In the Winter of 2013, my students and I tried to fill a void but creating an entry on women in hip-hop. At the time there was none. Focus was on inequality and the democratization of tech/knowledge.
This year I also became an active editor (more than 5 times a month) and joined the local NYC chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia New York City. I also have participated in meetups with AfroCrowd [1]. [2]
The Faculty Resource Network at NYU, where I was once on faculty, invited me to convene a seminar on millennials and social media for 25 college professors from Puerto Rico to Hawaii including members from HBCUs. We met for a week and I introduced them to editing Wikipedia. Two thirds of them started the week-long seminar with a disdain for Wikipedia. All had edited and were inspired to continue editing Wikipedia by the end of the week. I invited several members of WikiMedia NYC to lecture including AfroCrowd and Ann Matsuuchi, Long Island University. A member of Data & Society also visited the seminar.
We concluded the seminar with an insight from one of the professors turned Wikipedians:
If all knowledge is personal, than all politics are local. (acknowledgments to @ Juantele: You created this idea!)
I will be publishing materials we crowdsourced eventually.
This summer, 12 students and I are learning the basics of sociology while we also learn to become Wikipedia editors or Wikipedians. Our final project involves studying the knowledge produced and the culture of editing using first-hand, personal study on the site.
For 2-3 weeks, we will conduct participant-observation as Wikipedians to examine questions of power and representation (or the matrix of domination) among Wikipedians (editors) using a mixed method approach of quantitative and qualitative data. The View History page of any article offers a lot of rich data to analyze.
The question we are collaboratively exploring by editing articles of our choice is this: What issues of power and oppression can be discovered in the free-of-cost encyclopedia that provides knowledge to the world as the sixth most visited site on the Internet? We are applying the three main sociological perspectives -- functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism -- as well as examining how personal troubles as an editor reflect public or political issues.
Participants are editing articles including Lacrosse, Trump, Brexit, Transactionalism, Mass Shootings, microsociology, symbolic interactionism, Barbeque, SpongeBob SquarePants, Xenocentrism, Gatekeeping, Twerking, Jambole, and more. Among the 12 participants and myself we represent four women (a Black woman, two Latina women, and a White woman) and eight men (two Chinese men, two Black, one Latino man, and five White men). Several among us were born outside the US.
By allowing our diverse interests to thrive (you can edit anything you want), we should also witness the barriers that editors encounter in a complex way. Who is being reverted for what? Could the reverting activity be a function of being neophyte editors making mistakes? And could it also be related to the unconscious bias of writing like women and people of color from various backgrounds and linguistic differences?
The rules of Wikipedia -- its five pillars -- concludes with the fifth pillar:
Wikipedia has no firm rules: Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. The principles and spirit matter more than literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making exceptions. Be bold but not reckless in updating articles. And do not agonize over making mistakes: every past version of a page is saved, so mistakes can be easily corrected.
What fascinates me most about Wikipedia is how a free democratic space self-polices its members. There is no "authority" above like in a workplace or in the classroom, that tells us who we should edit and whose words are true, good, or objective. Given the diversity of human experiences and cultures, and given the discrimination found in EVERY culture and nation on the planet, there cannot be ONE neutral point of view in editing Wikipedia. It has to be that we are subtly inviting the predominately white and male gang of editors who dominate the space of knowledge production to reach back to what they inherited as a frame for policing the boundaries of knowledge on Wikipedia.
By contrast, what I also love about Wikipedia, is that it has the potential to help undergrads as well as professors (if they would stop slamming the site) who join the WikiEdu program learn to more deeply understand the socialization of knowledge and understand the process of resocialization that stands behind both social capital and human capital. Both thrive from diversity of knowledge, skills, and perspectives. There cannot be ONE point of view or what of being neutral that is right and true. Note the practice of strong objectivity.
This kind of creative work points at issues like ethics and how we develop trust in the small acts of editing to the big acts of our educational systems with its forms of political and oppression socialization. Trust is not granted without earning it even on Wikipedia -- or so it seems. In some cases, it was clear to those of us "outsiders" or newbies on Wikipedia that the experience of oppression was surfacing in incidences of being reverted. So I've come to think of editing Wikipedia as not only a form of knowledge activism and a fieldwork of anthropological study or micro-sociological study. It is also a really insightful process for learning to experience and witness how oppression works if done collaboratively on Wikipedia. One can truly begin to appreciate and examine intersecting oppressions -- heteropatriarchy, racism, heterosexism, misogynoir, transphobia, and the hegemony of a white supremacist, capitalist, political economy of money, knowing, labor, and value when one becomes an editor of Wikipedia and one is either a member of a marginalized group or being asked to think like one as part of a course focused on the culture and knowledge of marginalized or vulnerable groups. To become part of the crowd sourcing of Wikipedia with its mantra of creating the "sum of all human knowledge" and to be reverted is to gain insight into how power works online and off. Sharing as well as observing how we edit, what we edit, whose edits stick and whose don't; what is expected around certain hegemonic or hot topics and what is not allowed or expected; what article topics are still missing or missed altogether, and observing the fear and trepidation that shows up for millennials who are supposed to be so "comfortable" with tech and content creation--all this and more become apparent when editing Wikipedia with a mindset focused on the marginalized, the different, or the most vulnerable groups or topics of knowledge in our worlds.
