I can see worrying about harassment. "Inclusivity", though?
(From the tone of the press release, they mean race and gender, not article subjects.) Wikipedia editors are anonymous unless they don't want to be. How can anyone tell?
Wikipedia has some severe biases when it comes to what and who counts as notable. For instance, you can compare ”programming pattern” and ”knitting pattern” and try to guess which is a 50 year practice and which is as old as civilization...
That sort of topic bias is best solved by adding new contributors, but they will intrinsically have to be different sorts of persons, and historically that difference has caused issues for the newcomers: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-w...
Interestingly, if the article is to be believed knitting patterns aren't as old as civilization but are actually roughly contemporary with mechanical knitting machines.
Also, I suspect the actual answer is that knitting patterns as a general concept aren't actually all that interesting, what people are interested in talking about is the things you can do with them. So there are a lot of fairly old, long articles about various knitting stitches and techniques, traditional designs, yarns, communities etc but no-one created the "knitting pattern" article until 2015. The otherwise extremely long and detailed article on knitting referenced patterns even before then, there was quite a bit of information about where to get them, and the various row counters used to keep track of where you were within a pattern had a huge article covering different types and their history, but nowhere explained what a pattern was and how it worked!
(The other interesting thing is that a lot of the knitting-related articles were obviously created by women, as you might expect, but the article on knitting patterns was created by some guy as his first edit. His only other edits were an attempt to split up the content in the extremely long main knitting article into other articles which was immediately reverted. This probably does show something about some kind of flaws in the Wikipedia model, but probably not the ones you're assuming it does.)
Programming patterns as a general concept aren't actually all that interesting either, what people are interested in talking about is the things you can do with them.
> an attempt to split up the content in the extremely long main knitting article into other articles
These attempts are inherently hard to arrange, often requiring a long discussion on some agreed-upon Talk: page. Wikipedia does not have an equivalent to the git sites' "merge request" workflow where a set of diffs to multiple pages can be worked-on in "draft" status and then transparently merged; these things have to be arranged manually.
The last edit to the Knitting article at the time of writing is 24 September 2019, and the page doesn't seem to have any sort of edit protection enabled. I'm confident Wikipedia's policies aren't the major issue holding back a flood of knitting-oriented contributors. The people involved in knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users.
As for the lurking culture war and worrying about the word 'inclusivity' it is hard to imagine a less important issue. Wikipedia is one of the most structurally democratic organisations on the entire planet, and possibly the knowledge accumulating enterprise most resistant to social pigeonholing of its members. Even I could literally copy their software and content and rehost the whole thing if I don't like how the project is run. The Wikimedia Foundation can do whatever it thinks is best; good luck to them. There is no reasonable problem here, even for the paranoid.
> The people involved in knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users.
Well, probably not heavy Wikipedia editors, but then neither are most heavy internet users, so concluding that they aren't heavy internet users is probably unwarranted.
> The people involved in knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users.
The knitters manage to set up vast collection of patters for download just fine, and more people spent time knitting last month than there are programmers in the USA, so it is in fact more an issue of them not being present on wikipedia.
The fact that more people knit in the US than there are programmers is irrelevant though for the argument that most of "the people involved with knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users."
And it's conceivable that it's only a relatively small percentage of all practitioners who actually upload patterns.
> And it's conceivable that it's only a relatively small percentage of all practitioners who actually upload patterns.
That holds for anything through - including programming. Why would it be so hard to accept that a group of people can be active on internet without adding stuff to wikipedia?
Wikipedia is crappy about anything sewing, knitting, embroidery etc related. But whenever I need something, I can find information on reddit or blogs or youtube quickly and easily. It is not that information does not exist on the internet in general, it is that those groups dont find wikipedia place to put stuff in. It is not even that those groups cry for wikipedia to add them in cause they are helpless without that. Wikipedia is not a thing in that space, because who cares about wikipedia and anecdotally those few who tried found it generally waste of time and frustrating.
This is wikipedia finding about situation, because its mission is "to be the largest, most comprehensive, and most widely-available encyclopedia ever written" and it is failing in these areas. And somehow people take offence on that.
That holds for anything through - including programming. Why would it be so hard to accept that a group of people can be active on internet without adding stuff to wikipedia?
> The people involved in knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users.
Or MAYBE the Internet is structured in such a way that knitters are systematically discouraged from participating?
Maybe non-knitters are getting favourable treatment?
Ah, there were two questions:
First, yes, I can explain that, it was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the whole debate on inclusivity, if some domain has fewer of some category of people in it, it must be due to structural exclusion (unless the minority is men, then it's a great victory for equality).
The second question:
No, I cannot explain how the Internet is structured to discourage knitters to contributing, just like I can't explain how STEM or tech jobs are supposed to be structured to exclude women.. Except, from my educations, there were _ZERO_ women from the start, so somehow, even before education started, they must have been structurally excluded, it's the only explanation, next to "the females didn't apply", which is entirely too reasonable to be true, especially considering that it's not even serving any political agenda.
I can see that choosing topics to be gendered is itself problematic. Is the implied assumption that knitting is a women's interest not inclusive, and an unhelpful stereotype?
An example - there are pages which are not fleshed out as much as programming patterns such as childcare or kindergarten education which are commonly viewed as stereotypically gendered but which in reality all parents regardless of gender are actually interested in and write about.
> I can see that choosing topics to be gendered is itself problematic. Is the implied assumption that knitting is a women's interest not inclusive, and an unhelpful stereotype?
The person you are responding didn't choose to gender the topic.
Society did that. You may not like it, but in 2020, most people do, in fact, gender those topics. Ignoring that is ignoring reality.
If we don’t acknowledge sex differences in interests of subjects, then we fail to see the true problem, and thus an actual solution. Why is it taboo to say on average, one sex is more likely to take on a specific kind of work than another? Despite evidence [0] [1]
I’m all for increasing the opportunity for everyone to participate in specific subjects. Yes, at one point in time oppression from one sex against another was real in intellectual pursuits, be it academia or certain areas of interest. And there are instances of it today. But it’s not as pervasive as so many commentators or inclusion boards want it to be.
But to try and get a 50/50 split, or whatever arbitrary ratio, is madness. It implies personality is 50/50 split, as personality is directly related to interests, among other factors (such as writing dry, technical content, which men (on average) tend to gravitate towards). These ratios are impractical, and verifiably false. Men and women on average have widely different personalities, based purely on biological sex. Evolutionarily this makes sense, as each had a specific, important role. Today we have the luxury of looking past the necessity for adhering to these roles, but denying they’re not a part of our genetics is denying reality.
It’s no different than asking why person X dislikes subject Y. Is it because of institutional oppression? Rarely, yes. But for a vast majority of people, person X just doesn’t like subject Y. And if on average, sex Z is disinterested in subject Y, then naturally we’ll see a disparity between the representation of each sex in subject Y.
Most people who knit are not biologically male. There exists male knitters, as there exists male nurses. Is there a cabal oppressing male knitting on an institutional level? Doubt it.
Using inclusivity as a goal has unfortunately become a loaded word. It’s now more akin to price control in a market, essentially forcing a metric value that is arbitrarily chosen, without understanding the implications. I’m not saying this instance in particular is using the word in such a way (though the tone of the article leads me to believe so), but for a vast majority of cases this is how it’s interpreted. We should not be striving for equality of outcomes, but equality of opportunity.
> Why is it taboo to say on average, one sex is more likely to take on a specific kind of work than another? Despite evidence [0] [1]
It really depends on why someone is saying it. If one is saying it as an observation of statistics, then it's fine (usually. There are contexts where it is not; it's not a set of facts you should point out to a group of students about to take a college entrance exam, for instance). If you're saying it in the context of a causal inference, such as, for example, the Damore memo, then it's falling into the trap of conflating correlation and causation that has traditionally unfairly banned women (and men) from entire allowed modes of participation in society.
> Yes, at one point in time oppression from one sex against another was real in intellectual pursuits, be it academia or certain areas of interest. And there are instances of it today. But it’s not as pervasive as so many commentators or inclusion boards want it to be.
I agree. Many commentators want it to be far less pervasive than it is. Unfortunately, it's still very pervasive. We are no more than two generations removed (in the US at least) from women being generally overtly barred from working in most industries. We are only a scant 100 years out from women in the US being allowed the right to vote. It hasn't been enough time for the difference of fact to permeate into a difference in opinion; old prejudices die hard.
For example, the rest of your comment indicates you believe that the differences we see in society are biologically rooted. That's precisely the question the jury is out on; we used to believe it was true, but psychology has come to understand much better how profoundly deep cultural indoctrination and phobia of new cultural patterns run. Before we make claims like "Men and women on average have widely different personalities, based purely on biological sex," we need to be extremely sure we isolate out cultural effects, which is damnably hard to do.
Your example of knitting, specifically, ahistorically excludes the Celtic culture [https://www.thefencepost.com/news/when-men-knitted-a-surpris...]. Any discussion of biological imperative to knit needs to explain why men knit in Celtic societies, not only why men don't knit as much in Western societies now (and given that we know how quickly genetics change, it's going to be a real chore coming up with a genetic explanation that distinguishes Celts from the rest of humanity).
> Wikipedia has some severe biases when it comes to what and who counts as notable.
This is very true. I once googled “Next.js” to try to learn more about it, and Google “helpfully” linked me to the “Nuxt.js” (note the “u” instead of “e”) Wikipedia page. I was thoroughly confused.
Turns out Next.js doesn’t even have a page! It has a draft[0], but it’s been rejected as “not notable” despite it being more popular on GitHub (in terms of stars, contributors, etc)
Then you need to establish strict(er) notability guidelines.
The approach, tone, use of sources, etc. should be exactly the same when writing about design patterns and knitting patterns (actually, I have the feeling pages about knitting patterns will be much more sound and factual than those about design patterns- but that's only a specific case...).
Inclusivity, because you can then lay claim any dispute of facts of an article are instead a dispute that only exists because one side is bigoted, racist, or other such nonsense, and actually only disagrees because they do not accept the person posting the disputed fact.
It is one of the main methods of cancel culture, by portraying any disagreement as based in identity differences there can be no functional discussion of the facts at hand
In general? I guess a good example would be transgender athletes. This is a controversial subject but a reasonable argument can be made that people who grew up with higher levels of testosterone have an unfair advantage over people who didn't. This concern is often dismissed as bigotry. This fits the above description that said "portraying any disagreement as based in identity differences there can be no functional discussion of the facts at hand"
Thank you. I think that's a good example. For instance, I don't think I understand why people would want to ban those who were born identifying male from athletics because they have more testosterone than those born identifying female. Clearly, if the hormone levels are the issue, they should just sample the hormones of athletes at some point in their developmental process and ban anyone with too much testosterone from the womans' events, regardless of their gender identity. Identify as a woman but your testosterone levels are outside 1-sigma from average at 13? Sorry; doesn't matter if you were born a woman and have always thought of yourself as a woman, you're banned from Olympic Women's Pole Vault for life.
> Clearly, if the hormone levels are the issue, they should just sample the hormones of athletes at some point in their developmental process
Of course hormone levels are the issue, that's why we don't allow the use of human growth hormone and testosterone at the Olympics. It's called doping. And your proposed solution is completely impractical. In addition, your phrasing "if the hormone levels are the issue" seems to contain a veiled accusation of bigotry by suggesting that the actual issue is something else.
