![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
Image:Crossbow_diagram.png: I don't really care about the outdated name of this, but the image itself needs to be altered to remove the word "CROSSBOW" (in "Area targetted by CROSSBOW": should just be "Area targetted"). Can someone take this on? I'd really like to see this already dealt with before we publicly announce this as a WikiProject. --
Jmabel 23:21, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)
As far as I'm concerned, feel free to do whatever. The same Venn diagram minus the military metaphor would be fine by me, but so would all sorts of things. And if someone can identify some appropriate existing images to add, please go for it. -- Jmabel 00:50, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
New image:
I've taken the liberty of deleting from the list of the concerns of this project the phrase "Subjects which would normally be longer in other encyclopaedias." It's awfully vague, and I don't think it's useful. I've added one remark, reminding people that there already is a Wikipedia:Requests for expansion. -- Jmabel 00:02, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
I've done about what I can to set this up as a project. My inclination is to give about 48 hours for comments and revisions by the other people who have been actively involved in this, then announce it on the Village Pump, link it into the list of WikiProjects, maybe even add it to the template on maintenance tasks (what do people think of this last possibility)?
Anyway, I've put most of today into putting this together. It's time for someone else to weigh in. -- Jmabel 00:48, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
Can I just point out that the term "Third World" is very US/Euro-centric and is frowned upon by globalist organisations/academics. Alternatives include "The South", "Majority World" and "Developing World"; can we agree on standard alternative to use, please? -- Graham ☺ | Talk 00:51, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Before we go live could we move this page to:
Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias
so it is in line with usual WikiProject naming conventions, i.e. Wikipedia:WikiProject Animals etc. "WikiProject" is a like a pseudo namespace, so the first letter should be capitalized, then subsequent letters in lowercase. -- Lexor| Talk 08:09, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)
I have tried to incorporate the garish table above into the existing template design. It needs a lot of work design-wise. Anyone with the knowledge can try and make it look better. One thing that needs doing is making the "Country carousel" block a different color from the "Voted items" block. Leave comments and suggestions below.--- Xed 02:03, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Here are some open tasks in the
project on countering systemic bias:
Feel free to
or
discuss this list.
|
I think this is way too many topics to be worth listing at once on a to-do list. Are we suggesting that we will meaningfully take on, as a group, in the near future, a number of unrelated topics exceeding our number of participants? -- Jmabel 02:19, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Since we seem to be in agreement about the general layout, I'll confine myself to showing what we could do with the grid. Keeping the "columns" approach, but reducing number of topics and adding color:
-- Jmabel 03:07, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Making rows rather than columns meaningful and using free form as appropriate:
|
|}
In fact, now that I look at it, this might even let us get back to as many items as you had in the first place without it being confusing (although that still might be an awful lot to list as we launch this. Separate issues). -- Jmabel 03:29, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
This may not be perfect, but it's better than what I did before, so I will revise Template:WikiProjectCSBTasks accordingly. -- Jmabel 06:29, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Good work. I've simplified the code a bit, padded the cells, added categories to the carousel, and made carousel and voted items to diff color blocks, and turned the carousel items into a plain list. --- Xed 12:12, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
This is a rough idea of how I see the project working. Ethan Zuckerman ( weblog) has supplied us with a list of countries that he has calculated receive least attention, using his Global Attention Profile resource:
I suggest the systemic bias section should be a small box be made up of 6 columns, with 5 items in each column. This would be a box on the 'Community portal page'. (A link would go to main page, which would also have this box, as well as more detailed information)
Three of the columns should have as the first item one of the countries above. The remaining items in these columns should relate to this country, with items 2 and 3 being the History and Politics of that country. The next column would have the name of a popular language (other than english) used by Wikipedia (German, Spanish, Japanese etc), and below it 4 subjects which have more detailed entries in that language than in English. The next colum female oriented. The sixth column would be.... I don't know.
So it would look roughly like:
File:Mini systemic orange.gif Countries | File:Mini systemic purple.gifLanguage-German | File:Mini systemic lime.gif-oriented | Other | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Benin | Burkina Faso | Burundi | ? | ? | ? |
Politics | Politics | Politics | ? | ? | ? |
History | History | History | ? | ? | ? |
Mathieu Kérékou | Music | Esther Kamatari | ? | ? | ? |
Dahomey | Mossi | Kirundi | ? | ? | ? |
The countries would rotate every week, so that the next group of countries would be Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad. As would the 4th column language. The main page would have more in-depth details, including a list of the above countries, main languages of wikipedia etc-- Xed 12:38, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Archive 1#Template update.