[As of Summer/June 2016:] The Wikipedia Community has produced over 5 million articles in the English version produced by just over 100,000 editors who have been almost exclusively white and male. Learning how to negotiate the production of knowledge in an information economy provides many critical insights into how knowledge (and thus power) is organized by individuals as well as by groups and social institutions/structures. Editing Wikipedia provides insight into how knowledge is used (and how it uses us), who gets access (and whose access is left out), and who has control over knowledge by using what tactics and by way of which kinds of beliefs and practices (conscious and unconscious). [Rev. and edited 4/9/2019].
I'll end with a quote from Frederick Douglass (1857):
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [3]
In my new Wikipedian experience i found out how much information that has been aggregated throughout history has been transcribed by every day people. I have also found a higher confidence in the reputation of this information by seeing the obstacles one may face when trying to edit and post on Wikipedia pages. I'm now able to view Wikipedia through a different lens and can really appreciate the pages i contributed to. Being scientific in nature, it makes me feel like i'm a part of history as i can imagine some of the people who would look to read that page.
ZeroDaVinci ( talk)
Dark Matter -- Fundamental Interaction -- Fifth Force
Here at AfroCrowdit 10.3.2016 at Brooklyn Public Library. Jim.Henderson gave me some incredible insights into the community. He invited me to click his watchpage and I did. He said he spent 2 hours working on a photo of a church in Westchester and a dialogue ensued. Then I read the recent discussion from an hour ago. He then added that the network is small be serious. Not like Facebook where the network can be frivolous. Fascinating insight. I mentioned my paper was accepted at the Wiki Conf but I won't be able to go to San Diego because of limited funds even with the travel grant they gave me. :-( But I thought sharing my work on a sub page would be great. Jim helped me create one and it was SO simple. WP: cut and paste my user info from my user page and add slash subpage. See below. sheridanford ( talk) 20:51, 2 October 2016 (UTC).
“ Interesting that the majority of OPPOSE and most of DISCUSSION are about editathons. As it happens I coach at such events more than once most months and they are a useful institution. However, they don't generate many new persistent editors. They mostly attract attendance by promising new biographies, and newbies arrive expecting to make articles about their friends. Friends who, through no fault of their own, are unfortunately still alive and able to benefit. We tell them how difficult this is. (...) Having arrived with the wrong expectation, they may ask for new a direction. We may say they should find and fix Wikipedia's plentiful old, bad articles. (...) If they succeed in finding a few refs and write a new biography in userspace, that's when they run into the 4-day 10-edit barrier. We usually have enough coaches to take care of these directly by a mainspace rename. So, the major problem is the concentration on new BLP [Biographies of Living Persons], and the Autoconfirmed barrier is a minor one. That barrier could be further shrunk by giving Account Creators the right to boost newbies for one day or four, and maybe someone can suggest other methods, but it shouldn't be a reason for allowing the rawest newbies to create articles on their own.
Attended the Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon at MOMA 3.2.2019 and talked to members of the NYC Wikimedia Chapter about WikiData as an alternative for my Hip-hop Herstories WikiEdu project. I got an idea from @MEGS to use WikiData to create discographies of all the Black women who ever recorded a rap song or danced as part of hip-hop culture or DJed. All the non-commercial and non-pop artists who have contributed to what hip-hop is including all the women who were in background decorations that former President Obama recently made a sideways comment about twerking at his My Brother’s Keeper Alliance Summit in Oakland, Calif., Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. More later. Will intro to class today 3.12.2019. ~~~~
WATCH THIS VIDEO FOR GUIDANCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23_15imPLgI&ab_channel=TheBoringVoice
STOP: Click the Edit button
LOOK: Sign your signature and timestamp: TYPE "~~~~" before you comment.
POST YOUR REVIEW: Position at the bottom of the subheader "BAM 209 F2023 Student Reviews" and hit return to autogenerate the next number.
