The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2020-11-29. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.
Having created a few articles about pre-1900 British women, it has become clear to me that because their contemporary "authoritative" sources tend to be based on the concept of a male-dominated society, and because high-achieving women in the pre-1900 society often had to practice under the name of their male work superior or their male relative - that Wikipedia's rules of evidence should be adjusted for biographies of such women. I believe that it should be OK for an editor to clearly demonstrate and explain a deduction (with sources for the premises) that a woman is likely to have achieved, or possibly achieved this or that in the name of a male - without the editor being accused of original research or similar misdemeanour. So long as such an editorial process is made clear, that sort of editing should not be deleted. In that case, such a deduction could be balanced by a comment that the achievement could also have been collaborative, or solely the man's work, where appropriate. If we don't give space for this, in a proper and controlled manner of course, then we are probably never going to get a fair balance of articles about British pre-1900 women. (NB I only really have extensive experience of researching British women, and I leave it to others to decide if my comments should also apply to women of other countries). Storye book (talk) 19:07, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
On what would such a deduction be based? 207.161.86.162 (talk) 04:57, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Premises and a conclusion, as I said. The premises could be anything, if WP could dare to move on from authoritative third-party peer-reviewed quotable statement. That means using what are currently called primary sources (but which are not all necessarily really primary - such as a published-online famous art establishment catalogue, for example). It could be a deduction based on who is dead and who isn't, who runs the company, and who is formally credited for the work, and who, when all other possibilities are eliminated, remains responsible for the company production. If we are to look beyond the patriarchal records of the era in question, then we must be prepared to look beyond WP's rules about sources, and be prepared to stop mudslinging accusations of OR and the like at editors writing female biographies. Ideally, of course it would be good to end up with an all-third-party-authoritative sources article, but the initial start-class article should be permitted to contain a fair proportion of primary sources if they are shown as reasonable indications of female achievement or other notability. I am currently working on an example of this type of thing, and under WP rules I cannot create an article about it at all. I am currently decrypting a number of (currently unpublished) ca.1904 writings in a unique, self-invented code created by a young woman who was studying Latin and Greek and teaching piano, while suffering an unnamed debilitating illness. The evidence for this is the writing itself, plus various sources for her background. Almost all of the evidence is primary in WP terms. I shall be publishing the writings on Commons in due course, but the sources are still primary. On that basis, any article about her would be deleted, yet she invented (or at the very least, co-invented) something. It is a pity that WP's inflexibility on this point means that her achievement will go unrecognised. Storye book (talk) 14:54, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Not dismissing the proposal, I'm open to the idea of Wikipedia originally publishing research, however, if you publish your work, Storye book, through a reliable channel, for example, a journal article, that then can be used as a reliable source. So it's not inevitable that this women will always go unrecognized.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 00:15, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you 3family6 for the encouragement. However those academic journals which I have seen in the past have aligned themselves not only with specific areas of discipline, but to be published there you have to be responding to a current, specific, narrow discussion theme. The subject that I've described above doesn't fit in anywhere. Most of my stuff doesn't - that's why my research has always been independent. If you are looking to please a publisher, particular audience or employer, you can never research the kind of left-of-field subjects that I go for. If you know of any academic journal which covers the area that I'm working in, please let me know? Storye book (talk) 10:03, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, 3family6. I'll have a look. FYO I have managed to create an article about her son Edgar Claxton. The boys are so much easier to do ... Storye book (talk) 18:28, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