Does anyone find it incongruous that our countering systemic bias page includes the line "Female oriented/dominated subjects ... Nursing, Fashion" - SimonP 19:38, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)
Thrilled to see this as an official project. Kudos to the organizers!!
I'm working, bit by bit, to improve Smith College. It is by no means done, but I'm pleased to report it is no longer a stub with an unannotated list of alumnae. :) What I'm wondering is, how will we decide when it's good enough to come off of our to-do list here? And how should I indicate that when/if we do?
I will probably dig into Spelman College next if nobody beats me to it. — Bsktcase 02:32, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I feel it is important the todo list is the first thing someone sees when browsing the project page; so that potential contributors are can see at one glance that it is an active project and well worth involving themselves with. Usability research on the internet shows very clearly that most people do not scroll down a page, unless their first view of a page grabs their attention. I think the to-do list should be treated as an advertisment as well as active tool. The current location of the to-do list (below the table of contents) means it is out of sight and so out of mind. ChrisG 07:08, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
We have COTW, but we don't have any indication of which week (e.g dates). Perhaps we could add a date for this? This gives the immediate impressions, on arriving at the project that there is an active community. It also avoids confusion. cgfoz 12:25, 9th Oct 2004 (GMT)
I had to return to comment about the astonishing direction the page in taking. The page as it stands is completely contrary to what I envisaged when I started the project. It has been watered down to the point of irrelevance. The idea was to concentrate on subjects which fall OUTSIDE the systemic bias zone. The current page seems mainly about filling some missing pieces INSIDE the zone. The bias noted was primarily towards American, European and Developed Countries. Look at the list of names on the page and you find 95% of them are from these countries! It's a joke. The page should be renamed 'Encouraging Systemic Bias'. Completely contrary to the original idea.
It's as if a botanist, instead of searching far and wide for new plants, has just taken a few steps to the other side of his garden - and then congratulated himself for his adventurousness. Writing about US, Euro and Developed countries and people adds to the bias.
Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales has said he plans to create a printed version of the Wikipedia to distribute for free in the Developing World. What will people in these countries think when there's more articles on Middle Earth than their own countries? And what will they say if we claim to have tried to address this problem by writing about.... Joan Jett..?
The Guinea-Bissau Civil War doesn't even have it's own article, and has only two or three sentences in the whole of Wikipedia. PJ Harvey has a reasonably large article - and yet we are asked by this page to concentrate on PJ Harvey - it's insane! (and I say that as someone who went to Harveys early gigs)
The idea for the page at the moment seems to be that topics are be chosen on individual basis. Logic dictates that more popular topics will be chosen. Instead of a popularity contest, there needs to be a systematic mechanism for choosing subjects. I have outlined such a mechanism below. A popularity contest just chooses popular subjects - and if you're writing 'against' systemic bias, then who cares about those subjects. -- Xed 12:38, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The zone of bias is not just geographic: there are, for instance, more Asian topic articles on WP:FA than there are women. And there are no women artists or writers. We need to address all the holes tha bias creates, not just one. Please, Xed, add Africa topics to the todo list so that we can see what needs doing there. Filiocht 08:43, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
In my opinion, a subject area that seems to be generally undercovered in Wikipedia is labor issues. My theory is that this is at least partly due to systemic bias (white American computer users is generally not very interested in the area, I think). I added Congress of South African Trade Unions the other day, after having found it on Articles requested for more than a year. I'll take the liberty to add this to the list on the project page, along with a number of examples, but I'd also really appreciate comments on this. Alarm 01:01, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
While there will always be room for improvement, I think we've reached the level of "unembarrassing" and should announce that this project is live. Anyone disagree? I'll give it 24 hours for objections, because I know people are in different time zones and all that. -- Jmabel 06:42, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Because Xed and I have been often at loggerheads, I'm really hesitant to overrule him on this, especially in his absence. However right now, he's a minority of one out of five. Here's my suggestion: there is still about 12 hours until when I proposed going live. If even one more person weighs in saying we should hold it up, either on their account or for Xed's sake, I will yield to that no matter how strong the consensus the other way, but I'm not willing to let one person unsupported hold this up. -- Jmabel 19:32, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Being an Atlantan, I went ahead and added a bit to Spelman College. Along with a significant addition from an anonymus contributer, this article is almost up to par with articles on most other small schools. However, it could use some checking for grammar and spelling and a bit more info. Spelman's brother college, Morehouse College, also needs some work. Sayeth 17:25, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
Image:Crossbow_diagram.png: I don't really care about the outdated name of this, but the image itself needs to be altered to remove the word "CROSSBOW" (in "Area targetted by CROSSBOW": should just be "Area targetted"). Can someone take this on? I'd really like to see this already dealt with before we publicly announce this as a WikiProject. --
Jmabel 23:21, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)
As far as I'm concerned, feel free to do whatever. The same Venn diagram minus the military metaphor would be fine by me, but so would all sorts of things. And if someone can identify some appropriate existing images to add, please go for it. -- Jmabel 00:50, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
New image:
I've taken the liberty of deleting from the list of the concerns of this project the phrase "Subjects which would normally be longer in other encyclopaedias." It's awfully vague, and I don't think it's useful. I've added one remark, reminding people that there already is a Wikipedia:Requests for expansion. -- Jmabel 00:02, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
I've done about what I can to set this up as a project. My inclination is to give about 48 hours for comments and revisions by the other people who have been actively involved in this, then announce it on the Village Pump, link it into the list of WikiProjects, maybe even add it to the template on maintenance tasks (what do people think of this last possibility)?