PUBLISH: Indicate the reason for the edit as: WikiEdu BAM 2023 Review
Ill Doctrine: The Myth of Believing in NPOV
In the Winter of 2013, my students and I tried to fill a void but creating an entry on women in hip-hop. At the time there was none. Focus was on inequality and the democratization of tech/knowledge.
This year I also became an active editor (more than 5 times a month) and joined the local NYC chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia New York City. I also have participated in meetups with AfroCrowd [1]. [2]
The Faculty Resource Network at NYU, where I was once on faculty, invited me to convene a seminar on millennials and social media for 25 college professors from Puerto Rico to Hawaii including members from HBCUs. We met for a week and I introduced them to editing Wikipedia. Two thirds of them started the week-long seminar with a disdain for Wikipedia. All had edited and were inspired to continue editing Wikipedia by the end of the week. I invited several members of WikiMedia NYC to lecture including AfroCrowd and Ann Matsuuchi, Long Island University. A member of Data & Society also visited the seminar.
We concluded the seminar with an insight from one of the professors turned Wikipedians:
If all knowledge is personal, than all politics are local. (acknowledgments to @ Juantele: You created this idea!)
I will be publishing materials we crowdsourced eventually.
This summer, 12 students and I are learning the basics of sociology while we also learn to become Wikipedia editors or Wikipedians. Our final project involves studying the knowledge produced and the culture of editing using first-hand, personal study on the site.
For 2-3 weeks, we will conduct participant-observation as Wikipedians to examine questions of power and representation (or the matrix of domination) among Wikipedians (editors) using a mixed method approach of quantitative and qualitative data. The View History page of any article offers a lot of rich data to analyze.
The question we are collaboratively exploring by editing articles of our choice is this: What issues of power and oppression can be discovered in the free-of-cost encyclopedia that provides knowledge to the world as the sixth most visited site on the Internet? We are applying the three main sociological perspectives -- functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism -- as well as examining how personal troubles as an editor reflect public or political issues.
Participants are editing articles including Lacrosse, Trump, Brexit, Transactionalism, Mass Shootings, microsociology, symbolic interactionism, Barbeque, SpongeBob SquarePants, Xenocentrism, Gatekeeping, Twerking, Jambole, and more. Among the 12 participants and myself we represent four women (a Black woman, two Latina women, and a White woman) and eight men (two Chinese men, two Black, one Latino man, and five White men). Several among us were born outside the US.
By allowing our diverse interests to thrive (you can edit anything you want), we should also witness the barriers that editors encounter in a complex way. Who is being reverted for what? Could the reverting activity be a function of being neophyte editors making mistakes? And could it also be related to the unconscious bias of writing like women and people of color from various backgrounds and linguistic differences?
The rules of Wikipedia -- its five pillars -- concludes with the fifth pillar:
Wikipedia has no firm rules: Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. The principles and spirit matter more than literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making exceptions. Be bold but not reckless in updating articles. And do not agonize over making mistakes: every past version of a page is saved, so mistakes can be easily corrected.
What fascinates me most about Wikipedia is how a free democratic space self-polices its members. There is no "authority" above like in a workplace or in the classroom, that tells us who we should edit and whose words are true, good, or objective. Given the diversity of human experiences and cultures, and given the discrimination found in EVERY culture and nation on the planet, there cannot be ONE neutral point of view in editing Wikipedia. It has to be that we are subtly inviting the predominately white and male gang of editors who dominate the space of knowledge production to reach back to what they inherited as a frame for policing the boundaries of knowledge on Wikipedia.
By contrast, what I also love about Wikipedia, is that it has the potential to help undergrads as well as professors (if they would stop slamming the site) who join the WikiEdu program learn to more deeply understand the socialization of knowledge and understand the process of resocialization that stands behind both social capital and human capital. Both thrive from diversity of knowledge, skills, and perspectives. There cannot be ONE point of view or what of being neutral that is right and true. Note the practice of strong objectivity.
This kind of creative work points at issues like ethics and how we develop trust in the small acts of editing to the big acts of our educational systems with its forms of political and oppression socialization. Trust is not granted without earning it even on Wikipedia -- or so it seems. In some cases, it was clear to those of us "outsiders" or newbies on Wikipedia that the experience of oppression was surfacing in incidences of being reverted. So I've come to think of editing Wikipedia as not only a form of knowledge activism and a fieldwork of anthropological study or micro-sociological study. It is also a really insightful process for learning to experience and witness how oppression works if done collaboratively on Wikipedia. One can truly begin to appreciate and examine intersecting oppressions -- heteropatriarchy, racism, heterosexism, misogynoir, transphobia, and the hegemony of a white supremacist, capitalist, political economy of money, knowing, labor, and value when one becomes an editor of Wikipedia and one is either a member of a marginalized group or being asked to think like one as part of a course focused on the culture and knowledge of marginalized or vulnerable groups. To become part of the crowd sourcing of Wikipedia with its mantra of creating the "sum of all human knowledge" and to be reverted is to gain insight into how power works online and off. Sharing as well as observing how we edit, what we edit, whose edits stick and whose don't; what is expected around certain hegemonic or hot topics and what is not allowed or expected; what article topics are still missing or missed altogether, and observing the fear and trepidation that shows up for millennials who are supposed to be so "comfortable" with tech and content creation--all this and more become apparent when editing Wikipedia with a mindset focused on the marginalized, the different, or the most vulnerable groups or topics of knowledge in our worlds.