> Identify as a woman but your testosterone levels are outside 1-sigma from average at 13? Sorry;
Using 1-sigma in your example is a straw man. Normal female range is 15 to 70 ng/dL, normal male range is 300-1200. I suggest that if anyone has a testosterone level of 300 or more they should not be allowed to compete with women (but with that level of testosterone a human body would likely not develop as a female body in the first place). This should only apply to sports where testosterone is a direct advantage, e.g. there's no issue with a trans athlete competing in women's chess. Then again, I don't think they check for testosterone doping in chess competitions either.
See how much more difficult it is to discuss this issue without resorting to accusations of bigotry? That itself is the problem: We can't even sort these kind of problems out as a society because the conversations are shut down before they could begin.
With respect, I don't see where you're seeing an accusation of bigotry; I certainly didn't intend one. You agreed hormone levels are the issue; how is "if hormone levels are the issue" a veiled accusation of bigotry?
> Using 1-sigma in your example is a straw man. Normal female range is 15 to 70 ng/dL, normal male range is 300-1200
My error; I was speaking from pure hypotheticals without knowledge of how the numbers break down. The regulations from IAAF (and the research from the IAAF) indicates "About seven in every 1,000 elite female athletes have high testosterone levels." (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190212160030.h...)
Still, their stance seems odd... That a person with naturally-occurring testosterone should be required to take suppressing hormones. If the goal is to see "natural" talent apart from doping, how does forcing athletes to take hormone suppressants satisfy that goal? It seems to pretty self-evidently be reverse-doping.
It's also unclear to me why the IAAF would consider higher levels of testosterone to be an advantage in need of intervention but not, say, being born at and training in a higher altitude, which we know increases lung capacity https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4175264/. We don't force athletes training in Santa Fe to train at lower altitudes for six months before an Olympics. Why treat testosterone levels differently?
> With respect, I don't see where you're seeing an accusation of bigotry; I certainly didn't intend one. You agreed hormone levels are the issue; how is "if hormone levels are the issue" a veiled accusation of bigotry?
It suggests that the issue is something else, not what was raised. It reads as an accusation that the hormone issue is just an excuse for an other agenda. If that wasn't your intention I belive you, but it can be easily misread.
> If the goal is to see "natural" talent apart from doping, how does forcing athletes to take hormone suppressants satisfy that goal?
I think the goal is both finding what humans are capable of, but also rewarding human achievement. If a world record can only be broken or a race can only be won by someone in the top 0.1% of testosterone levels then 99% of people have no reason to even try to compete.
Training at a high altitude is still within the reach of natural human ability, while taking hormones isn't. Although I would support the idea that everyone can take as much testosterone as you need to get to 1200 ng/ml (or some other reasonable threshold) but not more.
This discussion reminds me of a scene in The Twelve Tasks of Asterix where he is about to race the best Olympic runner in the world, and he jokes that they also have races in their village but it's not that exciting because everyone drinks the magic potion, so they all finish at the same time and have the winner be decided by lottery. Guess that's another (slightly unsatisfying) hypothetical solution to the problem ;). Useful as a thought experiment though
That is one completely valid but also slightly reductionist way to look at it. I think it is quite telling that even trans people are saying "yeah that topic is a bit too messy to untangle even for us, and we're the ones living this experience" - the issue is mainly that there are multiple valid requirements are inherently contradictory. I suspect the issue of transgenderism and athletics is a very good example of a Wicked Problem.
This seems like a controversial subject because it's one frequently used without any actual scientific basis or rationale behind it. Hence, bigotry.
A good example of such a situation is what happened to Caster Semenya who is biologically a woman and has had her testosterone levels used against her in attempt to discredit her and her performance, despite evidence contrary to the idea that it's testosterone that gives her an unfair advantage.
And ultimately if we were to make that argument in the first place, then we should argue to limit all professional athletes (male and female) by testosterone level as it is not a consistent thing in either men or women rather than using it as a bludgeon against specifically transgender athletes.
The commenter above you believes that inclusivity standards will lead to a situation whereby one party could claim that certain genuinely controversial statements are actually beyond reasonable dispute, and that any such dispute could therefore only come about as a consequence of the disagreeing party not accepting the first party and/or their identity.
That was surprisingly difficult. Frankly, it's a little strange to see such an illucid response being seemingly well received by HN.
> Having more diverse editors will lead to more diverse content.
Can you elaborate what content you'd expect to see more of if the editors were "more diverse"? This gets thrown around a lot here, but nobody actually says what exactly they mean. There are more than six million articles on the English Wikipedia.
What would change, which topics would get more, which would get less attention if Wikipedia editors were swapped out to represent their attributed groups (along some axes; most likely gender and broad ethnicity, I'm guessing, but not social status or education) of the American society at large?
> If there were more Norweigan editors then I'd expect to see more content about things that are "notable" within Norweigan history and culture.
Like what though? Here's [1] the Portal on Norway, there are hundreds of articles on Norway and Norwegian culture. From what I can see, the Norwegian Wikipedia does not cover Norway that much more, even though you can reasonably expect that it's primarily authored by Norwegians.
There are fewer but still hundreds of pages about e.g. Zimbabwe, its history, culture, politics, demographics etc.
I fail to see what's being not presented there. I understand the concern that it may be too USA-centered, and to a small degree it probably is, but I don't believe it's anywhere near the proportions it's made out to be, and I don't believe that it would significantly shift, because it's absolutely not a special interest community that covers only their ideas. And given that the US is the lone super power right now, militarily, culturally and economically, it is to be expected that it is very well covered, even in other language versions. It's somewhat important to everyone on earth how the US works. It's less important how Liechtenstein or Lesotho are organized, and either has their own history, but their history isn't strongly intertwined with recent world history.
The super vast majority are articles that are global (in any and all meanings) in nature, explaining scientific concepts and history. You may argue that, since Wikipedia's goal is to represent the common consensus of scientists that these topics would be different if e.g. Zimbabwe had been the world's super power for the last 70 years, and I partially agree, but far from completely. We'd see a lot more information about Zimbabwean wild life, nature and environment, but we'd still see articles on lasers, genetics, space travel, the history of Arabic numerals, because there's really no reason to believe that Zimbabwean scientists wouldn't have looked into these things etc.
Like more articles about people/events/places/traditions that many Norwegians consider to be notable.
I don't know if you're intentionally being difficult, but the post you originally replied to had links to an article and some previous discussion about pages on female scientists coming under more scrutiny than pages about male scientists.
I just used Norwegians as an example of a cultural group. Replace it with female, African American, latinx, trans, etc. and you can see how if more people from those groups are a part of the site, then there will be more articles about people/events/places/traditions that are notable to those cultural groups.
Because those editors will more likely recognize such articles as being notable to a non-trivial amount of people, whilst your average white guy might think it's something trivial just because they've never heard of it and "don't see what the big deal is".
I know this is weak medicine, but Wiki is CC licensed.
That means it can be forked if it turns out they are doing more than protecting people from harassment. For now let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
It also has public change logs, so it is easy to have a debate about the presence/absence of censorship.
> I know this is weak medicine, but Wiki is CC licensed. That means it can be forked if it turns out they are doing more than protecting people from harassment.
Wikipedia's protective moat isn't the licensing, it's the SEO. You can't compete with that under any circumstances. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Fork all you want, your content will never show up in Google's results with a high ranking, and as such you won't get a large enough audience or editor base to matter.
>requires that any derivative of works from Wikipedia must be released under that same license, must state that it is released under that license, and must acknowledge the contributors (which can be accomplished with a link back to that article on Wikipedia).
I like how cc requires making the materials available but it is served as a giant multi TB turd mostly made up of cruft. (think: custom templates) It is also funny how people seem to think anonymous users who cant be identified own copyright to anything. WP has refused to set up a proper identification process.
2 angry alcoholics > nobel laureate
A [shame] link back to wp? why? They don't own the rights and they are not a reliable host for crediting sources. If WP vanishes you are still obligated to name the authors. (who have no name or address)
The idea is of course nice. It would be more fun if one could easily export a category in various popular formats.
It is actually a very strong medicine, but good luck coordinating a critical mass of core contributors and moderators towards a single effort.
Expect the new policies to have the "unacceptable" writeups also excluded from revision histories so that they could not be easily rehabilitated in competing forks.
Are there db dumps available with article edit histories? I know that there are article backups you can download, but I don't know the limits or extents of those archives.
Problem with inclusivity is that it becomes murky emotional stuff real fast.
"I'm triggered by the color orange, HN is SOO exclusive towards me because I cannot STAND that color, and as long as anyone dares post links to pages with orange, or that disgusting orange is used anywhere on the page, I cannot participate (checks diagnoses)"
Inclusivity of editors is a major factor for inclusivity of content.
Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content.
With less than 10% of editors being women, for example, content is guaranteed to be somewhat skewed, even assuming absolutely no ill will by anybody.
Among the famous examples are a scientist's entry being deleted as "not notable" just weeks before she won the Nobel Prize. Or, if you prefer quantitative data, that articles about women tend to emphasise their relationships and children (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06307v2.pdf).
I think you’re right here though. For example, the staggering amount of Japanese-centric pages on enwiki shows how the interest of a monoculture can have an outsized impact on the community. But at the same time, why not the free content?
> Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content.
Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopedia though, not a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences.
The context for this discussion has data demonstrating that articles about women have more space dedicated to their relationships and families than articles about men.
That's it? They found that women are more visible than men on Wikipedia. Like the results where they find that woman are less central etc, the differences are rather small. Given that it's a 9:1 split in genders, you'd expect a bit more obvious results if that was the reason for the results and not e.g. society at large, which Wikipedia largely mirrors. And you'd especially not expect that women are more visible than men. Alas, if you so choose, you can of course interpret that as "the male gaze" and the patriarchal conspiracy keeping the women out of the spot light by ... putting them in the spot light.
It seems you focus on one small part of one study and make sweeping declarations about Wikipedia by and large.
Look at you go, immediately discarding everything that other persons could contribute on the sole basis that it would be content from people different from yourself, true meritocracy in action!
I don't think that's what he means. You are reading too much there.
I read that as wikipedia should be factual and facts don't need to care about the background of the person. Citations are always needed.
Diversity in race imo is a bad diversity criteria for some things. For one, it separates people living long time at a particular place (think 2-3 generations) as different people because they are not white so they must be different.
Anyone who talks about diversity I have seen has stereotypes of their own on what people from different races are like.
Maybe, but when someone replies to the example of a Nobel prize winner being deleted as non-notable with "[wikipedia is] not a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences", I have a hard time supposing them to have a well argued position.
Ok, so how did he got from "different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge" to "a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences".
The only way to do so is to discard the interests and knowledge while putting great emphasis on experiences - and immediately assume they will end manifest as bulk personal anecdotes.
Way to assume my gender and preferred pronouns. Bet you're glad that HN has no CoC that would get you a stern warning for this.
> The only way to do so is to discard the interests and knowledge while putting great emphasis on experiences - and immediately assume they will end manifest as bulk personal anecdotes.
No. One very obvious way to do so is to recognize that Wikipedia isn't about interests and experiences and the contributors/authors of articles but about sourced information. It's an encyclopedia, not a social network or a blog. The articles are supposed to represent information gathered from other sources (and they take other literal there, Original Research by the author is not desired [1]), not the knowledge, interests or experiences of the person adding information to the article.
