User:Orpheus/Science and nationalism

I was going to post this on a talkpage but it was getting a bit soap-boxy.

Inventions are wonderful things, and I will confess that when I was a small lad I would read about inventions in books and feel pride at the ones linked to my country of birth. When I got older though, I realised there was two flaws with that. First, I was effectively usurping credit (in my own head) for someone else's discovery, just because we shared a country of birth. Second, science and engineering discoveries benefit the entire world, with a few exceptions which have been lost due to excessive secrecy. I now choose to take pride in all discoveries and discoverers no matter where they hail from, due to our shared status as human beings.

I think an encyclopedia, particularly in the global era we're in now, should take the same view. It is of great historical and philosophical interest to study the circumstances of discovery, and they include the cultural context, but there is no need to obscure that with one-upmanship.