User:Mwalcoff/RfC

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The question at issue is whether news items predominantly of interest to readers from one country should be prohibited from being listed on the In the News (ITN) section of the Main Page and, secondarily, whether the "local-ness" of an item should ever be a disqualifying factor.

Background

The ITN criteria say "The In the news (ITN) section on the main page serves to direct readers to articles that have been substantially updated to reflect recent or current events of wide interest. Formerly, the criteria required that items be of "international interest or importance." At some point, the "international" criterion was removed. However, many people voting on the ITN candidate page vote as if it was still part of the criteria, opposing items with the rationale that they are not of "international" interest.

As a result, many ITN votes have turned into fierce and acrimonious debates between those who are averse to items predominantly of interest to people from one country and those who are not. Usually, but not always, these are items that are major news events in the United States but not elsewhere. Examples of suggestions that have led to some degree of rancorous debate include:

• The appointment of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Elections and resignations of governors in large U.S. states.
• The election of Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, which eliminated the Democratic Party's 60-seat supermajority.
• The Arizona anti-illegal-immigration law.
• The Super Bowl.
• The election of Ed Miliband as leader of the British Labour Party.

(Please note that this discussion is not intended to address whether those particular items should have been posted on ITN but rather whether they should be banned outright as being of interest primarily to people in one country.)

The "no international interest" objection to items from the U.S. has helped limit items from the U.S. to a small percentage of all ITN items -- 7 percent in August, according to a recent count. Americans make up 52 percent of English Wikipedia readers, according to Erik Zachte's analysis of Wikipedia traffic.

Arguments in favour of a prohibition against items predominantly of interest to readers from a single country

• Argument 1
• Argument 2
• Argument 3
• Argument 4
• Argument 5
• Argument 6

Arguments against a prohibition against items predominantly of interest to readers from a single country

• There is plenty of room on ITN for items of interest to different groups of people.

There is room for seven items on ITN at a time, and the problem to date isn't that we have had too many items but rather that they have been replaced too slowly. There is plenty of room for one or two U.S.- or U.K.-centric items along with all of the other.

• Not every ITN item has to apply to everyone.

We have space items that appeal to those interested in spaceflight. They probably don't appeal to those not interested in the subject. We have sports items for those interested in sports. We have items for those interested in literature, health, biology, technology, economics, and so on. What's wrong with having items of interest to a geographically-defined group? They may not appeal to people who live outside of the country, but then, people who aren't sports fans aren't interested in sports items, and we post them anyway.

• When it comes to reader interest, the question should be how many people are interested in the item, not where those people are.

As noted above, ITN items are supposed to be "of wide interest to the encyclopedia's readers," among other criteria. As also mentioned, a small majority of English Wikipedia readers visit from the U.S., with 9.3% from the U.K., 5.5% from Canada and 3.2% from Australia. An item that many people from one of those countries (or, in the case of the U.S., even a single region) cares about may have quite a bit more reader interest than an "international" item.

• Using "internationalness" as a criterion may lead to a bias against items from large countries or in favour of items from smaller countries.

Theoretically, a flood that affects Lithuania and Latvia would be favored as an ITN item over a flood twice as bad that is limited to the U.S. The hyper-logical syllogism in which international items take precedence over national ones, and national ones over local ones, has led to ITN decisions that would seem absurd to most readers. For example, an election in the island nation of Tuvalu, population 12,373, was posted, but an election for governor of California†, whose 37 million people includes hundred of thousands of English Wikipedia readers, would likely be rejected as "sub-national."

†The Main Page received 5.6 million hits a day in September. If 52% of English Wikipedia readers come from the U.S., and 12% of Americans live in California, we can surmise that about 6% of Main Page hits, or about 336,000 hits, come from California.

• In practice, the "international" argument is used primarily against U.S. items and is ignored when it comes to items from other countries, leading to a situation where items of interest to fewer readers are favored over those with greater reader appeal.

For example, the sacking of the mayor of Moscow made it to ITN, as did a shooting in Slovakia and a new energy policy in Pakistan. Those items may have been worthwhile; however, equivalent items from the U.S. would be denounced as "domestic" and, therefore, unpublishable. This is to say nothing of the dozens of national elections from small or obscure countries that are of little international interest yet are posted on ITN as a matter of course.

• An outright prohibition on "sub-national" items ignores the importance of state or provincial governments in federal systems.

In the U.S., Canada and Australia, sovereignty is shared between the federal (central) and state or provincial governments. It is the state or provincial government, or the local governments they establish, that citizens deal with most often, and those governments' decisions may have a greater impact on their population than the decisions of the federal government. In short, states and provinces are very important, and while items from Florida or Ontario perhaps should be rare on ITN, they should not be forbidden.

• ITN editors can ensure U.S. and/or U.K. items do not dominate the section.

As explained earlier, we are nowhere even close to being in a situation where we have to worry about U.S. and/or U.K. items dominating ITN. There is no reason to think that permitting items predominantly of interest to people from a single country will lead to an unfortunate preponderance of such items. There is nothing in the ITN rules that prevent editors from declining to approve an item because there are too many similar items up already, or from removing one item before adding a similar one.