Note: This post is a long ramble about not much.
On 6/8/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam(a)vyznev.net> wrote:
I would disagree. The "dablinks" Steve
seems to be referring to are
metadata that just happens to be included in the article text for lack
of a better technical solution. Without looking at the actual articles
in question, I'd say a link at the top of [[en:President]] that says in
effect "If you came here looking for [[George W. Bush]], he's thataway."
would be perfectly reasonable if readers of that particular project in
fact with some frequency do so (which I find plausible enough).
As things turn out, this is not currently the case. However, I note
that [[President]], while being one of our more "internationally
balanced" articles, still has an excessive US bias:
There is a whole paragraph on electoral colleges in the US, while most
other countries don't get more than their name mentioned.
There is another paragraph beginning "The head of a university or
non-profit corporation, particularly in the United States of America,
is often known as president."
A paragraph on the fact that the head of the mormons is known as the
president...I doubt very much this would be interest to anyone reading
the hypothetic Urdu version, for instance.
In fact most of the article is centred around the US and France, with
a bit of Spain. For a Wikipedia article, that's not too bad, and is a
good start. But it's certainly skewed in favour of providing more
information on topics likely to interest anglophone (and in
particular, American) readers.
Is this bad? To me, not particularly, though other information on
other countries, perhaps including the presidential referendum in
Australia, would have been welcome.
Steve
Personally, as an American, I'd be more interested in presidents of
countries other than the US. More specifically, it'd be interesting
to me to read what the world as a whole considers the most important
information about presidents. If I wanted to read specifically about
the [[President of the United States]] (a topic about which I already
know plenty), I could always go to that article.
And like Raphael, I'd be very interested in reading about things like
[[terrorism]], [[George W. Bush]] and [[United States]] in non-English
versions of Wikipedia. Are there other avenues of getting some of the
same information? Sure, though none of them would provide precisely
the same information (what does this particular slice *of Wikipedians*
think is an appropriate article). Many of the other avenues would
require significantly more work to answer a particular question. And
many of the other avenues would introduce their own particular bias.
Anthony