People write about what interests them and what they know about before starting to write. That is where interest and knowledge plays huge role. Lack of knowledge about something means you wont be able to put together good article.
This has zero to do with original research, that is red herring trying to shift the topic. The whole "sourced information therefore pre-existing knowledge, interests and experiences dont play role" is obvious nonsense.
Experiences influence what you write about, what you put emphasis on and how you write.
If people write about what interests them and what they know about, what change would you see when the editors of Wikipedia are changed in demographics? If you add more women, will there be more knitting-articles? Won't women who studied physics work on physics related articles? Will an African-American that works as a programmer choose to write about Basketball instead of programming patterns?
I find the whole assumption weird that something would fundamentally change. It's not like Wikipedia claims to be "the world's knowledge at your fingertips", but is barely more than a bunch of pages on programming and ango-american cultural concepts. The English Wikipedia hosts over six million articles. Let that sink in: six. million. articles.
What are they missing, what are they suppressing, as somebody else suggested?
> This has zero to do with original research, that is red herring trying to shift the topic.
It has everything to do with it. An encyclopedia relies not on first hand knowledge, experiences and interests but on compressing third party information. It's basically an organized collection of book reports, only it's about topics, not individual books, and you get to add the bits of information that you discovered in some book to what others have discovered.
> Experiences influence what you write about, what you put emphasis on and how you write.
And, again, Wikipedia emphasizes that they do not want editorialized articles, don't want your individual writing style and personal opinions. They want a neutral point of view (that term is used so much on Wikipedia that they just say NPOV), they aim for a constant style of little variance. Again, it's an encyclopedia, not a social network or blog site. They very much do not want to give a small world to each and every editor where they can present their world view, opinions and experiences in whatever way they deem fit. There are sites for that, but Wikipedia is not it.
Here's what Wikipedia says on the topic of what it wants to be [1]: Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by acting as an encyclopedia, a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge. The goal of a Wikipedia article is to present a neutrally written summary of existing mainstream knowledge in a fair and accurate manner with a straightforward, "just-the-facts style". Articles should have an encyclopedic style with a formal tone instead of essay-like, argumentative, promotional or opinionated writing.
You may argue that it should want to be something totally different. But that's not really talking about Wikipedia, that would be watwutpedia, which might be a great project as well, but I hope you agree that it would be a different project.
> If people write about what interests them and what they know about, what change would you see when the editors of Wikipedia are changed in demographics?
Different demographics have different interests on average.
> If you add more women, will there be more knitting-articles? Won't women who studied physics work on physics related articles?
The two are not mutually exclusive. In that case there will likely get both women writing about physics and about knitting. Sometimes, it will be exactly same woman writing both articles. Kind of like same man can write about physics, wood carving, league of legends and embroidery.
> It has everything to do with it. An encyclopedia relies not on first hand knowledge, experiences and interests but on compressing third party information. It's basically an organized collection of book reports, only it's about topics, not individual books, and you get to add the bits of information that you discovered in some book to what others have discovered.
That is completely offtopic, because no one suggested people would write anything except third party information.
> And, again, Wikipedia emphasizes that they do not want editorialized articles, don't want your individual writing style and personal opinions. They want a neutral point of view (that term is used so much on Wikipedia that they just say NPOV), they aim for a constant style of little variance. Again, it's an encyclopedia, not a social network or blog site. They very much do not want to give a small world to each and every editor where they can present their world view, opinions and experiences in whatever way they deem fit. There are sites for that, but Wikipedia is not it.
Again, the only person suggesting that there would be editorialized articles or personal opinions is you.
But actually, yes, individual writing style shows up on wikipedia. Some pages are horribly written and others are well written - that is individual writing style.
I've got to ask; given that a core point of contributing to HN is "Assume good faith." How does that marry up with this cathy-newman esque tactic universally seen when any discussions around this sort of topic crops up?
You're misunderstanding what I wrote. Wikipedia very clearly states that they don't want original research even, much less original experiences and feelings. If you stay with the Wikipedia guidelines, a "diverse team of editors" could shift the areas of focus a bit (both within articles and on what articles get worked on), but the content should largely remain the same.
They want to provide well-sourced information, present the major thoughts where no consensus is visible and do it in a way that every reader can go to the sources and check it. If you want more representation of $group on Wikipedia, you'll do much better by publishing more work of $group's members so that it can be cited and quoted on Wikipedia. Just having them on Wikipedia doesn't/shouldn't work, it's not a news paper where somebody may set the topics/angles to be covered.
I don't know "the reason", but I find "knitting pattern" to be pretty hard to write a lot about in an encyclopedic context while limiting it to exactly that term. The article as is gives a general outline of what a knitting pattern is. I'm afraid that might trigger you, but I do believe that explaining what a programming pattern is is actually much harder than explaining what a knitting pattern is, as it's much more abstract.
And, of course, remember that the article isn't about "knitting", it's about "knitting patterns", so you'd need sources that concern themselves with knitting patterns _as a subject_ and not with individual knitting patterns.
There are very detailed articles about knitting, there's an article about common knitting abbreviations (which I don't believe fits into an encyclopedia, but whatever), there's plenty of other stuff about knitting.
What did you want to see on an article about knitting patterns? And, as a follow-up, why haven't you added that to the article about knitting patterns?
Consider that knitting patterns are older than calculus, and of concern for a huge number people today, while programming patterns are 50 years old and relevant for less than half of those that concern themselves with knitting.
Then argue again that the difference in effort is adequately described by lack of sources rather than people like you actively discouraging effort being put into expanding a topic.
As to your final question, I don't really care about knitting, why should I do it in place of all the people that do?
> Consider that knitting patterns are older than calculus, and of concern for a huge number people today, while programming patterns are 50 years old and relevant for less than half of those that concern themselves with knitting.
That says literally nothing about why you should have a long article about the meta of "knitting patterns". The different types of forks don't even have their own article. Shame! Rage! I'm offended!
> Then argue again that the difference in effort is adequately described by lack of sources rather than people like you actively discouraging effort being put into expanding a topic.
Literally nobody discourages any effort. Your assumption seems to be "just add some women, they will naturally flock to articles about knitting. If the articles about knitting patterns isn't as long as the article about programming patterns, that's proof of discrimination". It's obviously wrong.
> As to your final question, I don't really care about knitting, why should I do it in place of all the people that do?
That's the real reason. Nobody cares about expanding the knitting pattern article. But most people don't have a need to be perpetually enraged, so they notice that there's an article about knitting patterns, see that there's an spin-off article about common knitting pattern abbreviations, read a thing or two and then move on with their life.
They don't construct elaborate conspiracy theories about people trying to discourage efforts to expand the knitting pattern article because of reasons. No wonder people are wary of vague CoCs. They're afraid of people like you, who don't care about the project, who don't contribute, but who need to feel powerful by injecting themselves, making silly demands and then going off about how everybody else is discouraging the noble efforts they don't care about.
There is simply more content to cover. The commenter seemed to believe that it is more difficult to write an article about knitting patterns because there is just less material to cite.
This is a clear example of bias. A person holds assumptions about the depth of a community.
You can’t just assert that amount of content associated with an idea is just equal to how long it’s been around. There is far more research and intellectual effort going into programming patterns than knitting pattens.
Here’s what they mean by inclusivity. Right now the large majority of authors/editors on wikipedia are caucasian men from richer western countries. This causes an inherit bias in wikipedia’s content. Wikimedia rightly would like the authors to be an unbiased representative sample of society if it wants to be a representative encyclopedia (do se still use that word?)
I visited wikimedia’s HQ almost a decade ago. Back then they were trying to solve this problem by making the editor more approachable.
> Wikipedia editors are anonymous unless they don't want to be. How can anyone tell?
Anonymity and privacy are of course highly helpful but editors should be free to disclose facts about themselves if they so choose. I think we can all agree that incivility and harassment can be a major issue in such cases.
On the other hand, I don't think Wikipedia editors should ever disclose facts about themselves. Ideally, you want anonymized contributions to ensure that the contribution is actually correct and correctly sourced and isn't just "waved through" because others recognize the name of the editor, or because they've said that they are Professor Xyz.
The reason to reveal though is used to bolster the contribution by allowing them to declare any edit they do not approve of to be based on their identity rather than the facts of the article.
This is very common method and actually presented in writing as how to take over any system. You deny a voice to others by presenting the claim that any opposition is based wholly on identity issues.
Hacker news is a really good site for tech discussion.
But when it comes to anything about diversity / harassment in the workplace, it seems like a group of people crop up needing to tell everyone that they're the real victims
There's a signicant subset of people that cry the loudest of censorship only when it comes to communities having a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia.
In any other discussion about Wikipedia, there would be a significant concensus that Wikipedia has a unwelcoming to new editors community.
The community reflects the larger society, which is divided on social issues. Don't forget that users come from many countries and regions. That's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby.
The biggest factor, though, is that HN is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
(Edit: I mean internet communities of HN's size and scope, or larger. The problems are different at smaller size or narrower scope, but those aren't the problems we have.)
People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural/national divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts with opponents, it's usually in a context where conflict is expected, e.g. a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends has already responded to. The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of other users, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—something more important.
This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by hostile forces, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places in their life. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now it feels like that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this really is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was?
Different internet communities grow from different initial conditions. Each one replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial condition was to be a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions trapped in a single bottle.
This "non-siloed" nature of HN causes a deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article. It's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience is that bad.
But this is a misunderstanding—it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though they certainly do. Rather, it's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place broke into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1].
It's easy to miss, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, however partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about.
Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the orange site sucks.
I'd like to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: what's happening is a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that opportunity because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode.
HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is uncomfortable. Peace is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different.
I know it sounds strange and is grandiose to say, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to move further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself.
[1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, I'd love to know about it.
That is a clear, thoughtful, and worthwhile message; but not just sitting with that, you've followed it up with a goal, awareness and action
I would encourage you to write and maybe expand on it somewhere more permanent
I particularly like your ending - the nature of real peace and community! It is not your goal, but I feel this is a powerful message to both online and offline communities. Inability to live in the same room is a massive driving force in say politics and global exchanges
Maybe 'we' and 'they' will still disagree in the end, but even agreement can be meaningless if we haven't the ability to sit down together - in peace
I appreciated your technical observations on silos and voting, which are essential to running HN; but would like to suggest that you expand your vision a little to beyond HN, or to how you use even us (the scorpions in a bottle) to display these things more clearly
I agree that HN has such a large userbase whilst not splintering it off in a way that division forms in sites like Reddit / Twitter is really unique.
And it's a site where excellent discourse can be had because there's an expectation of spending time to explain your point of view or back it up.
How things like dumb joke replies get downvoted is a testament to how the community wants to keep the quality up.
Personally, it's because the site is so good, that when discussion quality drops it's more noticeable.
Like in this case, I was remarking on how knee jerk the comments were that they are like predicable cliches.
But also a lot of the ideas expressed with vitriol are the majority opinion.
In the same vein. Anything that Lennart Poettering has developed seems to get the same treatment where people often respond with snark/vitriol by default no matter the reason systemd/pulseaudio or something else has hit the news.
Also a few weeks ago there was a post something to do with online game services. And a developer at a large publisher commented about how the cost of hosting servers is done on a per user basis. And they ended up replying to someone with "I've been in the industry for 6 years, I know you hate me" at the top of their response.
