The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2015-08-19. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.
users were placed into categories based on their rates of editing
@ JSutherland (WMF), interesting article. Can you clarify whether these categories were based on edits to WP as a whole each day or edits to the Shooting article in specific? The most curious finding to my eyes was the comparative lack of edits in the verdict's traffic spike, which is kind of amazing and worth communicating to those worried about editor dropoff. On one hand, it's logical that there's not much new info to add apart from the verdict itself, but one would think that the pure number of eyeballs (traffic) would remind more editors to fix citations and clean the whole thing up, similar to how it first started. (Was the page protected in the traffic spike periods? Would be worth noting.) A bunch of empty pages are enticing to edit, especially to users who may know something about the topic, but once an article starts to build up, there's less a reason (or "need") to bulk it up. I'd also posit that featured articles, with their length and "brilliant" verbosity, look so pristine that editors are naturally discouraged from touching them, feeling no need to disrupt the order. If you do continue with the qualitative analysis, I would be curious whether the WMF finds that people read more/less of an article when it reaches that saturation state, or if it just makes them read the lede and skim one or two relevant parts instead of reading as much as they would of a smaller article. I've written lots of peer reviewed content here and I find that my own eyes glaze over at the walls of perfectly cited text, so I've come to prefer concision over completeness. It's one thing to worry about editor participation (as tied to rate of edits) and another to question how content quality actually affects the end product: readers reading. – czar 18:47, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
The Otello set design image is fantastic; it's the first such image I've ever seen on Wikipedia, let alone as an FP. BobAmnertiopsis ∴ ChatMe! 17:29, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
All right. Multiple things I want to say this article because I am dumbfounded. Firstly, for a humor website like Cracked claims to be, this was the complete opposite of the definition of humor. Second, saying that Wikipedia hates women is a generalization and a gross claim to make. Yes Wikipedia has a gender gap. God help I would like to see a female editor or two being part of the Video Game WikiProject. But to say that Wikipedia hates women is like saying that Wikipedia is a complete encyclopedia. Both false and claims that will never be true.
Sure ArbCom can get troubling (See the Lightbreather case), but I am getting tired of this whole thought that Wikipedia is Anti-women. For Gods sake the internet is full of people who say terrible things just to get a reaction from others. I'm just overall disappointed by this article and wish it was never made.
And one more thing. I don't like her claim that she left Wikipedia after the ArbCom case even though she still made little edits here and there. Including making a Draft page of video game journalist Cara Ellison which she also admitted to be a friend of hers. Saying you left Wikipedia while making some edits here and there doesn't constitute leaving Wikipedia, in my opinion. GamerPro64 16:50, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
I was willing to give the article a fair go, until I got to "focus on articles about entertainment" immediately followed by "out of fear of real-life consequences". Let's keep it real here, there are people who edit articles on mathematics, medicine, and politics, then there are people who edit articles on entertainment, and the reasons they primarily choose one or the other is not consequences, it's ability and resources, entertainment articles needing less ability and less resources. Int21h ( talk) 20:17, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
The writers failed to consider a yet another possibility. It is written: "Dr. Blofeld cited eleven sources". All of them predate the 2012 application by a wide margin. I know Dr. Blofeld, but I don't know DotMusic, and I'd rather assume that Dot ripped off the same sources (or sources further developed upon these), but without giving any credits. Staszek Lem ( talk) 17:48, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
I love the fact that the AfD for the article closed as trainwreck. Have a feeling we'll be feeling more of that article in the future. GamerPro64 03:46, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
Well, given that less than 10% of all editors have been women, if 1/3 (33%) of the editors left over a five year period, they can't mostly have been women. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 08:43, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
I have a hard time fathoming why anyone got paid to do 'research' concluding 'topics we consider politically but not scientifically “controversial” ... experience more frequent edits with more words changed per day than pages we consider “noncontroversial” '. This is rather like concluding that people who are more popular have more friends, or that dogs with more fleas have a greater incidence of small, itchy bites on them. Far more interesting actual research would have been a multi-valued comparison – rates of addition, removal, reversion, etc, change in number of editors, of anonymous editors, of administrative, RfC, and noticeboard actions, etc., ratio of edits to talk page posts, ratio of sources to word-count, ratio of secondary to primary sources, number of additions and removal of citations to separate sources, change in complexity level of language, splitting vs.consolidation of topically-related articles, and so on – between topics that are: a) politically but not scientifically controversial; b) scientifically but not politically controversial [including just due to obscurity]; c) both politically and scientifically controversial; d) neither politically nor scientifically controversial but controversial for some other known reason (religious objection, legal action, celebrity scandal, etc.). It would probably help if it used an actually statistically significant number of articles, too.