All the ideas about aiming for non-biased writing are good. Yet I'm very tired of the Wikipedia has a male-bias narrative that's become standard, which typically is to just state the same two statistics (the percentage of female editors and the percentage of female biography articles) and then just kind of expect the reader to nod as they take as granted that there's some massive conspiracy keeping women from being 50% of our editors and 50% of our biography articles. When the topic of gender bias comes up and people mention the "gender gap" and how "only 18%" of our articles are about women, it begs the question be asked, "What percentage should it be?" A kneejerk reaction might suggest 50%... but that can't be right since society HAS been severely biased against women, especially pre-1900 as this article states. Historically (and still currently in many places) women simply were expected to be more domestic which kept them from being in positions where they could do something encyclopedic. Given that that is true, it makes no sense to expect 50% of our articles to be about women. So what percentage should it be? I don't know but it's very possible that the current 20% is the current historically motivated value given that it is only in the last century women have been gaining the independence and freedom they deserve. This view, which is perfectly plausible and makes mathematical sense, has never been given proper consideration by the "Wikipedia is biased" folks. As for female editors, do we expect 50% there too? Again no. Many places in the world do not yet have equality for women and this will mean they are channeled into traditional roles. Our own surveys have found that women prioritize their time differently than men and this is a factor in the gender disparity. Some woman like the traditional housewife role that takes care of children and the house and leaves little time for editing. Others who stop editing said they viewed their career as a better way to spend their time than on Wikipedia compared men. Again, this is what our own surveys found. So 50% editorship is NOT expected either but something below 50%. What should it be? Again I don't know. These numbers are a result of social forces all over the world and we can't control society. We should focus on this things we CAN control. For example, Wikipedia and its sister projects should be inclusive and aggressively stamp out any editor being hostile to others based on gender. It should aim to educate readers (like this article is doing) about how to avoid bias they might not be aware they are propagating. The bottom line is that the fact that the percentages are both rising is good. But that might be less about us stamping out bias and more about us just tracking the trends of society. Jason Quinn (talk) 03:00, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Jason Quinn:I'm very tired of the Wikipedia has a male-bias narrative So am I, and as soon as it's no longer true, we can all stop talking about it! Until then, it seems worth discussing. With all due respect to my fellow male Wikipedians and the fatigue that sets in for them whenever this topic comes up, I have to imagine that it's female Wikipedians who are really tired of Wikipedia's gender bias, so I would submit that as long as they're still willing to talk about it, we have an obligation to at least show up and listen. We don't actually have to say anything, if we're feeling tuckered out. It's totally acceptable for us to pipe down, and simply hear them. (In fact, perhaps that would even be the preferable approach.)
As for female editors, do we expect 50% there too? Oh, heck no! That's far too low. I'm with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was fond of saying, when asked how many female Supreme Court justices would be "enough": "When there are nine, of course!" (As she correctly noted, we've tried a Court composed of nine men plenty of times...) And if say 70%, or 80%, or 100% of active Wikipedia editors in a given month were women, then perhaps we'd actually make some real progress on correcting the content gender imbalance that we're all so tired of. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 05:41, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@FeRDNYC:and as soon as it's no longer true I just presented a counter argument that suggests that the bias may not exist, or at least exist to an extent far less than is typically suggested. Instead of thinking about it and considering it, you instead ignored it to maintain a preferred narrative. This is POV pushing. Jason Quinn (talk) 08:57, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
By that standard, how is it that whatever you're doing here doesn't constitute "POV pushing"? 207.161.86.162 (talk) 05:03, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think Jason that you are the one POV pushing here, and in fact, your response is a perfect example of the The "No-Problem" Problem. Having been involved in rescuing articles about female-related topics I easily recognize the types of bias that this essay explains. Jane (talk) 14:36, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Jane023: Straight-hard fact: the Wikipedia-has-a-male-bias crowd has no defined objective for success. Worse, the editors claiming bias dodge and won't even properly address the issue. It's been this way for years. This is super important because the default (and zero thought) interpretation of success is 50% female editors and 50% female biographies. If we somehow magically managed to achieve those statistics tomorrow, the encyclopedia would have a huge female bias!! That is paradoxical-sounding at first, until you realize those numbers would mean there hasn't been any historical female bias. (Since it is contradictory to their own cause, this is the unsavory reason why editors don't want to define an objective.) Even if it's granted that bias exists in the encyclopedia, not one among you has ever even attempted to explain when and how they can detect if that bias has been effectively eliminated using those two statistics. In the absence of clearly-defined objectives, you have editors — as evidenced here — claiming I think seriously (despite it being semi-disguised as sarcasm as an easy out) that success might mean having a female majority editorship, perhaps even 100%. As for your