That kind of thing seems par for the course on Reddit / Twitter, but I guess because of the high quality of the forum, I feel sometimes that for other topics the discourse can be better.
A fine observation! I do disagree on a few points:
> no other site is even trying to do this
many websites are designed this way. Really, think about it. Segregation doesn't happen automagically. Now, you could ask "but are the user bases as large as HN"? A few are and other aren't, I'm sure.
> it isn't like John Lennon's 'Imagine'
In the Anarchistic vision of 'Imagine', you would probably have a lot of HN-style arguments too, but they don't devolve into inter-national or inter-faith wars. When the "world lives as one", it's just like you describe - a lot of friction and discomfort but no segregation of hostile factions.
Finally, we need to remember that the level of hostility on HN right now is a lot for some people regardless of what they're used to. That doesn't mean we need to censor ourselves, but just to be aware that many people are more conflict-averse than the typical HN reader - and this aversion may well be correlated with, say, gender. So problems remain despite the positive view that you justly present.
Right, I meant "no other site" at HN's scale. I tried to make that clear later (edit: and have added something earlier in the post to say it explicitly).
Of course I may be wrong about this—I probably am. But in that case I'm curious to know what they are, so we can learn from them.
It isn't just about scale, but also scope. If a forum has a specific topic—Lego, let's say—then the problems I'm writing about are off the table, because it's easy to tell which posts are about Lego and which aren't, and the community will happily support moderation of the latter.
That's really insightful, thanks for taking the time of sharing it.
That being said, without considering our own opinions on a given topic, you can easily reproduce the experience of visiting random HN threads and finding a well written dismissive post on top of the thread, no matter what the subject is, and almost systematically (and thus, when someone is interested in the topic, that's the first thing they see). This is hardly explained by the "monster neighbors shock" effect. If you agree with this observation, how would you explain it?
Second, though, I think you might be describing your own shock experience here. Not every thread starts with a shallow dismissal—some do, but actually most don't. (Moderation is a factor, because we downweight petty and indignant comments whenever we see them at the top of a thread.) My bet is that you're seeing these sometimes, and because they're shocking and unpleasant, they somehow expand into your experience of HN overall. That's a shock experience, because the things that strike us unpleasantly end up dominating our sense of the whole. I've written about this a lot, but in slightly different terms: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Trying to figure these phenomena out is an ongoing process.
I see. It makes sense, thanks. I guess that's actually the problem that silo'd discussions solve (if you see only what you already like, you won't rush to disagree, and your comments won't shock people). Although, that's quite a depressing conclusion :)
Out of curiosity, do you have any leads on what may replace a voting system for emerging insightful content? It sounds like a job for AI, but I guess any bias in it would be hated even more passionately.
I don't think AI has good enough taste yet. The best possibility I know of is giving users a higher-signal (than upvoting) way to single out a post that they think is particularly good. This would be like flagging, but for good things rather than bad. Actually, that was our intention when we created the 'favorites' feature and made favorites public—but it didn't work out that way, so maybe this is harder than it sounds.
Super interesting, thanks. Have you considered limiting the amount of votes a user can cast per hour or day or week? I guess they would get more on the reflective side if they're dealing with something perceived as a limited resource, making vote itself that higher signal.
Yes, this is what forums and mailing lists used to do (well, they're still doing it, there just aren't as many).
When Digg introduced voting on links, it was initially seen as having way better content than the rest. And then Reddit did it with comments as well, and nobody looked back.
The main reason, I think, is that nobody read a whole thread. They look at the few top level comments (in upvoted threads) or at the last ones (in a forum/mail threads) and will reply to that - so that the quality of the whole discussion is determined by what people see first.
That being said, it indeed comes with a lot of problems of its own. Upvotes/downvotes favor hive mind thinking (you want to be loved, so you'll give people what they want) and mobs (if something is downvoted, you'll just add one more downvote).
A couple years ago, I went back to using mailing lists and it's indeed a less frustrating experience, from my point of view. But I'm not sure it's about the technical aspect, it may just be because there are just less people in it.
The ones with the shock value tend to get bigger though. Chronological ordering would emphasize either the first or the last comment, and given that these are two out of many, it's unlikely that either of them is the best comment.
I appreciate this comment and mostly agree with the contents of it. But I take exception with the use of words like "evil", "monsters", etc.
I can't think of anyone who regularly writes on HN whom I'd characterize with such words, even ones I deeply disagree with.
I'd ask you to point me to such a user, but I know that it (reasonably) won't happen given the site's rules. Still, I'm very skeptical.
If someone is espousing things like Nazism or genocide, then yes the label applies, but I've never seen a regular HN user advocate for anything like that.
I think what's happening is that there's a subset of users here who live and/or have grown up in extremely liberal environments, like San Francisco, or university campuses, who view anything to the right of Joe Biden as being "extreme" and "evil". That doesn't mean such people are actually evil, or monsters. It just means they're on the right (often even center-right) of the political spectrum.
And most of the country is entirely unlike urban liberal enclaves. I don't use that term as an insult - many great innovations and ideas come from our urban liberal enclaves. But they're not representative of the country as a whole.
(and for the record, since some will assume my politics based on that remark, I'm neither a conservative nor a GOP/Trump supporter. I'm a centrist/moderate, both by self-identification and empirically - in the form of dozens of political tests).
By the way, just so you don't think this is a general anti-HN stance, it's not. I like HN a lot, and I think that aside from political/ideological issues and moderation, mods do a great job. I also don't agree with the common criticism that HN shields or shelters YCombinator companies. At least, I've not found that to be the case.
I'm not using those words literally but as a way of communicating the emotional effect of what I called the shock experience. (Edit: by 'emotional effect' I just mean how it feels.)
I really love this moderation style where you self reference yourself but with added thoughts instead of only pointing at a previous comment or guideline. It shows how moderator (dang) has changed over time after reinforcement learning of hn comments and submissions.
It's much more reminiscent of BB-style forums where moderators were part of the community and would explain their actions at the time of enforcement. This is unfortunately un-scalable, and so larger communities turn to strictly enforced rules with zero flexibility a la Reddit or moderation via machine classification like FB, Twitter, and YouTube.
One important thing you should also consider isn't just the fact that the community mostly stays together, but instead also that there's something to be said about who leaves, and which voices are subsequently never heard again.
Many of my friends who left this site did so because of how alienating these threads can be to people not represented in this community. I think that's been overlooked.
I agree that that's an issue. I've spent many hours talking with such users (generally by email) but of course most of them don't contact us.
The goal here is to have a healthy community that's organized around intellectual curiosity. Every time we lose one intellectually curious user, to me that is a disaster that cuts into the core of the site. To the extent that people aren't here because they feel unrepresented in the community, that's a big deal. We need their curiosity as much as anyone's, and diversity—if I may use that word literally—is a must-have for intellectual curiosity to function at all. Curiosity thrives on diffs.
And of course there is a vicious circle: if they leave, then they are even less represented here. I'm open to ideas about improving this. The problem is not that it is overlooked (by us, at least). It's that the same forces that make it hard to solve in society at large make it hard to solve here, and in one respect even harder, because people misinterpret the nature of this community in the way I described above.
This discussion can be tricky because it overlaps with the ideological question, which is not the same thing. Sometimes people want us to ban everyone who expresses the opposing ideology, because that's the only sort of community they feel welcome or safe in. Even if we wanted to do that, it wouldn't work. That does not mean we don't care about inclusion. We care a lot about inclusion. In fact I spend the majority of my waking hours trying to nurture the conditions for it here.
By the way: if any of your friends would be open to it, please send them to hn@ycombinator.com. I would very much appreciate hearing their concerns.
Not everyone is comfortable talking to you privately, given all the ridiculous warnings you give out. I wanted to talk to you about turning off downweighting of my comments that you secretly enabled, but there is no easy way to say anything to you publicly.
I have seen this in many communities, and my opinion is that it occurs from large growth and no monitoring trends in attrition with a coincidental "that's how the community voted; too bad, so sad" mentality that, unfortunately, generates a shout-down chamber, even if only on a limited set of topics.
This occurs, right now, here on HN, and IMHO it comes from the comments feed, a feature I find only useful to moderators and manipulators. Even the mention of certain topics from even a meta-discussion perspective receives down-votes, sometimes within seconds. This seems further amplified in communities where senior community members are granted super powers.
> One important thing you should also consider isn't just the fact that the community mostly stays together, but instead also that there's something to be said about who leaves, and which voices are subsequently never heard again.
> Many of my friends who left this site did so because of how alienating these threads can be to people not represented in this community. I think that's been overlooked.
I am one of the commonly dissenting voices and nearly left about two years ago. When I decided to stay, I decided my accumulated karma was to be sacrificed in the downvotes of those lurkers who disagree without having the courage to engage.
When my karma runs out I will leave the site forever.
Aside: Destin on SmarterEveryDay at YT had a good video on trolls at Reddit, but his points are generally applicable. His whole series on disinformation and filter bubbles is very much worth a watch:
TLDW: Lean into the trolling; don't just feed them, stuff them. Come at the person in good faith and respond to them until they prove otherwise. Destin's video has a lot more to it though.
Though such a 'countermeasure' is not what dang is talking about here, I think the advice is good for just about any online discussion. Lean in.
The Wikipedia community is unwelcoming and initiatives like this are part of the reason. That's because these initiatives for "inclusion" are quite often used for something superficial or as a convenient cudgel to hit someone you disagree with.
The way "inclusion" in the US/UK is done is what I would consider racist and sexist. I don't want to see more of it in online services that I use. Giving someone an advantage because of their race or sex and thus discriminating against others for the same reasons is racism/sexism.
Edit: we know Wikipedia has been a battleground for US politics for a long time now. I think this is seen as a step towards one side.
As much as I agree with you, is "inclusivity" ever used maliciously?
I'm running some coding events and while I'm a firm believer in meritocracy often giving the space to outsiders or unusual folk end up in more interesting and new experiences for the event attendees.
In my mind I see it as a meritocratic choice to diversify the floor and honestly I've never seen this "feature" being abused or cause any friction.
To me it seems like this attack vector is only when rewards are high (prize, job position) but for pay less and unappreciated work like wikipedia editing, or in my case coding presentations, I don't really see how this could be abused.
Take an example from the python founder. He directly said during a talk that he will not mentor any males, with the implied goal of furthering inclusivity.
In my views, refusing to help people because of their gender is maliciously. Making decision about the worthiness of helping a young individual should not be about their gender. Call it a principle.
From reading about the science of discrimination and In-group and out-group thinking, there exist some key finding of human behavior and rationalization. "Us" are individuals and "them" are a homogenic group, and if you treat people like individuals you are automatically treating them as a part of "us". When someone of "us" do something wrong, it is about individual faults and circumstances. When someone of "them" do something wrong, it is a inherent trait of the group and fundamental aspect their kind.
The attack vector can only exist when a set of people are treated as a homogenic group rather than individuals. Inclusivity initiatives should in theory never do this, but defining people as a homogenic group is sadly what most of them end up doing. Maybe it because it easy and quick, or because it makes for good signaling to the in-group. The result is usually the same with the out-group feeling abused and attacked, especially for individuals who been moved from being in-group to out-group and now instinctual feel more vulnerable to attacks.