I don't think anyone needed any kind of "study" showing that politically controversial topics get edited more. Any sane person would have confidently predicted that, and any even slightly experienced editor (or regular reader, for that matter) already knows this is true on WP, and we have policies and guidelines that specifically address the "controversial topic" factor. What we don't have data on (that I know of) is where there are quantifiable differences between different sorts of controversies. Whoever makes this your dissertation/thesis, please credit me with the idea in a footnote. :-) — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 19:14, 27 August 2015 (UTC)
'In the wake of a high-profile case, administrators callously and robotically rehearsed the "one time is too many" – a catchphrase that through its rhetorical singularity renders campus sexual violence an "isolated issue"'
Thanks for using that graph about the RKD database showing the women artists and accompanying it with the quote about 24% women on Wikipedia. Since the graph shows clearly that the best matching percentage is only about half that, then it is clear that Wikipedia does better than the RKD at including biographies (or at least Wikidata items) about women. In fact Wikipedia is twice as good. That said, 24% seems lagging, but this has to do with a gendergap in the arts world. Wikipedia cannot fix any existing gendergap, but it can help to stop them being amplified. A gendergap is amplified for example when a museum opts to spend all of its purchasing power on modern artworks by men. This may not even be a decision made by the museum directly, but indirectly, by stipulating that only prize-winning works should be purchased, and no prizes are awarded to women that year, etc. Looking at the history of this particular case, namely the history of sexual violence in US universities, I can imagine the amount of pushback this got at each turn. Most Wikipedian editors are students or just-graduated and looking for a job. In both cases they are highly motivated to keep their alma mater pages in order. If you had selected the topic of deaths relating to alcohol abuse at universities or just fatal accidents due to stupidity during " rush week", a yearly phenomenon which happens alas to ALL genders, I don't think the outcome would have been different. Wikipedia is not good political arena, though I would agree that it is one. It is just very tricky to maneuver within the confines of the Wikipedia policy system. I am ashamed to say that I agree with some of the quotes that you repeat here by Wikipedians. Sorry about that, but I think ALL of your work would be welcome on Wikidata, and we should probably make a Wikidata project to do just that. Jane ( talk) 16:44, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
One small point, I thought that the WP:GGTF was a community initiative started by @ SlimVirgin:, not a WMF one started by Sue Gardner. Ϣere SpielChequers 19:42, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
The article rightly pointed out that one of the critical comments was on Wikipedia Review, but while it linked to motherboard.vice.com for the quote "Accusing Wikipedia culture of being 'trollish and misogynistic' is nothing less than a way to silence people who challenge mainstream feminism,", it didn't name that site in the text. It would have been better if it had been clearer that this criticism was also elsewhere on the Internet, as currently written this could be misread as criticism from within the Wikipedia community. Ϣere SpielChequers 20:06, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
Here, I want to note an important distinction between male privilege and misogyny. Where male privilege might be understood as a form of power granted to individuals based on assertions or assumptions about their gender, misogyny is the use of that power in acts of domination.
The author has constructed a lot of generalities out of a handful of incidents and quotes, and ignored other facts that are hard to fit into the narrative. For example, he also created a List of American higher education institutions with open Title IX sexual violence investigations. This, too, was subjected to a deletion debate, but in this case the keep and delete votes were almost evenly divided. Ultimately the nominator withdrew the nomination without prejudice and redirected the list to Office for Civil Rights, where prose coverage of the investigations could be developed, offered to help develop it, and had no objections to the eventual creation of "a decent article on Title IX sexual violence investigations." At the time, the author seemed content with that decision. Wikipedia is not monolithic. RockMagnetist( talk) 06:29, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
This op-ed was a difficult slog for me to read, as I'm not sure it adequately summarized the point(s) it was making. So I'll just comment on two of my takeaways from it. (1) Regarding the idea that men dominate Wikipedia so as to suppress coverage of topics like campus rape, see Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). This topic was featured on Wikipedia's main page in the "Did you know?" section. This is a controversial topic, as demonstrated by its extensive talk page archives, but the "men's club" here has not suppressed it. (2) Regarding categorization, yes, Wikipedia:Defining applies here. I created Category:Facebook groups, and successfully defended it from a deletion attempt. Note, however, that it has less than a dozen members. I don't do Facebook, but my understanding is that it has thousands, if not millions, of "groups". However, only a handful of notable organizations are WP:defined by this characteristic. For example: " Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE) is a Facebook group..." I'm thankful that, as yet, there are no colleges which are so well-known for the frequency of rape on campus that we define them by that. Wbm1058 ( talk) 19:46, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
In an earlier discussion on this page, I made an ad hominem attack on Thebrycepeake, and I was surprised at myself. This is something I studiously avoid doing in Wikipedia (not to mention real life); I believe strongly in the core policy of civility. I came to realize that it was a response to the extended incivility of this article. It is one massive failure to assume good faith. When editors disagree with an initiative by Thebrycepeake, it is because the information threatens male domination. When they cite policy, they are using "scientism" to mask their ignorance of fact. Deletion debates become opportunities for the majority to impose their will on a minority. And by extension, Wikipedia as a whole is subject to a "hegemony of the asshole consensus." There is no real evidence for these claims; they are constructed out of a mixture of mind-reading, rhetoric and guilt by association. It positively invites an uncivil response.
For a glimpse of male hegemony in action, consider discussions at WikiProject Universities on University Sexual Assault Investigations in Lead, where staunch hegemonists like @ SarahStierch express doubt that the material belongs in article leads or in its own "controversies" section; or Editing Infoboxes, where another gang of oppressors questions its inclusion in the college/uni infobox template. Yet, on reflection, these people don't sound very frightening. They don't challenge the accuracy or value of the information; they simply question the way that Thebrycepeake wishes to present it. And they frequently propose alternatives such as creating a separate article on the investigations and linking university articles to it, or incorporating the material into the history section for each article. Indeed, that has been done in University of Chicago, while in Occidental College it is part of a multi-issue Controversy section.
The real problem is that Thebrycepeake wants to broadcast his information with a megaphone, and when his desires run counter to what he calls WP:<POLICIES>, he blames the policies. Consider, for example, the question of defining characteristics of a subject. To quote WP:CATDEF,
A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having.
In the category deletion debate, Thebrycepeake says, "The fact that the President's own taskforce NAMED (for the first time EVER) these institutions, and that the news has widely broadcast this naming, further makes it a defining feature for a lot of current and future occupants." Unfortunately, the other editors are not able to articulate the crucial flaw in this reasoning, falling back on statements like "it doesn't have the long-term and wide-ranging significance to be defining." But the real point of WP:DEFINING is clear from the examples it provides:
"Caravaggio, an Italian artist of the Baroque movement ...", Italian, artist, and Baroque may all be considered to be defining characteristics of the subject Caravaggio.
"Subject is an adjective noun ..." or "Subject, an adjective noun, ...".
When the University of Chicago is named in an article on the President's task force or on sexual assaults in colleges, the investigations are the subject of the article, so they are not defining. If, however, U of C were commonly referred to in other contexts as "The University of Chicago, a university under investigation for Title IX violations," it would be defining. But, of course, it isn't.