edits, great. I am NOT saying non-neutral language doesn't exist on Wikipedia. If you see a way to improve an article, great. But discussing individual articles is pennies on the dollar. My focus is on the macroscopic level related to the two metrics that always seen to be used to "prove" bias. If somebody is claiming there is something wrong with our percentage of female editors and percentage of female biographies, they need to explain what they "should be" with a convincing argument. Otherwise it's not meaningful. Jason Quinn (talk) 04:12, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Not a straight hard fact, but just your opinion. Like I said, perfect example of the "No-Problem" Problem. Jane (talk) 08:10, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Good. If it's "just an opinion", then state it. What is the consensus objective with respect to those two statistics to measure successful elimination of bias? Waiting for answer. Jason Quinn (talk) 13:47, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I was referring to your statements as opinion, and my opinion is that I agree with the article. In fact I took the picture of the blurb next to the painting by Rachel Ruysch. I suspect that the actual percentage of female editors on Wikipedia is even lower than the percentage of people willing to admit their female gender. However, there simply is no way to gather such statistics other than by interview or survey, and such means are few and far between anyway. My point about your comments being opinion is that you are just as unable to prove that your opinion is true. The idea that male bias is baked into most of academia is visible in the number of female professors, the number of female scholarship appointments, the number of awards to females in any academic discipline etc, and is not something that Wikipedia is able to change. By actively promoting women and working on the gap, Wikipedia can set an example that will hopefully find it's way back into academia. That said, it is also not clear what exactly drives women away from Wikipedia, or in any case fails to draw them in, but it is possibly the lack of sources that are interesting for women and which would enable them to produce articles with the same ease as men. Certainly I often find myself needing to create about five articles first in order to create the basis for one article about a missing women. This is because some major concept having to do with the woman's life is still missing. I think it would be great if more women contributed to Wikipedia, but sometimes I just wish more women would take an active part in reduce the gendergap in academia so that we would have more sources for articles about female-related aspects of everyday life, such as maternal death causes and prevention. We rarely consider Wikipedia being a matter of life and death, but we see more and more that people rely on Wikipedia as a source for information in their lives. Jane (talk) 18:04, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Unlike the notorious RBG, the goal is to have roughly 50% of the volunteer editors be female, and to have topics of usually greater interest to women to be covered in as much depth as topics of usually greater interest to men. (Which is not quite the same thing as male and female biographies, though those are a fair indicator.) --GRuban (talk) 13:56, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
As a side note, I can't believe I actually read this sentence in the year 2020: Some woman like the traditional housewife role that takes care of children and the house and leaves little time for editing. We really do still have a long, long way to go. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 05:46, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well, some men are happily filling that role too. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 05:54, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Davidwr: Oh, absolutely! Though I hope very few people of any gender adopt a role in the household that "leaves little time for editing" if they in fact want to edit, because what the hell are the other members of their household doing that they have comparatively greater amounts of free time available!? Clearly it's not pitching in and sharing the burden of responsibility at home. A relationship that leaves only one partner so overburdened that they have no time for themselves strikes me as a very unhealthy one! -- FeRDNYC (talk) 06:14, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Why would a "traditional housewife" role necessarily leave less time for editing than a "traditional money earner" role? --GRuban (talk) 21:53, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Man works from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done.EEng 23:46, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@FeRDNYC:We really do still have a long, long way to go. If you cannot accept common sense factual assertions without warping them into some statement to try to re-enforce a narrowly focused worldview, it is you who have a long way to go.... back to reality. As I stated, it was other things like jobs and family that our own survey found is the main reason women do not edit and stop editing Wikipedia. This is not my point of view, it was the point of view of women! You don't have to try to find chauvinism and injustice in everything. Look for truth instead. Jason Quinn (talk) 08:57, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for rerunning this, there's a lot of really good information here, and the more times we drill it into people the more hope we have of eventually seeing lasting improvements.