> The attack vector can only exist when a set of people are treated as a homogenic group rather than individuals. Inclusivity initiatives should in theory never do this, but defining people as a homogenic group is sadly what most of them end up doing
I feel that you've summarized the issue perfectly here with these two sentences.
However I feel that it's not exactly problem of diversity/inclusivity but problem of tribalism itself, though I'm not sure how practical it is to separate these two topics here.
We can hope that tribalism will go away eventually but if anything modern culture seems to be actually encouraging it instead. This in particular really perplexes me. The world is as global as it has ever been and yet people push and actively create tribes — it's this ugly human primitive nature poking it's head out and there really isn't any cultural push against that. In fact every time I try to point this out I get down-voted.
> It's not like young men interested in Python have nowhere else to go.
It tells them that inclusivity is against their interests. Boys growing up where they are explicitly barred from opportunities due to their gender are probably not going to be very willing to accommodate women in the future. Also things like this has shown to not move the needle, so all you accomplish is drive the wedge between genders even further down.
> I think how Guido wants to spend his time is up to Guido.
This over-extrapolates though. Guido deciding to mentor women doesn't imply every Pythonista is or should be doing the same. And when the userbase is already mostly men, the existing pipelines are demonstrably working for men; making an effort to pull in women isn't shrinking anyone's pie.
Yes, it's pretty malicious, both against the targets of his sexist policy and the broader movement towards inclusion. If young men come to understand that "inclusivity" means blocking them from certain opportunities, they're not going to be on board with proposals to make hiring or promotions more inclusive.
The argument is that, when someone says "we're going to make this mentorship program more inclusive", people will have to wonder whether they mean normal inclusivity or Guido's sexist inclusivity. His actions alone won't radically shift the needle, but we'll eventually reach a point where inclusivity just means "there are a lot of women" and the original idea of fair opportunities for everyone is lost.
Note that this isn't a radical conspiracy - it's already happened in some areas. There are a lot of colleges with special inclusion resources for women, even though women are significantly overrepresented in the modern university system.
Because they indicate how, in general, men continue to have more educational opportunities. Whether universities are inclusive is a subset of the question of whether the idea of fair opportunities for everyone is lost.
Yes, words and symbolic acts alone can be malicious regardless if the practical effect is negligible. Since the parent post talked about running coding events, Guido public stance is an example of what to not do in such events.
I have participated in events for gifted children, including teaching python. One such child already had before they came to the event written up the whole game design, painted the different rooms and enemies, created most of the game logic and now needed help with hit detection in pygames. Hit detection is quite a bit beyond the tutorial part of pygames, but in the end we mostly accomplished the goal and they left quite happy. Did I care about their gender or even asked about it? Of course not. Here was a person who needed my help.
Maybe no immedient harm would have happened if I had rejected that child based on their gender or treated them as part of a homogenic group with unchangeable inherent traits. There is always other people, other resources, and they clearly demonstrated the ability to self learn. But what kind of person would I be if I did that?
> Did I care about their gender or even asked about it?
No. They were a boy though. I'll tell you why I'm saying that with confidence: because we know men are most of the Python userbase, and they're more comfortable approaching other Pythonistas for help because they're other men. Argument from statistical probability.
That's specifically the issue Guido is seeking to address, and he's not going to do it successfully by not caring about gender. Not caring about gender tends to get us more of the status quo, not something approaching more inclusiveness.
If the kid was a girl, good for her and I commend her forwardness and bravery. We know most women aren't interested in putting themselves in that position because it's uncomfortable for them (any more than most men are interested in stepping into a knitting circle to learn more from a group of women). And if Python as a community is to grow the pie, that situation needs to change. So that it's not just you who doesn't need to care about the gender of the student; it's the student who doesn't need to care about the gender of the teacher.
> In my mind I see it as a meritocratic choice to diversify the floor and honestly I've never seen this "feature" being abused or cause any friction.
How is it meritocratic if you decidedly do not consider the merits of the participants, but their attributed identity / group-membership?
I don't disagree with the idea that diversity can make for great results (though I probably disagree with you on what constitutes diversity), new perspectives and cool events. But I wouldn't say "therefore it's meritocratic", because it seems like something completely different.
I encourage you to watch a Joe Rogan episode from last year when he brought Jack Dorsey, a Twitter VP, and Tim Pool. [1]
The reason this episode is relevant to your comment discussion is that Pool presents that there is this paradigm problem where certain policies intended to bring "inclusion" end up excluding something like half of the U.S. population. This paradigm Twitter management is stuck in prevents them from understanding how people outside their paradigm view their actions, and this results in effectively banning a enormous set of the population from popular discourse.
It is hard to evaluate if this is exclusively an American issue because, really, there are so few other countries that speak English.
> It is hard to evaluate if this is exclusively an American issue because, really, there are so few other countries that speak English.
What does speaking english has to do with this?
Regarding twitter case I feel that it's unfair to classify the issue with a single anecdote. Especially when this anecdote is about notoriously mismanaged, pointless corporation such as twitter.
> Regarding twitter case I feel that it's unfair to classify the issue with a single anecdote. Especially when this anecdote is about notoriously mismanaged, pointless corporation such as twitter.
Evaluating online behavior, which is presented in text, across all languages, is Hard.
It seems clear you didn't watch the video. Pool doesn't present Twitter as a single anecdote, but an example of a larger problem.
Addtionally, it is not clear to me that a platform as large as Twitter can be dismissed as an "anecdote".
The larger problem is people with these positions are not even interested in evaluating other positions, a claim supported by your comment and the down-voters of mine.
Often, such initiatives are about virtue-signaling rather than actually doing something against racism, sexism and homophobia.
Worse, and apparently also often, these initiatives are even worse: They introduce a mechanism legitimizing instant bans following a complaint against a user, with no detailed statement of the claims against them, no ability to respond to the accusations, no due process in handling the complaint, and no transparency vis-a-vis other users. This already poisons the community atmosphere - and of course, such mechanisms never fail to be misused, adding to the acrimony.
Using the term "virtue signaling" is itself an attempt to shut down any conversation, virtue signaling that the commenter is very impartial compared to everyone else and knows better
This site is incapable of having nuanced conversations about this, because opinions that the loudest voices disagree with are downvoted + flagged into oblivion. This is significant when talking about diversity, because it means minority voices are silenced, and without those voices, such a conversation is meaningless.
For example, look at the comments thread whenever "James Damore," "cancel culture," or "affirmative action" comes up. That should be proof alone that HN is never going to have an actual impactful conversation about this... Ever.
I'd prefer if the mods just banned these discussions forever, because it's exhausting, and forever doomed to end up as a "diversity is bad" conversation.
> I'd prefer if the mods just banned these discussions forever, because it's exhausting, and forever doomed to end up as a "diversity is bad" conversation.
Funny thing is, it looks the other way around from the other perspective.
Maybe what you're seeing is not a bias against race- and sex-based DIE initiatives, but your first taste of balance in discussions about them.
Maybe because you assume that your argument is correct, whenever you see the other side at all, you feel like there's an imbalance, when perhaps it's just that you have a warped view of the landscape of opinions on these matters.
In this submission at least, it seems to be primarily low-effort comments that are downvoted. By that I mean wild assumptions, no effort to provide any evidence to back them up or just some popular saying and a dash of moralization that suggests whoever isn't sharing the opinion of the commenter is a bad person, does not want to engage in an honest conversation, has a hidden agenda and wants to drive away the good people etc.
When someone is offered a conversation and results to name-calling and straw-manning, isn't a downvote what you'd expect?
> There's a significant subset of people that cry the loudest of censorship only when it comes to communities having a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia.
That's your own bias speaking here, HN is pretty vocal against all censorship or community hijacking efforts. It's just that in nine cases out of ten "a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia" is used performatively and in bad faith and few people here buy it or bother to pretend that they do.
People, and I'd argue especially on HN (for an internet community), generally aren't out to promote harassment or exclusivity so it's telling how Orwellian things have become when such a statement - which on the face of it sounds good and worthy - is rightly recognized as Newspeak.
Wikimedia can do as they please, and if it results in a shitshow as many such efforts have before, then on their head may it be.
I've been pretty generous with recurring yearly donations up until now but I'll honestly put things on pause until we see how some of this plays out.
If anyone is genuinely concerned about the impact this may have, I would suggest archiving a recent dump of wikipedia at the least. It's only ~25GB.
All the buzzwords are there, toxicity, harassment, safe spaces, sanction, ban, inclusivity. All to promote/cement the viewpoints that we now understand to be ,self evidently, the correct ones.
The thing is, whenever you invoke Popper, you're calling the person you disagree with a literal Nazi who wants to liquidate millions of people.
Anything short of that and the logic falls apart -- there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them.
I'm afraid I don't know what "invoke Popper" means.
> there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them.
If that intent is demonstrable, there's no reason to assist them in their goals.
Karl Popper's the original author of the paradox of tolerance meme.
The paradox isn't "you don't have to tolerate intolerant people because they're bad and tolerance is our goal", the paradox is that tolerating people who then proceed to seize power and outlaw all disagreement with them undermines tolerance.
Unless there's a credible threat, it's a misuse of the quote.
If you're talking about anti-Nazi laws in Germany, fine, but I see the quote trotted out all the time to justify eg twitter banning some alt-right-adjacent nerd for having bad opinions.
I suspect what has changed is that such "alt-right-adjacent nerds" are increasingly seen as credible threats.
Nobody paid much attention to what that guy on gab was saying to like-minded folk on gab... Until he grabbed a gun and massacred everyone in a religious building.
When the threat evaluation models aren't trusted, the spread on evaluation of "credible threat" increases.
I mean, even a mass shooting like that doesn't trigger the paradox of tolerance. It's a terrible tragedy, and a law enforcement issue, but society as a whole is not less tolerant for it -- we all agree, don't shoot up a synagogue or mosque, that is extremely bad form in our society.
The paradox of tolerance would be if we decided to be tolerant of a pro-mosque-shooting political party and they took power and instituted mandatory mosque shootings every Friday. We would have messed up in that case.
It's not, "I demand people who disagree with me on less clear-cut issues be silenced because they're bigots, according to me".
Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Do we all agree? I think a lot of people do. There's a disturbingly large number who do not. And there are corners of the Internet perfectly willing to entertain their fantasies of establishing such a political party.
I think whether one should cut that off at the knees by monitoring such sites and, when necessary, squelching the channel or one waits until someone has grabbed a gun to act on the ideation is an intensity slider on paradox of tolerance that reasonable people can disagree on.
Given the sliding scale, it's probably a case-by-case issue. Hard to come up with a general principle that's going to universally apply; give an example of something people have been silenced on that they should have been allowed to continue, and there's debate to be had, but on the general principle, both sides can probably agree that there's times to silence and times to not.
I think it's a fallacy to assume that spree killers are trying to seize any kind of political power. The Columbine killers could not care less about educational or school policy: they were simply extreme nihilists who hated everyone and everything, and they were ready to prove it in the most self-aggrandizing way.
Mind you, I'm not saying that we should tolerate such folks, either; and once you get past their tiresome, narcissistic self-aggrandizement, it's not like they have anything worthwhile to say. But that's a different argument than Popper's; it assumes the existence of some minimally basic ethic of thriving, and says that no, you can't aim to destroy the world around you even if you would be quite OK with everyone else doing it back to you in return.