I have not been involved in any of these discussions, but it seems to me that most participants were trying to honestly assess the information and the best way to present it; and they believe that Wikipedia policies are there for a good reason. They don't deserve this smear. They have proposed reasonable alternatives, and there is no evidence that Wikipedia policy is any barrier to implementing them. RockMagnetist( talk) 19:03, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
The op-ed seems to take an issue with scientism on Wikipedia, definining it (I am paraphrasising here) somewhere along the lines of an unjustified use of scientific arguments and terms to silence critics and dissenters, strengthening one's own political views with scientific authority and thereby claiming objectivity, and, on top of it all, being blind to the various forms of injustice and discrimination that are created in the wake of objectification and neutralization. While the above text makes those things sound as if the devil himself had devised them for this site, it should be clear that in most of the cases, these things are absolutely normal and essential for Wikipedia. Even Thebrycepeake, if he is serious about his work here, will have to engage regularly in these kinds of activities: We cite a physicist's textbook to silence those who claims that jet fuel can't melt steel beams; we counter claims that there is no racism in western societies with statistics of the job market; and we make a clear distinction between points of view that deserve to be presented in a well-balanced fashion and those who don't deserve that kind of privilege. And if we follow our conscious, we are doing this by being faithful to our sources, the issues we write about, and what we hold to be true and just.
But of course this is not what Thebrycepeake protests against here. What delineates scientific from scientism, it appears, is that the latter is phony and hollow, and that its proponents either bluntly lie about their real motives or (even worse!) are oblivious to the inherently mysoginist, sexist, hegemonic, or what ever you would like to call the forces that make them act in the ways which are criticized in this opinion piece. They are borrowing from science an authority they don't deserve, making them the actual opposite of what they claim to be – neutral, objective, fair, pragmatic, and so on. But here we might hesitate for a second: Isn't this article doing the same thing by citing renowned scholars who allegedly support the author's point of view? Isn't erecting the ideal of a fair and balanced account that manages to include everyone's views, claims, and needs and then pitting it against the messy reality of everyday Wikipedia guilty of the same sleight of hand that accuses others of their bias and their obvious personal interests, while firmly situating oneself outside such political quarrels? Doesn't the op-ed, by shifting away from the countless wikilegal, wikipolitical, and wikitechnical arguments brought forth by countless Wikipedians who hardly qualify as "Men™" (at least not any more than Thebrycepeake himself) towards the issues and arguments the author deems the most important commit the very same crime of ignoring problems that actually matter in the here and now in favor of dogmatized slogans, phrases, and claims which only bear the cloak of feminism?
I have to admit that I do have a problem with the way a number of STS scholars are cited in this op-ed. And it is not merely the fact that this text does not seem to have a problem with quoting both Latour and Bourdieu for its agenda, two authors whose theories and political stances are so radically opposed to each other with regard to this op-ed's theses that I find it hard to believe its author has thoroughly engaged with their relevant writings. For an article so ostentatiously bearing the banner of a critical approach to unquestioned truths, I think it could do a better job at exposing itself to the shortcomings, risks and blind spots of its own approach. Others – Wikipedians, Men, hegemonists, ignorants, formalists, etc. – cannot cease to fail in their quest for truth and neutrality, because they are mistaken from the very start. The author, on the other hand, or who ever it is who speaks through this lines to the readers, does not seem to live the dangerous life of being prone to error or having to learn about his or her own mistakes. I think this way of telling a story is bit too lazy, at least for our times who seem to have their difficulties with perspectives who claim access to an infallible truth.
After Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto I thought at leasts feminists were immune to falling into this kind of trap. But maybe that's also a bit too presumptuous from my side, as I have written pieces like this one myself, albeit I hope it's been some years by now. I can understand the rightful indignation of someone who's seen their hard work erased without sufficient explanation and whose complaints have been overheard, ignored, ridiculed and in any case misunderstood. The only reasonable way of resolving ignorance and misunderstanding, however, is not by hailing some kind of world where the differences from which they stem are finally – once and for all – done away with. Sacrificing this world, how ever inconvinient and troublesome it may be, for a utopian vision which feeds from exactly those false and phony transcendent truths STS has been criticizing for roughly fifty years now cannot be the answer. An encyclopedia where women and men finally get the same amount of kB for equality's sake may be anything, but it sure as hell will not lead to the end of history. Yes, crying out against injustice must be impossible, and that includes questioning the value and adequacy of certain norms, rules, and arguments. But that requires situating oneself within the landscape that is about to be renegotiated and accpeting the risk that, in the end, it might also be ourselves who will have to change or acknowledge our mistakes – and not solely those who we have conveniently bxed as "the others".-- Toter Alter Mann ( talk) 22:40, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
Similarly, the history of the Elliot Rodger article (merged with the 2014 Isla Vista killings) reveals debates over whether he should be included in the category "violence against men" instead of "misogyny," whether the word "misogyny" should be used since he killed more men than women, and if there should even be a section entitled "misogyny" given the "bias" of the term.
I think it is unfair to actual victims of violence against men to apply the term so carelessly. Gender-neutral violence, sadly, usually affects men more. To me, violence against men is violence against someone because they're male or assumed to be male (women/non-binary assumed to be men can be victims of VaM and vice versa). It is a real thing but it doesn't apply in the Isla Vista case.
I am female, I was assigned male at birth and have stereotypical male body parts. I shy away from the label "transgender" because I find the trans community too exclusive. I don't get into gender politics on Wikipedia or edit gender-related articles often because I'm afraid. The environment of gender on Wikipedia is extremely hostile and I don't think I'm qualified enough to speak on gender issues. I am learning to break free from that.
I agree with that Wikipedia policies are exclusive. Knowledge is biased to who writes it and we are seeing that our sources of knowledge exclude the knowledge of minority groups. Of course women and men aren't psychologically different but being treated differently leads to a different PoV.