There are occasional glimmers of hope just in what's changed (usually in small ways) since the essay's 2015 authorship. For one, singular they has become much more widely and readily accepted/adopted. It appears all over popular media and in culture recently, typically with minimal reaction. There's less need to give it the speak-slowly-and-use-small-words treatment, the way this essay seems to. Clearly the text here was written anticipating fairly confused and/or skeptical reactions, at least from some editors. FeRDNYC (talk) 05:19, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I am responding to points raised above, as to whether bias against recognition of women's achievements may exist, or matter to any extent. I can only talk about the 19th century in the UK, because that is where I have done most research. Our bias about female achievement there is not based on verifiable evidence that women achieved less in those days, because there isn't such evidence. Women were achieving, but allowed men to take credit (or maybe men took credit anyway) because the market did not welcome work authored by women. Census enumerators usually did not write down wives' professions due to not asking, due to social expectations of men being the breadwinners and possibly women did not bother to tell them for similar reasons, yet often a woman's work was mentioned in documents elsewhere. For years I watched my late mother-in-law quietly doing the parish accounts in her home, although her less bright husband had been made parish council treasurer, and took all the credit. She went on to run a successful business which she started from scratch, proving her ability. That was of course a 20th century event, but the pattern would have been the same in the 19th. In the 19th century, women often could not sell their work directly, so they had to sell it through a male intermediary. Since all households needed income, there are no grounds for any assumption that women did not use their abilities to earn in that way. Our bias is of ignorance of what was really happening. The 19th-century novels referencing women's place in the home were written for a market which expected that as an ideal promoted by Anglican evangelicals (a different meaning from today's US evangelicals) but real women still had to earn. So please do not assume that 19th century British women did not achieve. They did, and some of it can be found out, if we only look for it. Storye book (talk) 10:29, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Finally a definitive set of instructions we can follow, or perhaps it already exists and I've not read it. scope_creepTalk 14:40, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
There looks to be a gross error here. The ref at note 2 takes you to: 62 English 1767980 329746 18.65 - rank, language, all bios, female, %. This is around the figure I'm used to, and the 329746 is WAAAY higher than the 291,649 in the essay. I don't believe it was much different in March. The % looks ok though.[Actually this movement since March seems ok] As a long discussion at WiR showed, you can't understand gender ratios in WP BLPs without allowing for the massive distorting effect of the vast number of sports bios we have, the great majority male. Exclude all sports people, and the female BLP % is around 30%, which is not far away from the %s in many easily countable always-notable types of people, such as national elected politicians, heads of quoted businesses, fellows of national science academies etc etc. Johnbod (talk) 03:45, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Johnbod, the female BLP percentage excluding sportspeople is a very interesting statistic. What is the source? Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 06:04, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Johnbod and Clayoquot: I haven't had a chance to reassess these numbers since then - I really need to try and find the time to run some more analysis - but would agree that athletes, defined broadly, make up a disproportionately high share of our BLPs, and men make up a disproportionately high share of athletes. My numbers probably had an overly generous definition of "athlete" but it came to about 29% female for "all non-athlete BLPs".
