Cultural Bias and TV Articles

I have been reading the comments about cultural bias, and, while researching some articles for Wikipedia, I have noticed something that you may not have considered concerning TV articles. In regards to television programs' overseas premiere dates, ratings, and reviews, the bias toward US and/or UK television shows may be unintentional. Availability of information on foreign media sites and a lack of knowledge of reliable media resources hinder some contributors' addition of vital information from foreign sources.

With some shows, the only primary and secondary sources available to Wikipedia contributors are US and UK news articles listed on major search engines. Pertienent information about the show in other countries do not frequently appear in the main search engines' top 20 pages. If the foreign articles exist, they may be buried deep within the English-language/American/British results (e.g., result #709.697 out of 1.000.000), or they may be in a language which the contributor's web browser does not support. Looking up the show by country when searching is one solution. It, however, takes a long period of time to search all 200+ nations for references to the series. When a contributor is in the process of a Featured Article review, searching each country individually becomes a disadvantage as the review process occur quickly.

In addition, if contributors find the online articles, the contributors may not know which foreign web sites could be reliable sources for additional information about a show's appeal or dislike. The American and British contributors know, or have some idea, of their reliable sources, but they may be unfamiliar with, for example, Zambia's major newspapers or television networks. The same could be said of international contributors writing about US/UK articles. One solution is to research the name of the media organization. Finding a reliable assessment of the sources sometimes means trusting Wikipedia's infomation about the source, as the encyclopedia is a trusted informational source for even contributors.

As I have stated, I have seen this firsthand. I have been researching the Numb3rs episode articles on Wikipedia since August 2009, and I am still working on them when I have the time. I would like to include the overseas premiere dates, ratings, and reviews for the episodes, but I have been unable to find any information from other nations. I know that there are articles about the series on other countries' media sites, but I do not know where to look for that information. Also, I had to research one source on Wikipedia to see if it was reliable since I had never heard of the site. (Gratefully, my source was reliable, and I was able to use the information in my article.) Being unable to complete my articles because of a lack of reliable sources should not be the case.

In an ideal world, contributors should be able to find the articles easily in reliable international sources. This is not an ideal world. A lack of information and/or a lack of knowledge about informational sources are not easy to overcome, especially when one bears the burden of writing accurate articles. Contributors' television articles would have to be incomplete in terms of cultural bias until they could find additional articles in reliable international media resources.

It is a fact though that the English lanuage Wikipeida has more articles then any other lanuage Wikipeida, the 3,735,000+ articles the english wikipedia has is more then any other lanuage which is why perhaps the English lanuage has more articles in English regarding countries that speak a foreign lanuage then a foreign lanuage country has English articles? Mcjakeqcool Mcjakeqcool 02:15, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Mcjakeqcool, I was not referring to the English Wikipedia or to any other Wikipedia site. I was referring to the newspaper articles, magazine articles, and websites which we Wikipedians use as sources for our articles. Most of the time, we can find only the English-language sites as we research our articles. Sorry if I confused you.SciGal 21:13, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

@SciGal I research articles about information on the internet for purposes of editing wikipedia by using foreign Google search engines but I know what you mean about having less info about specific things I get the feeling it's because there is a smaller ammount of websites that are not in English then there are in English and the foreign lanuage articles are more recently starting to catch up which I think is why it is more harder to find non-English language sites then English 1s but it's other sites on the world web that are lacking info rather then info is what you're saying? I agree with that but there are definitely less Non-English articles then English articles on Wikipedia due to there being less sources avalible not in English due to there not being a smaller base of people who use the web who don't talk English then who do talk English. Mcjakeqcool Mcjakeqcool 20:08, 29 October 2011 (UTC)