Anyway, I've put most of today into putting this together. It's time for someone else to weigh in. -- Jmabel 00:48, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
Can I just point out that the term "Third World" is very US/Euro-centric and is frowned upon by globalist organisations/academics. Alternatives include "The South", "Majority World" and "Developing World"; can we agree on standard alternative to use, please? -- Graham ☺ | Talk 00:51, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Before we go live could we move this page to:
Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias
so it is in line with usual WikiProject naming conventions, i.e. Wikipedia:WikiProject Animals etc. "WikiProject" is a like a pseudo namespace, so the first letter should be capitalized, then subsequent letters in lowercase. -- Lexor| Talk 08:09, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)
I have tried to incorporate the garish table above into the existing template design. It needs a lot of work design-wise. Anyone with the knowledge can try and make it look better. One thing that needs doing is making the "Country carousel" block a different color from the "Voted items" block. Leave comments and suggestions below.--- Xed 02:03, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Here are some open tasks in the
project on countering systemic bias:
Feel free to
or
discuss this list.
|
I think this is way too many topics to be worth listing at once on a to-do list. Are we suggesting that we will meaningfully take on, as a group, in the near future, a number of unrelated topics exceeding our number of participants? -- Jmabel 02:19, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Since we seem to be in agreement about the general layout, I'll confine myself to showing what we could do with the grid. Keeping the "columns" approach, but reducing number of topics and adding color:
|
-- Jmabel 03:07, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Making rows rather than columns meaningful and using free form as appropriate:
|
|}
In fact, now that I look at it, this might even let us get back to as many items as you had in the first place without it being confusing (although that still might be an awful lot to list as we launch this. Separate issues). -- Jmabel 03:29, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
This may not be perfect, but it's better than what I did before, so I will revise Template:WikiProjectCSBTasks accordingly. -- Jmabel 06:29, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Good work. I've simplified the code a bit, padded the cells, added categories to the carousel, and made carousel and voted items to diff color blocks, and turned the carousel items into a plain list. --- Xed 12:12, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
This is a rough idea of how I see the project working. Ethan Zuckerman ( weblog) has supplied us with a list of countries that he has calculated receive least attention, using his Global Attention Profile resource:
I suggest the systemic bias section should be a small box be made up of 6 columns, with 5 items in each column. This would be a box on the 'Community portal page'. (A link would go to main page, which would also have this box, as well as more detailed information)
Three of the columns should have as the first item one of the countries above. The remaining items in these columns should relate to this country, with items 2 and 3 being the History and Politics of that country. The next column would have the name of a popular language (other than english) used by Wikipedia (German, Spanish, Japanese etc), and below it 4 subjects which have more detailed entries in that language than in English. The next colum female oriented. The sixth column would be.... I don't know.
So it would look roughly like:
File:Mini systemic orange.gif Countries | File:Mini systemic purple.gifLanguage-German | File:Mini systemic lime.gif-oriented | Other | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Benin | Burkina Faso | Burundi | ? | ? | ? |
Politics | Politics | Politics | ? | ? | ? |
History | History | History | ? | ? | ? |
Mathieu Kérékou | Music | Esther Kamatari | ? | ? | ? |
Dahomey | Mossi | Kirundi | ? | ? | ? |
The countries would rotate every week, so that the next group of countries would be Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad. As would the 4th column language. The main page would have more in-depth details, including a list of the above countries, main languages of wikipedia etc-- Xed 12:38, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Archive 1#Template update.