Sadly, I'm not sure what happened to the denelezh data, which was really useful for getting a handle on this sort of question. I know there have been plans to replace it with a newer tool but not sure how far that's got. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:15, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Heaps of thanks to SarahSV and co-editors of this excellent piece. Tony(talk) 08:14, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I can't link to a photo because I can't see it in person (museum still closed due to lockdown) but there's a picture of the Rachel Ruysch flower painting being rehung in the Rijksmuseum honor gallery in recognition of International Women's Day. Two other notable paintings by women were hung there: Portrait of Moses by Gesina ter Borch and the Jolly Drinker by Judith Leyster. It's about time! Maybe this essay helped? Who knows. Jane (talk) 13:30, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for putting this together, Adam and Gog! Looks very nice. It's good to see all of the great work people do here. -- Eddie891TalkWork 18:26, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Eddie891, this was almost entirely Adam's work and I would second the thanks to them. Good work is flagging up some of the fine work which is generated here. Gog the Mild (talk) 18:36, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't appear to be there anymore. I'd imagine it was some weird interaction with some other tag elsewhere. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.7% of all FPs 01:26, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
technically Covid doesnt suck, it penetrates and spews. viruses are definitely guys then.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 02:51, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Some stunningly beautiful images here. Good outreach work. — Bilorv (talk) 12:28, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Great work! Hope some of these communities stay active, and otherwise we will just have to send Mike around regularly to shake things up again. Jane (talk) 13:23, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding the comment that "Wikipedia coverage of some towns and localities on the West Coast was so incomplete that tourists would be dissuaded from visiting", the irony is that Wikivoyage is the WMF site to help tourists, not Wikipedia. -- John Broughton(♫♫) 17:06, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I was given some fascinating data from a tourism agency in NZ that ranked different sites by how much search traffic lands there from people seeking holiday destination information. Different language Wikipedias were usually ranked in the top three, maybe top 10. Wikivoyage was ranked about 200th. So we can conclude Wikivoyage is not being used by tourists, and Wikipedia is. —Giantflightlessbirds (talk) 07:15, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like CNET has not figured out that Ryan Merkley is Canadian - not that it matters much, and I am sure he is fully qualified to answer their questions about the US elections.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:16, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
but it really was the only data publicly available - meaning laziness of this person. Wikipedia articles are based solely on data publicly available. And if there were no references in wikpedia article they used then they are an naive idiots.Lembit Staan (talk) 21:42, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
But it wasn't really just him - he was helping to run a major advisory group to the UK government. Of course knowing there are sources out there and actually checking and recording the sources are two different things. So the point of the criticisms was that Wikipedia was doing a better job than the UK government. The speaker was probably coming at it from a different angle - the UK govt wasn't providing them any official data that was any better than Wikipedia's. Smallbones(smalltalk) 00:31, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
On a whim, I wrote a Letter to the Editor about that New Yorker column. This was the meat of it:
Louis Menand's entertaining column ("Wikipedia, “Jeopardy!,” and the Fate of the Fact", 23 November 2020) misrepresents Wikipedia in a few ways. When it comes to citations, peer-reviewed journals and blogs are not treated the same. Blog posts, social media and other self-published sources can only be used in restricted circumstances. In medical matters, a blog would virtually never be an acceptable source, and even many peer-reviewed journal articles would not make the cut, as Wikipedia values review articles that summarize and contextualize over initial reports that might not hold up. Menand is correct to say that Wikipedia functions as "in essence, an aggregator site", but long experience has taught its community that there need to be standards for what is aggregated.
Menand describes Jimmy Wales as the project's "grand arbiter", but the vast majority of day-to-day decisions about when editors get the boot are made by the volunteers themselves. Community members who successfully run a gauntlet of a nomination process become "administrators", who can then block editors temporarily or permanently, as well as impose various types of editing lock-outs upon individual articles. Similarly, when Menand writes that Wales "doesn't care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors", this elides the fact that "pretending to expertise" is only one kind of imposture. One way for an editor to get booted and their contributions deleted is to be unmasked as a paid shill.