Sorry if I misunderstood the article. :( Andrea Carter ( at your service | my good deeds) 05:03, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
It's a pretty high bar to include mention of any controversy in any lead paragraph. The controversy generally needs to be a major or defining event for the subject at hand, not just one thing that happened to an otherwise large, complex, or old subject. The removal of these was probably well justified and had nothing to do with any gender issue. Gigs ( talk) 20:05, 27 August 2015 (UTC)
What's happened here is that someone tried to expand, categorize, and restructure a whole bunch of articles in a skewing way, that focused, laser-like, on something that's really a vague, open-ended "investigation" the basis and parameters of which are unclear. When reasons were given why this exact approach isn't appropriate on WP, rather than listen to the reasons and reapproach the issue by writing an article about the investigation(s), their scope, and the targeted institutions (i.e., salvage the work), the writer instead declared WP full of hegemonic assholes, abandoned the work, and parlayed the "experience" into a one-sided journal paper instead. I kind of feel WP was used, and the entire situation is a false dichotomy setup: Either the author gets her way, in every single way, or WP is a wicked place to be publicly shamed. There were so many other ways to handle this.
The sad thing is that there really are a WP:BIAS problem and a WP:GENDERGAP problem, but this editorial missed both of them widely, and devolved almost immediately into an incoherent conspiracy theory. Just because not every imaginable approach to coverage of campus sexual violence is an encyclopedic approach doesn't mean that some good ol' boys' club of misogynist douchebags is in control of Wikipedia and is censoring the issue from our pages. What really happened was someone was trying, however inadvertently, to inappropriately use Wikipedia as a soapbox, meanwhile the actual facts they sought to include should actually be included, just in a more encyclopedic, less tabloid, manner. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:30, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
This kind of doublethink and cognitive dissonance is found throughout the piece. To just pick a paragraph at random: Peake, in criticizing WP's consensus decision-making model says "This ethnography is not without its quantitative supporters", and cites previous work he feels is enthnographic in nature, but the works he cites are not actually research in that field but two papers by largely the same researchers, on computer-mediated work collaboration; to the extent they have a social sciences component, they seem to be sociological and microeconomic (particularly concerned with distributed organizational ergonomics), not culturally anthropological, i.e. ethnographic. Since when do Wikipedians form an ethnic group or anything like one anyway? WP is a self-selecting affinity group. A sentence later Peake turns this "ethnographic" criticism on it its ear, and says of his own counter-argument "Through an ethnographic approach, however, I am able to go one step further than these quantitative studies to demonstrate ..." [various things he can't prove]. So, what is this? An ethnographers against ethnographers war? While Peake has some educational background in anthropology, I do, too. I'm not detecting anthropological thinking at work in this editorial; it's a socio-political communications (i.e. PR) piece; like Peake, I coincidentally have a degree in that, too, so I recognize it when I see it (especially having been a professional activist for about a decade). An ethnographic approach is certainly not evidenced by a claim of "scientism" on the part Peak's "asshole" opponents. Last I looked, anthropology is a science. And it doesn't require a focus on science to decide whether something is a defining quality of a university, for either lead or a category, anyway. No untoward veneration of science is required to assess whether some vague "investigation" is encyclopedic material or of indeterminate importance. It's absolutely the wrong approach to ethnographic methods to generalize from observations of outlying members of a group to assumptions about every member of a population.
The frustrating thing is, this is all a total distraction from the real bias and gender gap problem on Wikipedia. There is no "WP:THREATENING2MEN" factor at work here, except on the part of a few isolated individuals. Men are not generally threatened by women or feminism (even if some outlying weirdos with mental issues are). Rather, the gap and the bias come from "WP:NOTINTERESTING2MEN". Males in the aggregate tend to be self-absorbed and simply WP:DGAF about things that aren't "guy stuff". There's a reason that WP is dominated by coverage of sports, video games, rock stars, hot actresses, machines, warfare, business leaders, and other traditionally "dude"-leaning interests. It's not because men hate women and want to keep them from writing articles on other things or minimize their proper representation within those topics, too; most of them simply can't be bothered to notice or care. It's not even male privilege, it just male collective narcissism. It's not a conspiracy (and it does not posit one about women), it's just systemic apathy commingled with willful ignorance, a combination that, when it becomes self-congratulatory, we call stupid. There is, surely, a Wikipedia douchebag factor at work (closely related to that found in the gaming community, the free software movement, academia [at least in the sciences], and business, but it's just Y-chromo jackassery, not a vindictive political movement. It's a thick wall to knock down, but hammering on the wrong one doesn't help. I'll close with Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 05:59, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
Hi Bryce. It has been brought to my attention that you wrote this article in 2015, and that it cites a diff of one of my edits. Unless I'm missing something, you either used the wrong diff or misquoted me. Here are the diffs:
As you can see, there is a total disconnect between your description of my thoughts and my edit summary. Did you use the wrong diff? If there's another explanation or some other diff and or quote(s) of me in that article, please clarify it for me. Thanks. -- BullRangifer ( talk) 17:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
Hilarious. I lost it at Torvald. Gamaliel ( talk) 21:45, 19 August 2015 (UTC)
I was listening to Straight Outta Compton while reading this! Eat me, I'm a red bean ( discuss)( contribs) 05:56, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
These lists display terribly on a laptop. You should use something like Template:Episode list. - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) 02:52, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
A belated happy birthday, Tony! Smallbones( smalltalk) 16:47, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
@ TonyTheTiger: Thank you again for contributing this piece. I don't see a lot of comments here so I hope the heat from this week's op-ed didn't distract from your travelogue. I hope you contribute again, perhaps with your next trip, or perhaps our Gallery feature would be a good fit for you. Gamaliel ( talk) 17:57, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
Pretty cool! - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) 18:44, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2015-08-19. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.