It almost feels like one could, if one so chose, synthesize out a "Societies interpret self-destructive nihilism as damage and route around it" statement. Or something near to it.
I'm not sure how satanism factors into it; let's table that.
> Would you also support banning hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?
If we're talking no-platforming, I don't think the question is whether society bans it; I think the question is "Would you compel Wal-Mart to sell hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?" And I would not. But it's a sliding scale which is, as you've noted, tied to the likelihood of the group in question seizing enough power to concretize their ideas. In the US at least, hip-hop artists aren't an organized political structure intent on overthrowing the US government.
White supremacists are another story entirely. It's pretty unambiguous what "blood and soil" or "Jews will not replace us" mean. And a lot of Americans are deeply concerned with the risk that that ideology has its tentacles extremely deeply embedded in one of the two primary parties at the federal level in the US.
The conclusion was that parental advisory stickers are cool and will help sell your album, and I'm glad we got there as a society.
Incidentally, Wal-mart in particular was on the conservative side of that culture war episode, and they did in fact refuse to sell those albums while also selling entire racks of guns.
> Incidentally, Wal-mart in particular was on the conservative side of that culture war episode, and they did in fact refuse to sell those albums
Indeed they did. And the US government did not compel them to sell the albums, nor should they have. The albums found their audience in spite of some channels deciding it wasn't a kind of speech they would tolerate on their premises.
Similarly, some of the speakers who have been no-platformed will find their audience without a university's help; that doesn't imply the universities should be compelled to help them. And some toxic moderators and editors will continue to be toxic on some other site; that doesn't imply that site must be Wikipedia.
There's an argument that certain information systems have become 'common carriers' in a way that wal-mart never was, and maybe we should regulate them differently.
But I was mostly just nitpicking improper usage of the paradox of tolerance. Righteous censorship of 'bad' ideas might feel good but it's probably not a great instinct to have in the long term -- this cultural moment will pass, the meta-ideas about when it's ok to censor are longer-lasting.
Wal-Mart carries plenty of stuff, though. If you're going to move towards that kind of regulation for free information services, there has to be some other basis for it.
I don't know the solution, but I definitely wouldn't want my phone carrier deplatforming me for counter-revolutionary speech.
There are plenty of other places to go if Wal-Mart doesn't sell a CD. Not so much in Twitter or Wikipedia's case. Some alt-right 'competitor' with 30 users isn't really a substitute.
I think you implied an analogy between your phone carrier and Twitter / Wikipedia that doesn't hold water.
Your phone carrier is a service provider that is constrained by the FCC. Twitter is one of many broadcast sites one could go via a phone carrier. But the US, to my knowledge, has never recognized anything approximating a right to broadcast. Not even freedom of the press implies freedom to spew signal over the airwaves, for instance (because the radio spectrum is finite and shared).
Freedom of the press has never implied freedom to use someone else's press, and telecommunications hardware providers aren't in the same category. If your phone carrier cuts you off, nobody on the Internet can read your signal; if Twitter cuts you off, they've merely taken their megaphone out of your hands.
Yeah, I used 'common carrier' in reference to when Ma Bell was a monopoly and wasn't allowed to just not do business with people.
We don't have jurisprudence saying so for websites, because this is new, but it could be argued that a number of websites have reached a sort of monopoly status. Facebook is probably closest, but Twitter and Wikipedia both occupy unique places in society to the point where it's not, just, "go start your own website".
As far as business freedom, remember the gay wedding cake guy? Where were all these "you're not entitled to Twitter's megaphone" people then? On the exact opposite side of the principle, mostly.
Production of tangible goods is in a different category from either being allowed to use Twitter or having a cell phone. Denial of production of tangible goods by a local provider conjures up the grim specter of Jim Crow laws in the United States. And discrimination regarding sexual orientation is an understood protected class in the US, where political opinion is not.
I think people having different attitudes regarding the three categories of service is reasonable.
I personally think of no-platforming as almost the last tool. Where I think a lot of people disagree is here:
lacking any chance of success...
Fascism can take over a government faster than people think, and we're in a global cycle of democracies dallying with fascism again. This is not a safe time.
I don't think fascist takeovers of governments are that hard to anticipate; I don't think they're likely in most of the cases that people advocate censorship for. Admittedly this may be hindsight bias.
Germany has sharply limited censorship laws. I do not oppose them more out of respect for the victims of Nazism than any genuine agreement that they do good; but I will oppose their expansion. I do not think they are useful; I think they are limited in harm.
> Germany wrestled its censorship laws from hard history lessons.
Citation needed.
Germany has had strict censorship laws since forever. They obviously did not stop the Nazis. If you're arguing that censorship is required to stop the Nazis, that's a point you should address, especially given that they had specifically added censorship laws against right-wing extremists in the Weimar Republic in the Republikschutzgesetz.
What I'm missing is signal on how those laws were enforced. The Weimar constitution included (translation) "No censorship will take place," which does make me wonder how effective the existing laws were.
Emergency decrees could freely override any such provision, and became increasingly common during the Weimar Republic (particularly so in the early 1930s) as a result of gridlock within Parliament. The no-censorship provision, while real, was not enforceable as a matter of fact.
The rule of law, combined with the broadest possible free speech, is the best defence as had been shown in Western democracies for quite some time now. Democracy in Germany in the thirties was in a very weak condition for a variety of reasons which allowed the Nazis to undermine it fatally.
Notably this law perpetuates on a daily basis the Nazis' coercive and violent appropriation of a number of traditional religious and cultural symbols, and with it their unnatural exploitation as emblems of the most evil and despicable ideas ever contrived in modern history. All things considered, a very fitting example of parent poster's point.
Indeed; there's nothing "natural" either about taking a symbol that has literally been used from time immemorial throughout the Northern hemisphere (including in Europe up until the early 20th c.!) and treating it as an inherent reference to a bunch of folks who anyone sensible regards as enemies of everything that civilized society stands for. But that's not what one would assume, given that this law exists!
This is not the problem here. The problem is that traditional ideas (those that rules the world until very recently and that are still applied in a lot of countries including some top world powers) are being systematically suppressed both on and offline. Moreover speech is now evaluated on who says it instead of the content itself, and if the locutor is not in one of the privileged groups, it is dismissed or even casted as an aggression.
We have not seen the code of conduct. We can't imagine what it will be like based on two or three adjectives from this article.
I moderate a small community. When we introduced new moderators, we had to formalise the unspoken rules that governed our moderation habits.
Now, we follow guidelines instead of intuition. Writing things down forced us to think about our behaviour, and to discuss the flaws in our unspoken rules. It makes our behaviour more consistent, especially towards content we personally don't like.
A code of conduct can be just that. A formal, consistent rulebook for a community.
A code of conduct that flexibly promotes civil interactions between community members is commendable. Framing civility in terms of the language of social justice activism is worrying. Attempts at inclusivity should not hand-out veto power. Safe spaces should not be exclusive platforms for the grievances of anyone who self-identifies as marginalized.
A code of conduct promoting civility should be sufficient.
Wikimedia needs to make some serious changes if it wants more editors to join. They need to do a lot of UI work to make the process for creating a new article or discussing new changes. When I tried it I found the process very confusing. Why is all communication done in a wiki page editor?
> Why is all communication done in a wiki page editor?
Dogfooding, essentially. This guarantees that all participants eventually become broadly competent at using it.
There are newer tools to streamline common interactions, though personally I think they make the learning curve steeper in exchange for making it start off a little easier.
Plus, wiki is often an exceptionally good way to hold discussions. The fact that other contributors can, e.g. fix broken links and that freeform layout can be used... that multiple contributors can seamlessly collaborate on a single comment. It's very powerful.
Wiki for discussion also builds community and trust, because people could screw up your comments but they don't. (and if they do, it'll get fixed promptly and they'll have helpfully identified themselves as someone either totally clueless or having difficulty with self control)
Dogfooding helps you build better tools for experts, but it doesn't help you build friendlier tools for newcomers. Those who have the power to improve the tools are well past the point where they need friendlier tools.
They added a lot of WYSIWYG tools which are much better than the plain text ones. Wikimedia lets you specify licences for the files you upload, and find categories for them.
Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve?
I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency.
Also if this just formalizes existing practices why creating a "retroactive review process"?
> Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve?
Know the phrase "follow the money"? In this case, follow the power.
To be caught up arguing about codes of conduct in general is a distraction.
>I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency.
Remember that time the Wikimedia office banned a user for unclear reasons, without engaging community governance that would typically handle the banning, and the row it caused because that wasn't the normal way of doing business? If you doubt how huge the separation of responsibility between the people who work FOR wikpmedia and work ON wikpedia is, see: https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/wikipedia-fram-banning-...
This release from wikimedia says that they're going to be taking top down control, but unless you're already versed in the structure of the system you just hear names of groups without understanding the boundaries they represent.
> Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve?
Either, the wikimedia board is again trying to "fix" wikipedia engagement with all the insight, art and tact of people that wouldn't be caught dead participating as editors within wikipedia's self governance system.
Or, a wedge issue has emerged that will allow the foundation to take more direct control while minimizing the appearance of ramping down wikiepedia's self governance.
> enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity across projects
Well done. I like how Wikimedia works with many languages and helps to share human knowledge. It is a great institution and a good example on how humans can collaborate to create something great. Inclusivity is at the roots of humanity at its best.
It is sad to see the unconstructive cynical comments in this post. We need more people to build a better world. Cynicism is a good tool agains tyranny, used agains a foundation that has done so much good is just a cheap shot. Be civilized, be constructive.
I remember when the Go community adopted similar code of conduct. There was similar push back based around concerns that the rules would be abused and the community would end up becoming less welcome. This hasn't actually happened in the last 4 years, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Most other open source software projects have adopted similar guidelines and they're thriving as well. Taking Rust as an example, they manage to put out high quality releases every six weeks. Thousands of developers of all backgrounds have contributed, which makes me think that the Code of Conduct has encouraged more participation rather than less.
There are dire warnings in this thread about how Wikipedia is going to burn to the ground because of this change. Based on experience of Go and Rust, I'm somewhat skeptical.
I have always feel a mix of amusement and scepticism regarding codes of conduct.
I don't actually mind them. They pretty much can all be boiled down to please act as a reasonably well adjusted and decent human being to a point I don't really see what they actually aim to achieve. I fail to see how writing a set of vague rules are supposed to solve deep cultural issues in a community but I guess that at least signal a willingness to tackle the subject which might in itself be enough. Anyway, if it gives some people a warm fuzzy feeling, I'm all for it.
What I find really amusing however is what they say about the culture of the people writing them. For exemple, I have always found it very amusing that the Rust code of conduct feels the need to explicitely address avoiding overtly sexual aliases as its second point, a long time before condemning harassment.
These developments are indeed reassuring, but we're still not sure what Wiki's "universal" code of conduct will look like. It should go without saying that CoC's and related initiatives have also led to quite a bit of tension in other software projects, even recently (including w/ devs resigning as a result), and I don't think anyone clearly understands why it is that Go and Rust have fared so well wrt. these issues.
Codes of conduct aren't censorship. In the physical world, they're known as "house rules". You want to join the community, here's how you behave. It is essentially a list of "how not to be an asshole".
Nothing is stopping you from expressing yourself however you want - just elsewhere, if you can't follow the rules.
