It's not so much American historical illiteracy *per se*, as the tendency of all countries to teach a superficial and patriotic approach to history until the university level, where most people don't study it. Arguably, that habit is at the root of our many nationalist edit disputes: each side quite sincerely advocating the 'neutral' view of history they studied in formal settings.
The optimist in me hopes that within a generation these perspectives will have changed significantly. It was interesting, though, to compare the John Paul Jones biographies in English and in German (the sailor, not the bassist). In the United States Navy he's revered as the first national Naval hero. The German biography calmly introduces him as a pirate. -Durova On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Ian Woollard <[email protected]>wrote: > On 26/03/2009, doc <[email protected]> wrote: > > Personally, I think this is just a cunning plan to get hundreds of > > thousands of young Brits trained to use wikipedia, so we can control the > > right articles and edit the Empire back in. Two clicks and 1776 becomes > > a minor crushed uprising. The world map will be pink once again > > (virtually). > > Too late! According to the six degrees of wikipedia project: > > http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki/ > > the central article (the article with the least number of clicks to > anywhere) in the wikipedia is [[United Kingdom]]! > > The British Empire is in control and you can't stop it :-p > > <cue British national anthem> > > p.s. thanks for spending the money to host it in Florida for us! > -- > -Ian Woollard > > We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly > imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect > world would be pretty ghastly though. > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > -- http://durova.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