Does anyone find it incongruous that our countering systemic bias page includes the line "Female oriented/dominated subjects ... Nursing, Fashion" - SimonP 19:38, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)
Thrilled to see this as an official project. Kudos to the organizers!!
I'm working, bit by bit, to improve Smith College. It is by no means done, but I'm pleased to report it is no longer a stub with an unannotated list of alumnae. :) What I'm wondering is, how will we decide when it's good enough to come off of our to-do list here? And how should I indicate that when/if we do?
I will probably dig into Spelman College next if nobody beats me to it. — Bsktcase 02:32, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I feel it is important the todo list is the first thing someone sees when browsing the project page; so that potential contributors are can see at one glance that it is an active project and well worth involving themselves with. Usability research on the internet shows very clearly that most people do not scroll down a page, unless their first view of a page grabs their attention. I think the to-do list should be treated as an advertisment as well as active tool. The current location of the to-do list (below the table of contents) means it is out of sight and so out of mind. ChrisG 07:08, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
We have COTW, but we don't have any indication of which week (e.g dates). Perhaps we could add a date for this? This gives the immediate impressions, on arriving at the project that there is an active community. It also avoids confusion. cgfoz 12:25, 9th Oct 2004 (GMT)
I had to return to comment about the astonishing direction the page in taking. The page as it stands is completely contrary to what I envisaged when I started the project. It has been watered down to the point of irrelevance. The idea was to concentrate on subjects which fall OUTSIDE the systemic bias zone. The current page seems mainly about filling some missing pieces INSIDE the zone. The bias noted was primarily towards American, European and Developed Countries. Look at the list of names on the page and you find 95% of them are from these countries! It's a joke. The page should be renamed 'Encouraging Systemic Bias'. Completely contrary to the original idea.
It's as if a botanist, instead of searching far and wide for new plants, has just taken a few steps to the other side of his garden - and then congratulated himself for his adventurousness. Writing about US, Euro and Developed countries and people adds to the bias.
Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales has said he plans to create a printed version of the Wikipedia to distribute for free in the Developing World. What will people in these countries think when there's more articles on Middle Earth than their own countries? And what will they say if we claim to have tried to address this problem by writing about.... Joan Jett..?
The Guinea-Bissau Civil War doesn't even have it's own article, and has only two or three sentences in the whole of Wikipedia. PJ Harvey has a reasonably large article - and yet we are asked by this page to concentrate on PJ Harvey - it's insane! (and I say that as someone who went to Harveys early gigs)
The idea for the page at the moment seems to be that topics are be chosen on individual basis. Logic dictates that more popular topics will be chosen. Instead of a popularity contest, there needs to be a systematic mechanism for choosing subjects. I have outlined such a mechanism below. A popularity contest just chooses popular subjects - and if you're writing 'against' systemic bias, then who cares about those subjects. -- Xed 12:38, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The zone of bias is not just geographic: there are, for instance, more Asian topic articles on WP:FA than there are women. And there are no women artists or writers. We need to address all the holes tha bias creates, not just one. Please, Xed, add Africa topics to the todo list so that we can see what needs doing there. Filiocht 08:43, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
In my opinion, a subject area that seems to be generally undercovered in Wikipedia is labor issues. My theory is that this is at least partly due to systemic bias (white American computer users is generally not very interested in the area, I think). I added Congress of South African Trade Unions the other day, after having found it on Articles requested for more than a year. I'll take the liberty to add this to the list on the project page, along with a number of examples, but I'd also really appreciate comments on this. Alarm 01:01, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
While there will always be room for improvement, I think we've reached the level of "unembarrassing" and should announce that this project is live. Anyone disagree? I'll give it 24 hours for objections, because I know people are in different time zones and all that. -- Jmabel 06:42, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Because Xed and I have been often at loggerheads, I'm really hesitant to overrule him on this, especially in his absence. However right now, he's a minority of one out of five. Here's my suggestion: there is still about 12 hours until when I proposed going live. If even one more person weighs in saying we should hold it up, either on their account or for Xed's sake, I will yield to that no matter how strong the consensus the other way, but I'm not willing to let one person unsupported hold this up. -- Jmabel 19:32, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
Being an Atlantan, I went ahead and added a bit to Spelman College. Along with a significant addition from an anonymus contributer, this article is almost up to par with articles on most other small schools. However, it could use some checking for grammar and spelling and a bit more info. Spelman's brother college, Morehouse College, also needs some work. Sayeth 17:25, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)