It focuses on different things than the Wikimedia one, but it's fundamentally the same thing. For both of them, I'd suggest that if there are things that you feel are detrimental, you specifically address them.
Making an empty comment like "new wave of censorship" achieves nothing except saying "I don't like the rules". In which case, fine, there are plenty of other places on the Internet.
If the rules were decided by the English Wikipedia community following their process for making such decisions then this would be a meaningful criticism. But this is an edict from the WMF ivory tower. To say it's representative of the Wikipedia editors is a gross mischaracterisation.
From my perspective it's naked entryism, striking at the centralised weakness in an otherwise robust, decentralised system.
The English Wikipedia can be part of the problem in some cases. It's not a democracy but a "tight-knit" community where insiders have a lot of influence, and even harassing, uncivil behavior can go on for a long time if it's perceived as "defending" the community's precious "work" from new editors. Part of the problem is also that harassment concerns must often be disclosed in private for obvious reasons, so a community-wide dispute resolution process might just not work very well for those.
And then there's Wikipedias in other languages and other Wikimedia projects, which come with additional cans of worms.
> where insiders have a lot of influence, and even harassing, uncivil behavior can go on for a long time if it's perceived as "defending" the community's precious "work" from new editors
It definitely happens, but the influence and uncivil behaviour by longtime editors are always, in my experience, very well disguised under a veneer of civility and lawyering. So the CoC will be completely useless against that, which is IMO the serious issue with Wikipedia right now.
> It is essentially a list of "how not to be an asshole".
No, they're essentially just a list of vague rules that are at the sweet spot of "vague enough that I can make anything you write fit into it" and "vague enough that you can't point to it and definitely say that somebody else does it to you". It's basically a very rough outline of laws, with everything in between to be filled out by a judge on a case by case basis, without precedents or abstraction.
They are an instrument to strengthen the power of whoever is enforcing those rules. There was a fun read some time ago where Chinese princelings were showing off their riches, dollar bundles, rolexes, cars etc, one-upping each other. The person who won just posted a badge of attendance at a conference of the party's committee tasked with enforcing the party's moral standards (or something similar, Google is shit, I can't find it again). That's power, not being an editor with a thousand articles.
When I read these things I always have to think of Voat, the reddit clone that was 'open to assholes'. A lot of reddit users who could not follow the rules actually jumped ship, but what they found was that Voat was not really what they were looking for. They (ironically) did not find their safespace there because the other side of the coin was that other users could also criticize their views (extremism is exponential). That was not what they were looking for.
The other reason it didn't really work out well is that people need an audience. Voat was and is much smaller than reddit, so they had less reach. What I'm trying to say is, is that it's not a technical challenge, those have been solved already. It's people with extreme views who want to be able to express themselves where those views are not tolerated.
I'll join the protests once they actually start censoring, but if it's just like hey: don't be an asshole or you can just be an asshole somewhere else... I'm fine with it.
Wikipedia and YouTube are as large as they are, in terms of user base, for their utility. Part of that utility does and continues to include some thin editorial voice. They're under no obligation to be all things to all people.
People have set up alternative data sources to Wikipedia. Conservapedia has existed for years. Its relatively smaller size says more about its relative utility then about anything ill Wikipedia has done.
Of course there will be. The internet has done wonders for helping people with terrible opinions congregate.
But that doesn't imply one needs to let the Stormfronters hang out in one's digital lobby instead of directing them back to their own donuts in Stormfront.
Standards and a "universal" code of conduct to adress harassment and promote inclusivity, that all sound extremely American both in the approach taken and in its wording.
I impatiently await to see how it's going to be received by the international Wikipedia community. If I had to guess, I would say with a large dose of scepticism but who knows, that might work.
There is no need to fork. Wikipedia is a US originated project but it's also very much an international project already with a presence in 300 languages and 39 local chapters which are independant but affiliated with the foundation.
There is a reason the press release talk of a _universal_ code of conduct.
Whether this is true or not(I can't be bothered to research), it sure feels that way sometimes. I remember recently overhearing what started as a friendly conversation in a waiting room. It devolved into politics, and I remember the black fellow just kinda replying 'I dont care much' or 'yeah, I don't get into that'. Not refuting, just implying he didn't have an opinion. By the end, the older white fellow was fuming at the black guy for not hating Trump because he is bad for black people. Really makes me laugh, even to this day.
> The irony in this is that this type of language about "inclusivity" only really appeals to a narrow subset of upper middle class white people.
IME, bourgeois identity politics is mostly popular in members of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletarian intelligentsia (which maps loosely to the dominant American use of the term “upper middle class”, which is really tied to any coherent model of economic class), but seemingly slightly more (Proportionately) in the groups it on its own term seeks to extend inclusion to than Whites.
You will be quickly disabused of this notion if you talk to poor and/or brown people. While I’m sure that you can find occasional individuals who do not care about inclusivity, the large majority do care.
The attitude that your comment reflects crops up a lot in relation to, for example, the Washington Redskins naming controversy. Folks who like the current name are always bringing up a couple of examples of Native Americans who say they “don’t care” about the name, and claiming that it’s really only white liberals who are offended; meanwhile, in my experience, the large majority of Natives actually do care very much, and are upset that a racial slur used for their ethnicity is being used as the name of a sports team.
> The attitude that your comment reflects crops up a lot in relation to, for example, the Washington Redskins naming controversy. Folks who like the current name are always bringing up a couple of examples of Native Americans who say they “don’t care” about the name, and claiming that it’s really only white liberals who are offended; meanwhile, in my experience, the large majority of Natives actually do care very much, and are upset that a racial slur used for their ethnicity is being used as the name of a sports team.
I found this comment rather funny, because if CGP Grey is correct [0] the preferred term by American Indians is "American Indian", NOT "Native American". So you're claiming knowledge of the general opinion of a group, while not using the group's preferred name for themselves.
The attempt at a “gotcha” is annoying. I can only speak from my lived experience as a white person who grew up on a reservation. I married a native, and almost all my closest friends were (and are) natives. Everyone I knew called themselves “native” or “Native American”. “American Indian” wouldn’t have been considered offensive (unlike “redskin”), but it really wasn’t the common parlance. The only place one would routinely see the phrase “American Indian” is on government paperwork, eg from the BIA.
This is one of those things you can find out for yourself: go to a pow-wow (non-native visitors are typically very welcome) and ask the people there how they usually refer to themselves.
That'd be evidence for CGPGrey being wrong, then. But I'd still love to see statistics on what proportion of people found the existence of the Redskins to be offensive.
There’s also this element of framing surrounding the word “offensive”. when someone is put on the spot and asked if they find something “offensive”, it’s kind of a socially precarious moment. If they say “yes”, it could lead so challenges and confrontations (“why? Can’t you see that it’s just a word? No one’s getting hurt, it’s just a game”), but if they say “no”, the conversation will probably end, without any uncomfortable follow-ups.
Just searched on 'wikipedia editing for beginners'
The top item links to article 'Help:Editing'. This page is -not- for beginners.
The article: 'Help:Wikipedia'
does not mention editing. It does lead to 'Help:Menu'. It offers general help.
Anyway, I had to wander around a while to find this article: 'Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Editing for the first time'. This page also tries to do too much.
It seems clear that a site this size, trying to attract new and diversified editors, could afford to invest in a 'tutor-text' approach to taking on different kinds of editing tasks. Beginners could jump in at 'adding a link' or 'changing a spelling' or 'rewriting a sentence'. Each would offer them a sandbox to try out something they want to learn to do. After couple of dozen of these, they'd feel more at-home in the editing environment.
These ideas can come from good intentions, but what it often means is that a certain opinion is the _right one_ and another opinion isn't.
As an example, some parts of the internet ostracised Brendan Eich for a personal donation he made to support a Californian ballet proposition on same sex marriage; forcing his resignation. There were no complaints about any of his behaviour or actions at Mozilla whatsoever.
That's not a good thing to be doing.
As another example, the recent Stack Overflow changes where a controversial, over-empathsised policy change on respecting pronouns (also pretty much a non-issue, I have never seen pronoun complaints come up on Stack Overflow) has forced multiple community moderator resignations and a widespread community revolt.
These changes are often negatives for the projects involved.
(I'm willing to catch some flak for this, since I know this may be controversial but it's how I truly think about this)
What to you may be just another opinion is another's legitimacy of them being them.
Maybe it's because I see myself as a progressive, I understand why people were mad at Eich and petitioned his removal. Him being the face of one of the biggest tech companies in the world actively working against your best interests must be hurtful. In my bubble it's absolutely normal to be gay, gay marriage is also nothing to be frowned upon, my country (NL) was the first in the world to legalize it. I realize a large portion of the rest of the world sees it differently, but I'd place it in the same category of a CEO donating money to the KKK or other extremist groups - should black people just think well hey he's doing a good job right? Who cares he's funding a group that actively detests me not for who I am but the color of my skin? Just like gay people think he's funding a group that detests me for something that isn't even my choice?
I followed the SO debacle and what I gathered from it was that there were a couple of individuals who made some very very poor decisions, ruled with an iron first, and any dialogue was not only suppressed but the mod in question was booted in such a despicable way that the rest of the community followed. I don't think they're comparable.
> I realize a large portion of the rest of the world sees it differently, but I'd place it in the same category of a CEO donating money to the KKK or other extremist groups
At the very least, that depends on whether you take his position as being an extremist "anti-gay" one, or simply as upholding the then-current status of traditional, cross-sex marriage. It should be noted that same-sex marriage has not been introduced by overt policy in the U.S.; it has acquired its status via a judicially-introduced "extension" of the usual cross-sex marriage. This surprising development has contributed to its wide-ranging acceptance in a way that shouldn't be misunderestimated; far from being something "contrary" to existing tradition, same-sex marriage has simply joined a lengthy list of comparable legal fictions known from the history of Western jurisprudence.
The Stack Overflow fiasco was more about virtue signalling because nowadays you need to be (or rather show) “diversity and inclusion” as a business if you want to appear as a “better” company (useful for soliciting VC investment when you don’t have a profitable business), regardless of whether diversity & inclusion has ever been a problem at the company.
> nowadays you need to be (or rather show) “diversity and inclusion” as a business if you want to appear as a “better” company (useful for soliciting VC investment when you don’t have a profitable business), regardless of whether diversity & inclusion has ever been a problem at the company.
Could you expand on this? My naive impression is that VCs do their best to make hard-nosed expected-value-in-USD estimates, perhaps specifically estimating the likelihood the company will be worth >$100M/$1B or whatever; and that acting like that is probably in their job description because they're investing other people's money who expect a return.
How does the phenomenon you describe fit in? Is there some group of VCs that believe that championing "diversity and inclusion" is likely to lead to 10x growth? Does the company making the pitch make that claim—or, as one reading of your words suggests, claim that not having achieved 10x growth in the past is due to the lack of such championing? Or do VCs face social pressure (from, I dunno, other VCs, journalists who write about them, whoever else they talk with) to make it look like they're funding virtuous causes (er, companies)? Seems like the last is most plausible.
Companies in general try to seem like they care about more than money. "Grey Goo Ltd. We care." Diversity rhetoric is an easy, pre-constructed set of Things to Say (TM) that you can use to project empathy - notably, without doing anything significant to back it up. Google is still 70% men.
But bear in mind San Francisco is incredibly liberal, SF programmers even more so. Companies based there will make overtures toward diversity & inclusion rhetoric to keep their workforce happy.
