[WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 4/11/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 4/11/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Yes, this IS english-speaker-centric, but the very fact of writing an
>>> encylopedia in English is already deciding to do that.
>> Thank you.  This is a beautiful way of expressing something I've been
>> thinking about for some while.
> 
> Can you elaborate? Perhaps we should decide if we really want this
> bias, or not? [[WP:CSB]] thinks we don't.
> 
> Question: To use Jimbo's well-worn poor African once again, what does
> he expect? Georgia the country, or Georgia the state? Does he care
> that most Wikipedians are American, British, Canadian, etc? Should he
> just grateful for whatever information he can get, regardless of whose
> biases, interests and prejudices it reflects? Should he not be
> concerned if, when he looks up Zaire, he comes up with a suburb in
> Arizona?
> 
> I did not raise this issue to bash Americans. Nor would I have a
> complaint if a state in the US were disambig'ed with a terristory in
> Pakistan. But for a mere state in the US to be considered somehow
> "equal" in importance, interest, searchability as a *country* just
> seems wrong. I'm really having trouble putting into words exactly why
> I feel that way, so I'll leave it for a bit and come back to it.
> 
> [[WP:CSB]] really is worth a read.
> 

I'm largely in favour of primary disambiguation for precisely the reason
that without it, you get minor lawyers, actors and baseball players
taking precedance over historically important politicians who's only
crime is that they weren't from the US.

Back to the Georgia issue: suppose someone in the former Soviet
territory is trying to learn English, they have internet access, and
they look up their home country in the English Lanuage Wikipedia.
Imagine their horror when they find that their glorious homeland has
been usurped by some two-bit swamp on the East Coast of the United States...

That being said, I'm quite happy with the current status of [[Georgia]]
as a primary disambiguation page. Yes, I'll go help fix the links to it.

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