users were placed into categories based on their rates of editing
@ JSutherland (WMF), interesting article. Can you clarify whether these categories were based on edits to WP as a whole each day or edits to the Shooting article in specific? The most curious finding to my eyes was the comparative lack of edits in the verdict's traffic spike, which is kind of amazing and worth communicating to those worried about editor dropoff. On one hand, it's logical that there's not much new info to add apart from the verdict itself, but one would think that the pure number of eyeballs (traffic) would remind more editors to fix citations and clean the whole thing up, similar to how it first started. (Was the page protected in the traffic spike periods? Would be worth noting.) A bunch of empty pages are enticing to edit, especially to users who may know something about the topic, but once an article starts to build up, there's less a reason (or "need") to bulk it up. I'd also posit that featured articles, with their length and "brilliant" verbosity, look so pristine that editors are naturally discouraged from touching them, feeling no need to disrupt the order. If you do continue with the qualitative analysis, I would be curious whether the WMF finds that people read more/less of an article when it reaches that saturation state, or if it just makes them read the lede and skim one or two relevant parts instead of reading as much as they would of a smaller article. I've written lots of peer reviewed content here and I find that my own eyes glaze over at the walls of perfectly cited text, so I've come to prefer concision over completeness. It's one thing to worry about editor participation (as tied to rate of edits) and another to question how content quality actually affects the end product: readers reading. – czar 18:47, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
The Otello set design image is fantastic; it's the first such image I've ever seen on Wikipedia, let alone as an FP. BobAmnertiopsis ∴ ChatMe! 17:29, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
All right. Multiple things I want to say this article because I am dumbfounded. Firstly, for a humor website like Cracked claims to be, this was the complete opposite of the definition of humor. Second, saying that Wikipedia hates women is a generalization and a gross claim to make. Yes Wikipedia has a gender gap. God help I would like to see a female editor or two being part of the Video Game WikiProject. But to say that Wikipedia hates women is like saying that Wikipedia is a complete encyclopedia. Both false and claims that will never be true.
Sure ArbCom can get troubling (See the Lightbreather case), but I am getting tired of this whole thought that Wikipedia is Anti-women. For Gods sake the internet is full of people who say terrible things just to get a reaction from others. I'm just overall disappointed by this article and wish it was never made.
And one more thing. I don't like her claim that she left Wikipedia after the ArbCom case even though she still made little edits here and there. Including making a Draft page of video game journalist Cara Ellison which she also admitted to be a friend of hers. Saying you left Wikipedia while making some edits here and there doesn't constitute leaving Wikipedia, in my opinion. GamerPro64 16:50, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
I was willing to give the article a fair go, until I got to "focus on articles about entertainment" immediately followed by "out of fear of real-life consequences". Let's keep it real here, there are people who edit articles on mathematics, medicine, and politics, then there are people who edit articles on entertainment, and the reasons they primarily choose one or the other is not consequences, it's ability and resources, entertainment articles needing less ability and less resources. Int21h ( talk) 20:17, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
The writers failed to consider a yet another possibility. It is written: "Dr. Blofeld cited eleven sources". All of them predate the 2012 application by a wide margin. I know Dr. Blofeld, but I don't know DotMusic, and I'd rather assume that Dot ripped off the same sources (or sources further developed upon these), but without giving any credits. Staszek Lem ( talk) 17:48, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
I love the fact that the AfD for the article closed as trainwreck. Have a feeling we'll be feeling more of that article in the future. GamerPro64 03:46, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
Well, given that less than 10% of all editors have been women, if 1/3 (33%) of the editors left over a five year period, they can't mostly have been women. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 08:43, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
I have a hard time fathoming why anyone got paid to do 'research' concluding 'topics we consider politically but not scientifically “controversial” ... experience more frequent edits with more words changed per day than pages we consider “noncontroversial” '. This is rather like concluding that people who are more popular have more friends, or that dogs with more fleas have a greater incidence of small, itchy bites on them. Far more interesting actual research would have been a multi-valued comparison – rates of addition, removal, reversion, etc, change in number of editors, of anonymous editors, of administrative, RfC, and noticeboard actions, etc., ratio of edits to talk page posts, ratio of sources to word-count, ratio of secondary to primary sources, number of additions and removal of citations to separate sources, change in complexity level of language, splitting vs.consolidation of topically-related articles, and so on – between topics that are: a) politically but not scientifically controversial; b) scientifically but not politically controversial [including just due to obscurity]; c) both politically and scientifically controversial; d) neither politically nor scientifically controversial but controversial for some other known reason (religious objection, legal action, celebrity scandal, etc.). It would probably help if it used an actually statistically significant number of articles, too.
