On 4/11/06, Sam Korn <smoddy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/11/06, Matt Brown <morven(a)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.
--
Alphax -
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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