According to this chart[1], less women than Amazon, Facebook and Apple, more than Microsoft. When you normalise for tech workers only, it climbs to 77% men, which is about average for the industry.
This is from my experience looking at a few companies and their online presence.
Companies with a strong business model don't seem to do this whole bullshit virtue signaling, whether it's about diversity/inclusion or "values" unless there is an actual problem with one of those things.
The VC-funded ones that usually have no long-term, profitable business model are the ones to brag the most about "diversity and inclusion" or similar things. It's as if they were saying "we'll run out of money in 3 years, we pay shit, but hey at least we're diverse and inclusive and (pretend to) have values; wanna work for us?".
One company went as far as banning words and idioms like "blacklist" and "elephant in the room". I mean come on, were these words even being a problem or are you just looking for a problem so you can push your virtue signaling to the next level and obviously write the obligatory blog post?
Whether that actually translates to more VC funding or not is unclear, but the majority of VC-backed companies seems to be doing this charade nowadays.
Most users on Stack Overflow use nongendered pseudonyms, and as a Q&A site, they go out of their way to explicitly discourage conversation. If you do need to a reply to a user in the comments, the convention is @username, no pronouns needed.
Wikipedia already has too many policies and this is part of the problem. However noble the intentions, adding yet another policy-like document is not going to be part of the solution.
Obviously harassment and toxic behavior are bad and should be discouraged but all this will accomplish is that politically-inclined editors will have even more weapons in their inventory to throw "harassment" and "toxic behavior" accusations at one another.
The bar to start contributing to Wikipedia is already very high: the way it works in practice, one must familiarize themselves with hundreds of pages from the WP: namespace, and learn how to use them strategically to defend their contributions. No wonder few people have the time and inclination to do that. To encourage more inclusivity this burden should first of all be lowered, not raised.
So, if more inclusivity was really the objective here, a better experiment would be to remove all the current policies except a dozen of the most important ones decided by popular vote among editors, and then edit them even further so that they fit on a single page, leaving these as the only rules in force. From then on, not more than a single policy change could be made per month, and all of it should still fit on the same single page. This would give new users an equal footing with the entrenched ones, with rules straightforward enough for everybody to understand and follow, which in turn should empower people to use their own judgement instead of being micromanaged. Disagreements would have to be solved by discussing the matter at hand, as opposed to flinging projectiles from the safety of the WP: namespace. Wikipedia could learn something from how remarkably simple the HN rules are in comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
OK, maybe the above is not the greatest idea but it'd at least rattle things a bit in the right direction if done as an experiment. On the other hand, much of what Wikimedia Foundation has been doing recently is tangential to the development of a free encyclopedia, and this press release is no different: it reads like an exercise in corporate bullshit that checks all the right boxes but will change exactly nothing. The response to the failures of bureaucracy is more bureaucracy: "What we were doing so far has failed, so we urgently need to do even more of the same. This time it'll work."
>Lisa Lewin, Managing Partner at Ethical Ventures, a New York City based management consulting firm, will be the newest member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees
>Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new member and leadership appointments to its Board of Trustees. Shani Evenstein Sigalov, currently an EdTech Innovation Strategist and lecturer at the School of Medicine in Tel Aviv University
I wonder if these new board members were involved in the new CoC and inclusivity rules.
These articles are from August and January 2019, respectively.
And, yes, it is likely that these board members were among the board members that voted on this proposal, considering they are members of the board, and the board voted on it.
Is there any specific problem you see with these two as opposed to other board members, or why do you feel the need to point them out?
The web page points them out as "RELATED" (emphasis in original) at the end of the press release. It's not clear if that was done manually or algorithmically. If algorithmically, perhaps it's one of those unintentionally bigoted algorithms?
Once again, we fall prey to a monopoly. Britannica exists and it’s quite decent, but it’s edited only by a few and has a tiny fraction of the reach as Wikipedia.
It's ironic that, in fear that Wikipedia is an information monopoly, someone would turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, given how many supporters of Wikipedia have historically been seeking an alternative to the centralized print encyclopedia model.
This will be very interesting to observe because it might apply western concepts of good behaviour to a global audience. Previously it let different chapters, different parts of the world behave differently. In effect Wikimedia should want to allow users who are actual signed up Fascists in their countries to contribute to their project, whilst also ensuring they behave themselves.
To me, (most probably because the language of this has been shaped by progressive politics in the west and the article is written in English and Wikimedia is primarily English speaking) this might well be an experiment with applying the western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well on monocultural programming and tech communities to a really globally diverse and actual multi cultural project.
There really is no other global project like this which spans and crosses actual cultures and languages. None.
This will be fascinating to watch, I hope they get it right, or at least publish their failings if they don't.
> western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well
Says who? Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic folks, of course. Don't get me wrong, there is an underlying reality behind the oft-repeated claims of 'Whig history' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history . In particular, democratic and classical liberal values seem to do an unusually good job of de-escalating unwanted social conflict: NPOV (as known on Wikipedia) is at its root a "liberal" idea, not an authoritarian or intolerant one! But these overbroad claims should always be treated with plenty of caution.
In this thread I saw how a petition to show an example of bogus claims of discrimination, followed by a clear cut answer to which not even the asker could argue against, devolved into nebulous musings on what certain organizations should or should not consider unfair advantages.
This is probably the main reason why I hate these discussions whenever they appear in HN. It's not because of whether I consider that initiatives for "inclusivity" are "baseless, performative and counterproductive at worst" or "the right step into promoting a more dynamic exchange of ideas", but because one side of the discussion never stops moving the goalposts.
The conversation only stops when one side has successfully shouted out dissenters, and not out of any actual solid argument made in their favor.
This is something that really strikes me as interesting.
When one side of the debate is clearly completely operating in bad faith what do you do?
I think by now anyone who's joined these debates is familiar with the tactics seen.
- The attempt to exhaust the opposition by wasting debate asking for clarification/examples of things that are common knowledge and to try and drown out core arguments with word salads and getting side tracked in arguments over semantics.
- The tendency for every argument to effectively follow the narcissists prayer.
- The tactic of spamming the same illogical arguments over and over despite the fact these have been refuted before; seemingly in the hope that if enough of their own side pile on with enough logical fallacies it will get too exhausting for the opposition to repeatedly tear down the same arguments over and over again while having to remain civil.
Ironically it's the one thing I can think of that even comes close to aligning with the tolerance of intolerance argument.
Its common knowledge at this point. English wikipedia is guarded by an army of moderators who try their best to prevent new articles from being created.
You know what I think is really telling? I think you're correct that it was a joke/meta-commentary, but I didn't even process it as such until you called it out.
And that's exactly why Wikipedia has such a problem with its editors. They're so good at getting their way while appearing to just have logical arguments, as has been stated elsewhere in these comments.
So that either makes it an incredibly on-point joke, or actually a statement that anecdotes aren't facts, and I can't even tell which for sure.
> Specifically, the Board has tasked the Foundation with:
> Developing and introducing, in close consultation with volunteer contributor communities, a universal code of conduct that will be a binding minimum set of standards across all Wikimedia projects;
> Taking actions to ban, sanction, or otherwise limit the access of Wikimedia movement participants who do not comply with these policies and the Terms of Use;
> Working with community functionaries to create and refine a retroactive review process for cases brought by involved parties, excluding those cases which pose legal or other severe risks; and
> Significantly increasing support for and collaboration with community functionaries primarily enforcing such compliance in a way that prioritizes the personal safety of these functionaries.
The first thing they state is creating a universal code established by some hand-picked team.
The second thing discussed is how this code will be enforced.
The third thing discussed is rewriting everything published to be sure it conforms to the new code.
The fourth thing discussed is building a wall around the functionaries. It seems notable they have chosen a word which describes an obtuse rule enforcer.
These activities do not describe the way to create anything "inclusive" of anything that is not in service to some very specific set of viewpoints.
hey, this is totally tangential to the topic being discussed but i am hoping wikipedia people are here, reading these comments...
why not make the mobile theme the default theme?
it has better readability. works on both desktop and mobile. i find myself always adding "m" in the wikipedia urls to get to the mobile version. also started updating all my bookmarks.
I maybe wrong but this sounds like a good recipe for groupthink bias, low-level fascism, newspeak, and weaponizing a CoC for cyber-crybully attacks and de-platforming while purporting to promote contrary ideals. Orwellian and Kafkaesque, eh? So much for classical liberalism, free association, and tolerating (not necessarily condoning or endorsing) a diversity of viewpoints. Identity politics and unspoken "correct/acceptable" beliefs come next. Sigh
Ah the dystopian newspeak - inclusivity. We are so inclusive that we only how people who think, act and talk alike are allowed. The tech world is rotting top down from the inside.
China has "harmony". We have "inclusivity". But ultimately, it's all about control and manipulation.
“ The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.”
Lesser known is Popper's meta-paradox which is that Popper's paradox is often quoted by people attempting to justify their own intolerance, the same sort of people that Popper's paradox tells us cannot be safely tolerated by a society.
Does anyone know why this is happening? I just assumed Reddit, Youtube, Stackoverflow, etc were doing it because they were being paid by the DNC or various political action groups. But Wikipedia is a non-profit with a good chunk of money in reserve.
> Does anyone know why this is happening? I just assumed Reddit, Youtube, Stackoverflow, etc were doing it because they were being paid by the DNC or various political action groups. But Wikipedia is a non-profit with a good chunk of money in reserve.
An argument could be made that RNC operatives do this because, in fact, they have benefited the most from such efforts.
I don't know why so many people making these conspiracy claims and only consider the single, most obvious party as the one that must be engaging in such actions instead of the party that has actually benefited the most.
It's quite well known that many non-profits "with a good chunk of money in reserve" end up being deeply politicized in weird and bizarre ways, due to these institutions lacking any kind of incentives or outside direction that might keep them transparently focused on their existing goals. So if you're assuming that even for-profit businesses like Reddit, YT, SO might be acting politically, I'm not sure why we wouldn't expect the same from Wiki.
Lots of people try to eidt Wikipedia and are driven away by arseholes, and this is a problem that Wikipedia has been trying to fix for years.
Things came to a head last year when a prominent editor was harassing users for years and the English wikipedia failed to address it. It came to the attention of Wikimedia foundation who took action against the editor, and that caused a storm.
Personally I think they need to do a lot more than a CoC, especially if it's going to be applied by Wikipedia.
So wikipeda is moving out of the age of "how will we get anyone to show up?" into "to get even more people to show up, how do we force better customer service skills?"
I don't get why projects think a top-down straighten-up-and-fly-right edict is how you retain driveby contributors (I get why they do it, I don't get why they make that the primary/only change). That's a highly visible but overall small part of the barrier to entry. Online volunteer collaboration projects often assume anyone motivated to participate will self-train. Making the surface level language nicer only keeps people reading long enough to find out that they've walked into a busy office full of people working with tasks, process and goals they don't understand. Lots of the day-to-day in an office puts efficiency above approachability, and I don't think that's always wrong.
Surely WMF would have better results if they actually worked on the barrier to entry by explicitly adding to staffing(/recruiting volunteers) to onboard new editors. e.g. shepherd their work through onboarding-focused helpers until the newbie is ready to drop into the office proper. Use the failures of conversion to identify where there was a lack of handholding (and build a system for that), vs a lack of interest.
