[WikiEN-l] Pakistani politicians and systemic bias

[Bryan Derksen]

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Nov 2007 04:19:47 -0500, "John Lee" <johnleemk at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> Wait, we have a rule saying only English sources are acceptable now? Or do
>> you just mean that an article should never rely on non-English sources
>> alone?
> 
> I don't think it's unreasonable that on the *English* Wikipedia, the
> English-speaking community should be able to verify at least the
> core facts.

I do. There are plenty of subject areas we cover where non-expert
readers can't verify the core facts and have to rely on experts to
"translate" them into plain English. I'm that way on many esoteric
mathematics topics, for example; if I come to an article that describes
some intricate aspect of tensor matrix whachamacallits and all of the
references are to journal articles that make my head spin, I trust that
out there among our thousands of editors are a couple of mathematicians
who are capable of understanding that stuff and verifying the article's
statements for me.

Same goes for foreign languages. I'm not fluent in any but I know there
are plenty of English/Foreign bilingual editors around who can do the
verification for me. In many cases I can even fall back on Babelfish to
give me a vague idea of what the sources are saying, something I can't
do for mathematics.

> I did do a Google search for English-language coverage and all I
> could find that was usable was this:
> http://www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/freedom_detail.html?country=/KW0001/KW0002/KW0029/

So that means Wikipedia is the largest and most complete
English-language source of information available about this newspaper?
Woohoo! Why is this a bad thing?

IMO, "non-notable" subjects are an area where Wikipedia can really
excel. Every encyclopedia worth its salt is going to have a big,
comprehensive article summarizing General Relativity or the American
Civil War, but only Wikipedia has the resources to have comprehensive
articles about every wee town or minor band or whatnot. As long as our
policies are met - verifiability, NOR, NPOV - this is a good thing. With
the ever-more-imminent introduction of version flagging it'll become
even easier to maintain these small topics.

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