Monday, October 3, 2011

Britannicagroaning

Let us first regard the general article Music. In that division of the article entitled, Recent Music — that is, music during the last sixty or seventy-five years — we find the following astonishing division of space: recent German music receives just eleven lines; recent French music, thirty-eight lines, or less than half a column; recent Italian music, nineteen lines; recent Russian music, thirteen lines; and recent British music, nearly four columns, or two full pages!
...It is unnecessary to criticise such bias: the figures themselves are more eloquently condemning than any comment could possibly be.
From Willard Huntington Wright's 1917 book Misinforming a Nation, a criticism of Anglocentric bias in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Nearly a century later, this methodology of criticizing encyclopedias still seems to be in fashion:
Beowulf vs He-Man - One is the protaganist of one of the oldest works in English literature, an epic poem that offers unmatched insights into the culture of our Anglo-Saxon forbears. The other hero is Skeletor's enemy in a 1980s cartoon series, and worthy of more coverage, according to WIkipedians.

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