[As of Summer/June 2016:] The Wikipedia Community has produced over 5 million articles in the English version produced by just over 100,000 editors who have been almost exclusively white and male. Learning how to negotiate the production of knowledge in an information economy provides many critical insights into how knowledge (and thus power) is organized by individuals as well as by groups and social institutions/structures. Editing Wikipedia provides insight into how knowledge is used (and how it uses us), who gets access (and whose access is left out), and who has control over knowledge by using what tactics and by way of which kinds of beliefs and practices (conscious and unconscious). [Rev. and edited 4/9/2019].
I'll end with a quote from Frederick Douglass (1857):
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [3]
In my new Wikipedian experience i found out how much information that has been aggregated throughout history has been transcribed by every day people. I have also found a higher confidence in the reputation of this information by seeing the obstacles one may face when trying to edit and post on Wikipedia pages. I'm now able to view Wikipedia through a different lens and can really appreciate the pages i contributed to. Being scientific in nature, it makes me feel like i'm a part of history as i can imagine some of the people who would look to read that page.
ZeroDaVinci ( talk)
Dark Matter -- Fundamental Interaction -- Fifth Force
Here at AfroCrowdit 10.3.2016 at Brooklyn Public Library. Jim.Henderson gave me some incredible insights into the community. He invited me to click his watchpage and I did. He said he spent 2 hours working on a photo of a church in Westchester and a dialogue ensued. Then I read the recent discussion from an hour ago. He then added that the network is small be serious. Not like Facebook where the network can be frivolous. Fascinating insight. I mentioned my paper was accepted at the Wiki Conf but I won't be able to go to San Diego because of limited funds even with the travel grant they gave me. :-( But I thought sharing my work on a sub page would be great. Jim helped me create one and it was SO simple. WP: cut and paste my user info from my user page and add slash subpage. See below. sheridanford ( talk) 20:51, 2 October 2016 (UTC).
“ Interesting that the majority of OPPOSE and most of DISCUSSION are about editathons. As it happens I coach at such events more than once most months and they are a useful institution. However, they don't generate many new persistent editors. They mostly attract attendance by promising new biographies, and newbies arrive expecting to make articles about their friends. Friends who, through no fault of their own, are unfortunately still alive and able to benefit. We tell them how difficult this is. (...) Having arrived with the wrong expectation, they may ask for new a direction. We may say they should find and fix Wikipedia's plentiful old, bad articles. (...) If they succeed in finding a few refs and write a new biography in userspace, that's when they run into the 4-day 10-edit barrier. We usually have enough coaches to take care of these directly by a mainspace rename. So, the major problem is the concentration on new BLP [Biographies of Living Persons], and the Autoconfirmed barrier is a minor one. That barrier could be further shrunk by giving Account Creators the right to boost newbies for one day or four, and maybe someone can suggest other methods, but it shouldn't be a reason for allowing the rawest newbies to create articles on their own.
Attended the Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon at MOMA 3.2.2019 and talked to members of the NYC Wikimedia Chapter about WikiData as an alternative for my Hip-hop Herstories WikiEdu project. I got an idea from @MEGS to use WikiData to create discographies of all the Black women who ever recorded a rap song or danced as part of hip-hop culture or DJed. All the non-commercial and non-pop artists who have contributed to what hip-hop is including all the women who were in background decorations that former President Obama recently made a sideways comment about twerking at his My Brother’s Keeper Alliance Summit in Oakland, Calif., Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. More later. Will intro to class today 3.12.2019. ~~~~
WATCH THIS VIDEO FOR GUIDANCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23_15imPLgI&ab_channel=TheBoringVoice
STOP: Click the Edit button
LOOK: Sign your signature and timestamp: TYPE "~~~~" before you comment.
POST YOUR REVIEW: Position at the bottom of the subheader "BAM 209 F2023 Student Reviews" and hit return to autogenerate the next number.
PUBLISH: Indicate the reason for the edit as: WikiEdu BAM 2023 Review
Ill Doctrine: The Myth of Believing in NPOV