I don't think anyone needed any kind of "study" showing that politically controversial topics get edited more. Any sane person would have confidently predicted that, and any even slightly experienced editor (or regular reader, for that matter) already knows this is true on WP, and we have policies and guidelines that specifically address the "controversial topic" factor. What we don't have data on (that I know of) is where there are quantifiable differences between different sorts of controversies. Whoever makes this your dissertation/thesis, please credit me with the idea in a footnote. :-) — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 19:14, 27 August 2015 (UTC)
'In the wake of a high-profile case, administrators callously and robotically rehearsed the "one time is too many" – a catchphrase that through its rhetorical singularity renders campus sexual violence an "isolated issue"'
Thanks for using that graph about the RKD database showing the women artists and accompanying it with the quote about 24% women on Wikipedia. Since the graph shows clearly that the best matching percentage is only about half that, then it is clear that Wikipedia does better than the RKD at including biographies (or at least Wikidata items) about women. In fact Wikipedia is twice as good. That said, 24% seems lagging, but this has to do with a gendergap in the arts world. Wikipedia cannot fix any existing gendergap, but it can help to stop them being amplified. A gendergap is amplified for example when a museum opts to spend all of its purchasing power on modern artworks by men. This may not even be a decision made by the museum directly, but indirectly, by stipulating that only prize-winning works should be purchased, and no prizes are awarded to women that year, etc. Looking at the history of this particular case, namely the history of sexual violence in US universities, I can imagine the amount of pushback this got at each turn. Most Wikipedian editors are students or just-graduated and looking for a job. In both cases they are highly motivated to keep their alma mater pages in order. If you had selected the topic of deaths relating to alcohol abuse at universities or just fatal accidents due to stupidity during " rush week", a yearly phenomenon which happens alas to ALL genders, I don't think the outcome would have been different. Wikipedia is not good political arena, though I would agree that it is one. It is just very tricky to maneuver within the confines of the Wikipedia policy system. I am ashamed to say that I agree with some of the quotes that you repeat here by Wikipedians. Sorry about that, but I think ALL of your work would be welcome on Wikidata, and we should probably make a Wikidata project to do just that. Jane ( talk) 16:44, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
One small point, I thought that the WP:GGTF was a community initiative started by @ SlimVirgin:, not a WMF one started by Sue Gardner. Ϣere SpielChequers 19:42, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
The article rightly pointed out that one of the critical comments was on Wikipedia Review, but while it linked to motherboard.vice.com for the quote "Accusing Wikipedia culture of being 'trollish and misogynistic' is nothing less than a way to silence people who challenge mainstream feminism,", it didn't name that site in the text. It would have been better if it had been clearer that this criticism was also elsewhere on the Internet, as currently written this could be misread as criticism from within the Wikipedia community. Ϣere SpielChequers 20:06, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
Here, I want to note an important distinction between male privilege and misogyny. Where male privilege might be understood as a form of power granted to individuals based on assertions or assumptions about their gender, misogyny is the use of that power in acts of domination.
The author has constructed a lot of generalities out of a handful of incidents and quotes, and ignored other facts that are hard to fit into the narrative. For example, he also created a List of American higher education institutions with open Title IX sexual violence investigations. This, too, was subjected to a deletion debate, but in this case the keep and delete votes were almost evenly divided. Ultimately the nominator withdrew the nomination without prejudice and redirected the list to Office for Civil Rights, where prose coverage of the investigations could be developed, offered to help develop it, and had no objections to the eventual creation of "a decent article on Title IX sexual violence investigations." At the time, the author seemed content with that decision. Wikipedia is not monolithic. RockMagnetist( talk) 06:29, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
This op-ed was a difficult slog for me to read, as I'm not sure it adequately summarized the point(s) it was making. So I'll just comment on two of my takeaways from it. (1) Regarding the idea that men dominate Wikipedia so as to suppress coverage of topics like campus rape, see Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). This topic was featured on Wikipedia's main page in the "Did you know?" section. This is a controversial topic, as demonstrated by its extensive talk page archives, but the "men's club" here has not suppressed it. (2) Regarding categorization, yes, Wikipedia:Defining applies here. I created Category:Facebook groups, and successfully defended it from a deletion attempt. Note, however, that it has less than a dozen members. I don't do Facebook, but my understanding is that it has thousands, if not millions, of "groups". However, only a handful of notable organizations are WP:defined by this characteristic. For example: " Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE) is a Facebook group..." I'm thankful that, as yet, there are no colleges which are so well-known for the frequency of rape on campus that we define them by that. Wbm1058 ( talk) 19:46, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
In an earlier discussion on this page, I made an ad hominem attack on Thebrycepeake, and I was surprised at myself. This is something I studiously avoid doing in Wikipedia (not to mention real life); I believe strongly in the core policy of civility. I came to realize that it was a response to the extended incivility of this article. It is one massive failure to assume good faith. When editors disagree with an initiative by Thebrycepeake, it is because the information threatens male domination. When they cite policy, they are using "scientism" to mask their ignorance of fact. Deletion debates become opportunities for the majority to impose their will on a minority. And by extension, Wikipedia as a whole is subject to a "hegemony of the asshole consensus." There is no real evidence for these claims; they are constructed out of a mixture of mind-reading, rhetoric and guilt by association. It positively invites an uncivil response.
For a glimpse of male hegemony in action, consider discussions at WikiProject Universities on University Sexual Assault Investigations in Lead, where staunch hegemonists like @ SarahStierch express doubt that the material belongs in article leads or in its own "controversies" section; or Editing Infoboxes, where another gang of oppressors questions its inclusion in the college/uni infobox template. Yet, on reflection, these people don't sound very frightening. They don't challenge the accuracy or value of the information; they simply question the way that Thebrycepeake wishes to present it. And they frequently propose alternatives such as creating a separate article on the investigations and linking university articles to it, or incorporating the material into the history section for each article. Indeed, that has been done in University of Chicago, while in Occidental College it is part of a multi-issue Controversy section.
The real problem is that Thebrycepeake wants to broadcast his information with a megaphone, and when his desires run counter to what he calls WP:<POLICIES>, he blames the policies. Consider, for example, the question of defining characteristics of a subject. To quote WP:CATDEF,
A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having.
In the category deletion debate, Thebrycepeake says, "The fact that the President's own taskforce NAMED (for the first time EVER) these institutions, and that the news has widely broadcast this naming, further makes it a defining feature for a lot of current and future occupants." Unfortunately, the other editors are not able to articulate the crucial flaw in this reasoning, falling back on statements like "it doesn't have the long-term and wide-ranging significance to be defining." But the real point of WP:DEFINING is clear from the examples it provides:
"Caravaggio, an Italian artist of the Baroque movement ...", Italian, artist, and Baroque may all be considered to be defining characteristics of the subject Caravaggio.
"Subject is an adjective noun ..." or "Subject, an adjective noun, ...".
When the University of Chicago is named in an article on the President's task force or on sexual assaults in colleges, the investigations are the subject of the article, so they are not defining. If, however, U of C were commonly referred to in other contexts as "The University of Chicago, a university under investigation for Title IX violations," it would be defining. But, of course, it isn't.
