Talk:Politics of Dominica

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Hi Vera!

Way back in the long-ago discussions of the Wikipedia Countries Project, we discussed whether the location of the embassies of the US, and to the US, were of sufficient interest for an international encyclopedia. It was decided that they were not. As a result, we've been slowly but systematically removing those addresses from the "Politics of..." pages. Is there a particular reason you think that information should remain? -- April 22:06 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, all embassies should be listed. Removing is the wrong way to do this, you should be adding.

  • Adding every address of every embassy in Dominica, plus every address of every embassy from Domica in another country? And then repeat for all the world's countries? That would be a mammoth project, and considering how rapidly that information could change, I don't think a very useful one. -- April 22:10 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a mammoth project. I don't think thats a very good argument against doing something. Also, nobody is asking you to do the project. But why destroy the beginnings of it? We have US embassies for every country int he world noted, now add Canada or Dominca or whatever, but dont delete what we have done. Vera Cruz

    • The ones that are currently added are added only because the person pasting them in--me--didn't realize that he was unintentionally biasing the 'pedia towards a U.S. point of view, which has been much lamented since and generally agreed was the wrong way to go. KQ
  • While I agree on the former, these embassies are currently only there because we copied in information from the CIA World Factbook, wholesale, without editing. We have since been going through and editing that information to keep only what is useful for the general reader. Most people do not need to know the addresses of every embassy in the world to and from a country when they're looking up the politics of that country! If you really, really want to undertake such a project, I'd recommend adding an extra link like "Dominica Embassies" onto the main Dominica page. But since ambassadors to/from the US, at least, are changed every few years, and embassy addresses are also subject to frequent changes, it'll be very hard to keep such a thing up to date.

Meanwhile, if we leave in only the US Embassy information - and adding all the other nations is not practical at this time - we create more of a "US bias" in Wikipedia. Since so many of the contributors here are US residents, this is already a continuing issue; better that we should crop the US embassy info unless and until we're ready to do it for the Whole World. Even if that were not the case, it's really not "encyclopedic" information; it only happens to be there because the CIA figured it'd be useful for US citizens to have in their Factbook. We have different aims, and for our aims, that information isn't really useful. -- April 22:19 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

No we do not create a US bias-if most of the users are from the US it stands to reason that most of them will write about what they know about. Having the US embassies will encourage others to add embassies. It most certainly is "encyclopedic". Cropping information is wasteful and destructive.

Just cut and paste them into US Embassies. Vera Cruz


  • Um, as a blanket statement, that seems a little... unsafe. I mean, if I were to put in the addresses of all my relatives, would you then argue that this is "encyclopedic", because everyone else is free to put in the addresses of their relatives? I wouldn't think so.
  • Ergo, we do make quality decisions on information. We remove things that violate the NPOV, but we also remove things that most readers will not find useful and on-topic for a particular article. It is not our ambition at this time to have an entry for every human being who ever lived; or to have the address of every important building in the world. Exercising that judgement, then, the group of us conferring on countries decided that the addresses of embassies was non-essential information. If a large chunk of Wikipedians stand up and say they disagree, that consensus may change; but until then, since 90% of the embassies have been edited out by now... I'll continue to remove the other 10%. After all, if we do decide to include this after all, might as well do it systematically, with current (not 2-year-old) information, separate links (so those interested in politics needn't deal with 'em) and all nations included. :) -- April
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