIZU Naoko <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Off topic alert:
> 
> I haven't given a closer look to your main topic, Milos, so I cannot
> give a responsible statement in any way. But your reference to Wiki
> Loves Monuments, while I agree it's heavily Europe-focused, I strongly
> disagree with you on its decadency, as an (retired) aesthetic. While
> the determination what artworks are heavily depends on the community
> to appreciate, so partly I understand your concern, if WLM is carried
> on only by European chapter people, it can hardly of NPOV at some
> future moment, but artworks belong to the critical part of "the sum of
> human knowledge" along with the information who created them and then
> have appreciated or rejected them.
> 

Only countries which have lists of monuments compiled by the government
and having the status of the law are eligible for WLM. This is in some
sense POV but no more POV than say writing articles of members of
parliament who were elected by direct vote. If Japan has such a list (I
hope it does) next year it would be eligible to participate. My
understanding is that somehow the organizers did not expect such interest
and did not try to contact chapters outside Europe. Presumably next year
they will do. On the other hand, by the next year some of the European
countries may exhaust their monuments (in the sense that the most of the
pictures will be taken and the articles written or judged to be impossible
to write). Thus, NPOV does not seem to be a problem to me. 

I do see two other problems with WLM, which are (i) competition format,
which implicitly stimulates certain strategies we normally do not want to
stimulate; (ii) involvement of the chapters as a precondition - some
countries do not have chapters, some chapters showed no interest, some were
unable to organize anything in the end. But I am not sure such discussion
belongs to this thread.

Cheers
Yaroslav