I have not been involved in any of these discussions, but it seems to me that most participants were trying to honestly assess the information and the best way to present it; and they believe that Wikipedia policies are there for a good reason. They don't deserve this smear. They have proposed reasonable alternatives, and there is no evidence that Wikipedia policy is any barrier to implementing them. RockMagnetist( talk) 19:03, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
The op-ed seems to take an issue with scientism on Wikipedia, definining it (I am paraphrasising here) somewhere along the lines of an unjustified use of scientific arguments and terms to silence critics and dissenters, strengthening one's own political views with scientific authority and thereby claiming objectivity, and, on top of it all, being blind to the various forms of injustice and discrimination that are created in the wake of objectification and neutralization. While the above text makes those things sound as if the devil himself had devised them for this site, it should be clear that in most of the cases, these things are absolutely normal and essential for Wikipedia. Even Thebrycepeake, if he is serious about his work here, will have to engage regularly in these kinds of activities: We cite a physicist's textbook to silence those who claims that jet fuel can't melt steel beams; we counter claims that there is no racism in western societies with statistics of the job market; and we make a clear distinction between points of view that deserve to be presented in a well-balanced fashion and those who don't deserve that kind of privilege. And if we follow our conscious, we are doing this by being faithful to our sources, the issues we write about, and what we hold to be true and just.
But of course this is not what Thebrycepeake protests against here. What delineates scientific from scientism, it appears, is that the latter is phony and hollow, and that its proponents either bluntly lie about their real motives or (even worse!) are oblivious to the inherently mysoginist, sexist, hegemonic, or what ever you would like to call the forces that make them act in the ways which are criticized in this opinion piece. They are borrowing from science an authority they don't deserve, making them the actual opposite of what they claim to be – neutral, objective, fair, pragmatic, and so on. But here we might hesitate for a second: Isn't this article doing the same thing by citing renowned scholars who allegedly support the author's point of view? Isn't erecting the ideal of a fair and balanced account that manages to include everyone's views, claims, and needs and then pitting it against the messy reality of everyday Wikipedia guilty of the same sleight of hand that accuses others of their bias and their obvious personal interests, while firmly situating oneself outside such political quarrels? Doesn't the op-ed, by shifting away from the countless wikilegal, wikipolitical, and wikitechnical arguments brought forth by countless Wikipedians who hardly qualify as "Men™" (at least not any more than Thebrycepeake himself) towards the issues and arguments the author deems the most important commit the very same crime of ignoring problems that actually matter in the here and now in favor of dogmatized slogans, phrases, and claims which only bear the cloak of feminism?
I have to admit that I do have a problem with the way a number of STS scholars are cited in this op-ed. And it is not merely the fact that this text does not seem to have a problem with quoting both Latour and Bourdieu for its agenda, two authors whose theories and political stances are so radically opposed to each other with regard to this op-ed's theses that I find it hard to believe its author has thoroughly engaged with their relevant writings. For an article so ostentatiously bearing the banner of a critical approach to unquestioned truths, I think it could do a better job at exposing itself to the shortcomings, risks and blind spots of its own approach. Others – Wikipedians, Men, hegemonists, ignorants, formalists, etc. – cannot cease to fail in their quest for truth and neutrality, because they are mistaken from the very start. The author, on the other hand, or who ever it is who speaks through this lines to the readers, does not seem to live the dangerous life of being prone to error or having to learn about his or her own mistakes. I think this way of telling a story is bit too lazy, at least for our times who seem to have their difficulties with perspectives who claim access to an infallible truth.
After Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto I thought at leasts feminists were immune to falling into this kind of trap. But maybe that's also a bit too presumptuous from my side, as I have written pieces like this one myself, albeit I hope it's been some years by now. I can understand the rightful indignation of someone who's seen their hard work erased without sufficient explanation and whose complaints have been overheard, ignored, ridiculed and in any case misunderstood. The only reasonable way of resolving ignorance and misunderstanding, however, is not by hailing some kind of world where the differences from which they stem are finally – once and for all – done away with. Sacrificing this world, how ever inconvinient and troublesome it may be, for a utopian vision which feeds from exactly those false and phony transcendent truths STS has been criticizing for roughly fifty years now cannot be the answer. An encyclopedia where women and men finally get the same amount of kB for equality's sake may be anything, but it sure as hell will not lead to the end of history. Yes, crying out against injustice must be impossible, and that includes questioning the value and adequacy of certain norms, rules, and arguments. But that requires situating oneself within the landscape that is about to be renegotiated and accpeting the risk that, in the end, it might also be ourselves who will have to change or acknowledge our mistakes – and not solely those who we have conveniently bxed as "the others".-- Toter Alter Mann ( talk) 22:40, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
Similarly, the history of the Elliot Rodger article (merged with the 2014 Isla Vista killings) reveals debates over whether he should be included in the category "violence against men" instead of "misogyny," whether the word "misogyny" should be used since he killed more men than women, and if there should even be a section entitled "misogyny" given the "bias" of the term.
I think it is unfair to actual victims of violence against men to apply the term so carelessly. Gender-neutral violence, sadly, usually affects men more. To me, violence against men is violence against someone because they're male or assumed to be male (women/non-binary assumed to be men can be victims of VaM and vice versa). It is a real thing but it doesn't apply in the Isla Vista case.
I am female, I was assigned male at birth and have stereotypical male body parts. I shy away from the label "transgender" because I find the trans community too exclusive. I don't get into gender politics on Wikipedia or edit gender-related articles often because I'm afraid. The environment of gender on Wikipedia is extremely hostile and I don't think I'm qualified enough to speak on gender issues. I am learning to break free from that.
I agree with that Wikipedia policies are exclusive. Knowledge is biased to who writes it and we are seeing that our sources of knowledge exclude the knowledge of minority groups. Of course women and men aren't psychologically different but being treated differently leads to a different PoV.
