Talk:United States of America

Article Checklist for "United States of America"

Workgroup category or categories	Geography Workgroup [Categories OK]
Article status	Stub: no more than a few sentences
Underlinked article?	No
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	Petréa Mitchell 11:03, 1 April 2007 (CDT)

To learn how to fill out this checklist, please see CZ:The Article Checklist.

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First sentence

"...is a nation located in North America, bordering both the North Atlantic Ocean and the North Pacific Ocean, between Canada and Mexico." No excuse for this. Anyone who doesn't know where the U.S. is won't find it enlightening to have it located with respect to N. America, oceans, Canada, and Mexico. Such a comment probably belongs in a section about the political/historic significance of its location. It would be better to open with some comment about what makes the U.S. distinctive. Good luck with that.  :-) --Larry Sanger 23:30, 9 April 2007 (CDT)

Range of incomes

The article read: "...and a highly inequitable distribution of wealth compared to other nation-states." I changed this to: "...and a very wide range of incomes, compared to other nation-states." But I'm not even sure that this is true, according to the first source cited, where there are many countries with numbers higher than that of the U.S. I'm not sure what the second source is doing there, either; it's an absolutely enormous document that (for that reason) shouldn't be directly linked to without explanation. It should be moved to a footnote, or deleted.

Anyway, this is specifically a criticism of the U.S. by people on the Left, and, whatever you think of them, people on the Right tend not to find it such a problem or even a particularly noteworthy fact, to whatever extent it is a fact. Hence, we must be careful about this. I'd like to emphasize that I do not have a dog in this fight; I simply want to insist that we stay true to our commitment to the Neutrality Policy. --Larry Sanger 13:39, 13 April 2007 (CDT)