Sorry if I misunderstood the article. :( Andrea Carter ( at your service | my good deeds) 05:03, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
It's a pretty high bar to include mention of any controversy in any lead paragraph. The controversy generally needs to be a major or defining event for the subject at hand, not just one thing that happened to an otherwise large, complex, or old subject. The removal of these was probably well justified and had nothing to do with any gender issue. Gigs ( talk) 20:05, 27 August 2015 (UTC)
What's happened here is that someone tried to expand, categorize, and restructure a whole bunch of articles in a skewing way, that focused, laser-like, on something that's really a vague, open-ended "investigation" the basis and parameters of which are unclear. When reasons were given why this exact approach isn't appropriate on WP, rather than listen to the reasons and reapproach the issue by writing an article about the investigation(s), their scope, and the targeted institutions (i.e., salvage the work), the writer instead declared WP full of hegemonic assholes, abandoned the work, and parlayed the "experience" into a one-sided journal paper instead. I kind of feel WP was used, and the entire situation is a false dichotomy setup: Either the author gets her way, in every single way, or WP is a wicked place to be publicly shamed. There were so many other ways to handle this.
The sad thing is that there really are a WP:BIAS problem and a WP:GENDERGAP problem, but this editorial missed both of them widely, and devolved almost immediately into an incoherent conspiracy theory. Just because not every imaginable approach to coverage of campus sexual violence is an encyclopedic approach doesn't mean that some good ol' boys' club of misogynist douchebags is in control of Wikipedia and is censoring the issue from our pages. What really happened was someone was trying, however inadvertently, to inappropriately use Wikipedia as a soapbox, meanwhile the actual facts they sought to include should actually be included, just in a more encyclopedic, less tabloid, manner. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:30, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
This kind of doublethink and cognitive dissonance is found throughout the piece. To just pick a paragraph at random: Peake, in criticizing WP's consensus decision-making model says "This ethnography is not without its quantitative supporters", and cites previous work he feels is enthnographic in nature, but the works he cites are not actually research in that field but two papers by largely the same researchers, on computer-mediated work collaboration; to the extent they have a social sciences component, they seem to be sociological and microeconomic (particularly concerned with distributed organizational ergonomics), not culturally anthropological, i.e. ethnographic. Since when do Wikipedians form an ethnic group or anything like one anyway? WP is a self-selecting affinity group. A sentence later Peake turns this "ethnographic" criticism on it its ear, and says of his own counter-argument "Through an ethnographic approach, however, I am able to go one step further than these quantitative studies to demonstrate ..." [various things he can't prove]. So, what is this? An ethnographers against ethnographers war? While Peake has some educational background in anthropology, I do, too. I'm not detecting anthropological thinking at work in this editorial; it's a socio-political communications (i.e. PR) piece; like Peake, I coincidentally have a degree in that, too, so I recognize it when I see it (especially having been a professional activist for about a decade). An ethnographic approach is certainly not evidenced by a claim of "scientism" on the part Peak's "asshole" opponents. Last I looked, anthropology is a science. And it doesn't require a focus on science to decide whether something is a defining quality of a university, for either lead or a category, anyway. No untoward veneration of science is required to assess whether some vague "investigation" is encyclopedic material or of indeterminate importance. It's absolutely the wrong approach to ethnographic methods to generalize from observations of outlying members of a group to assumptions about every member of a population.
The frustrating thing is, this is all a total distraction from the real bias and gender gap problem on Wikipedia. There is no "WP:THREATENING2MEN" factor at work here, except on the part of a few isolated individuals. Men are not generally threatened by women or feminism (even if some outlying weirdos with mental issues are). Rather, the gap and the bias come from "WP:NOTINTERESTING2MEN". Males in the aggregate tend to be self-absorbed and simply WP:DGAF about things that aren't "guy stuff". There's a reason that WP is dominated by coverage of sports, video games, rock stars, hot actresses, machines, warfare, business leaders, and other traditionally "dude"-leaning interests. It's not because men hate women and want to keep them from writing articles on other things or minimize their proper representation within those topics, too; most of them simply can't be bothered to notice or care. It's not even male privilege, it just male collective narcissism. It's not a conspiracy (and it does not posit one about women), it's just systemic apathy commingled with willful ignorance, a combination that, when it becomes self-congratulatory, we call stupid. There is, surely, a Wikipedia douchebag factor at work (closely related to that found in the gaming community, the free software movement, academia [at least in the sciences], and business, but it's just Y-chromo jackassery, not a vindictive political movement. It's a thick wall to knock down, but hammering on the wrong one doesn't help. I'll close with Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 05:59, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
Hi Bryce. It has been brought to my attention that you wrote this article in 2015, and that it cites a diff of one of my edits. Unless I'm missing something, you either used the wrong diff or misquoted me. Here are the diffs:
As you can see, there is a total disconnect between your description of my thoughts and my edit summary. Did you use the wrong diff? If there's another explanation or some other diff and or quote(s) of me in that article, please clarify it for me. Thanks. -- BullRangifer ( talk) 17:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
Hilarious. I lost it at Torvald. Gamaliel ( talk) 21:45, 19 August 2015 (UTC)
I was listening to Straight Outta Compton while reading this! Eat me, I'm a red bean ( discuss)( contribs) 05:56, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
These lists display terribly on a laptop. You should use something like Template:Episode list. - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) 02:52, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
A belated happy birthday, Tony! Smallbones( smalltalk) 16:47, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
@ TonyTheTiger: Thank you again for contributing this piece. I don't see a lot of comments here so I hope the heat from this week's op-ed didn't distract from your travelogue. I hope you contribute again, perhaps with your next trip, or perhaps our Gallery feature would be a good fit for you. Gamaliel ( talk) 17:57, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
Pretty cool! - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) 18:44, 25 August 2015 (UTC)