The wiki-links here were hyperlinks in my email. I doubt I'll hear back, but it was fun to use imposture in a sentence. XOR'easter (talk) 18:12, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for that. I'm not sure it comes thru in what I wrote about the New Yorker piece, but it was my 2nd favorite (after the Canadian border guard articles) of everything I read about Wikipedia last month. Very informative, and entertaining, and a very interesting style. That said, yes, journalists who don't specialize in Wikipedia make a lot of mistakes. Smallbones(smalltalk) 01:29, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Rather infuriating that of all the changes we wanted them to make, that was the one the BCG decided to spot upon, and it's the one the Community doesn't have a clear consensus on! Nosebagbear (talk) 17:56, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This piece got already quite long and detailed, so it had to omit some explanatory background. For readers who might be wondering why the move from "community voting" to "community nomination" could be a big deal: An illustrative historical example is the James Heilman situation, where a community-elected trustee was removed from the board by his fellow trustees, only to be voted in again by the community in the next elections. Technically, the election results have never been binding - the Board has always been legally able to not approve a community election winner, preventing them from actually becoming a trustee. But it has never exerted this option, not even in that extreme case in 2017 - surely the backlash would have been enormous. In a possible future process though where the board picks new "community-sourced" trustees itself from a long list of nominations (evaluated against a list of vague criteria), it would have been politically easy in the above situation to come up with a plausible-sounding rationale for a decision that prevented Heilman from reentering the board. Regards, HaeB (talk) 18:22, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"In this week's discussion on Facebook" - wait, we're holding governance discussions on Facebook now, rather than on-wiki? Mike Peel (talk) 19:42, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed this too. And for the record; I don't like it. I doubt I'm the only 1 who believes we have a well-functioning way off doing those things on-wiki and placing obstacles, like having to go to other social media, is unnecessary and even counter-productive as fewer will follow/participate. Even if they are aware of it. --Dutchy45 (talk) 20:20, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I've never had a Facebook account and won't be getting one. In a community full of opinionated and tech-savvy people, I can hardly be the only one to have made this choice as a matter of principle. XOR'easter (talk) 21:17, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It seems to me that a non-profit movement based on many of the principles of free software and following the principles of open copyright, should probably not be on Facebook, the antithesis of all of that. And I say that as someone who uses Facebook a lot. Definitely a bad idea -- Rockstone[Send me a message!] 01:40, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Whereas I agree that it is generally not a good idea to discuss movement-related issues on Facebook, Meta as a discussion platform is a stone age technology compared to FB, and realistically we are not going to ever match FB even by setting up our own platform, so people will be always discussing these things on Facebook, Telegram and other venues.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:43, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Ymblanter: We're obviously not going to stop discussion on a variety of platforms, but the WMF Board has absolutely no excuse for supporting GAFAM, or even worse, carrying out decision-making there under GAFAM control. For software technology, the Fediverse, with Mastodon (software) as the most popular, and the software and servers listed at https://switching.software are generally much more ethically compatible with Wikipedia.
As for throwing out Jimbo from his founder's position: I fully agree with Jimbo's comment stated above - yes, he should eventually lose power, but at the moment it's clear that he's necessary. Otherwise we'll end up with the Wikimedia community forking and effectively throwing out the WMF Board. Boud (talk) 14:07, 28 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, agreed. ((u|Sdkb))talk 06:51, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Re. "wait, we're holding governance discussions on Facebook now...?" – yes, apparently we they are. Rebranding brainstorming was on FBook, Movement Strategy drafting was in Google Docs, and UCoC draft review was via (I think?) weekly video conference with very brief minutes/summaries posted on-wiki. And there's a "consultation" about how to "improve movement communications", for which you can volunteer to participate in a hand-picked real-time facilitated session. Pelagic ( messages ) – (14:36 Sat 05, AEDT) 03:36, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
In this specific case, the idea did start on-wiki at Meta, but the news that the Board and W?F were taking it seriously appeared on Wikimedia-l [1] (possibly cross-posted from Meta, but I can't find the original "Update from the Board") and spread to a similar in-crowd at Facebook. It's notable that Jimbo and Natalia replied at Meta but María only at FB. Thanks, Signpost authors, for bringing this to wider attention. Pelagic ( messages ) – (16:43 Sat 05, AEDT) 05:43, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think most editors would agree, and within the historical importance of Wales in world progress, that you don't fuck with Jimmy Wales unless you have a damn good reason. Randy Kryn (talk) 19:59, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with both of the above. I don't like what's happening with the Founder position, and I don't like that the process is being discussed on Facebook, of all sites. Zarasophos (talk) 22:17, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I too agree with both of the above. This process should be discussed on the wiki and Jimmy Wales should be involved in our governance for a long as wants to be. --Bduke (talk) 00:01, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The Board shouldn't be so quick to dismiss Jimmy's value to them. (To say nothing of Jimmy himself!) While he remains the public face of Wikipedia leadership (however ceremonial or powerless that role may be), he'll naturally act as a sponge for social commentary regarding the Foundation and how it's run. Without him, they could end up being the butt of jokes like this classic Streeter Seidell piece poking fun at Wikipedia's (at the time) progressively-expanding fundraising messages. As long as Jimmy remains the figurehead here, it'll always be his cocaine problem, instead of cocaine orgies in the boardroom. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 00:17, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
One does not simply kick Jimbo Wales. His account has the power to destroy the WMF, and one does not simply kick the founder. This isn't Discord. I also agree with NBB and FeRDYNC on WMF's poor decision. Firestar464 (talk) 01:05, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
His account really got the power to destroy wikipedia ?? --Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 21:50, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This is like relationship of Notch and Mojang, post-acquistion in 2014 (except Jimmy Wales appears to be in the right side of this situation). SMB99thxmy edits! 11:23, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I have served on a number of charity boards. 13 members is probably too many unless you are carrying some semi active members, but at least it is an odd number. 16 is definitely too many and increases the risk of a tied vote, and such votes are to be avoided, even if you give the chair an extra tie breaking vote. I have been on a board with 11 members, ten of whom were limited to two five year terms. That one worked very well with a nice mix of turnover and longevity and one or two new members a year. Institutional memory is not something I'd limit to one person - when I was in my tenth year on the charity i mentioned there were also people coming up to their 8th and 9th anniversaries. The Jimmy debate is probably best had on Meta rather than on EN wiki as my understanding was that the non-English speaking communities have less affinity with Jimbo than his fellow English speakers do. Losing control is a real risk with a non profit, I've seen it happen more than once myself. One option is to have a maximum number of independent places and a number of needed areas of expertise with independents only appointed when the community doesn't nominate someone with a particular needed skillset. When I was on the board of a charity with an endowment and reserves similar to Wikimedia's we had a policy of always having someone with investment experience on the board, for different reasons we also made sure we had a retired medical Dr. Arguably Wikimedia needs the former but doesn't have to have the latter. So you could agree a skill requirement, and if the community doesn't elect someone with that expertise, appoint an independent from outside. ϢereSpielChequers 13:16, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Place wouldn't be the same without Jimbo. He should stay as long as he wants. There are always things we don't like about the directions we go. And all we can do is hope they don't make us do stupid things. So I continue to hope. P.I. Ellsworthed.put'r there 14:39, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I find the idea of reducing community influence and the removal of Jimmy very disturbing. Wikipedia, as one of the highest traffic sites, is always under the constant threat of being taken over by those who would like to monetize it. It is—and always will be—up to the community to defend Wikipedia from people who want to profit from it. It will need as much power as possible, and all the help it can get to do so. Jimmy could have made a large fortune out of Wikipedia, but chose not to. He has been a constant defender of "Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia". The community will continue to need his help, for as long as he is willing to give it. Perhaps we need an RFC about this? Paul August☎ 10:36, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well said, sir. I agree. This is very alarming. I support the idea of an RfC or whatever we can do to bring attention to this matter. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:35, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Copy of my post from Jimbo's talk page:
Signpost article/ Founder's Seat / Makeup of the WMF board
Jimbo, you need to have two votes on the WMF board, not zero. You are the one that can be most trusted for keeping things from going awry. If you've ever made a big mistake, it was in approving that mess of of set By-Laws that the current ones are and which are facilitating the issue described in Signpost. They are basically the Constitution of WMF/Wikipedia. Just imagine if the US had a Constitution that said that congress could unilaterally change the constitution any way any time that they wanted. And that congress could make the rules any way that they want as to the makeup of congress and who gets to be in congress. And one of the rules that they made up is that half of the congressman are appointed by congress, not elected. The by-laws have fundamental problems that prevent self-correction and need repair. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 15:23, 30 November 2020 (UTC) North8000 (talk) 15:08, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Does anyone have any idea as to why the board really wants to remove Mr Wales (whether they may have anything to hide, like plans for selling Wikipedia) ? Is this a "both sides want to achieve the same goal in different ways situation" or do they have clearly different views on Wikipedia's future? This sounds somewhat like how Apple kicked out Steve Jobs. 45.251.33.78 (talk) 04:00, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If you look here you would see that there is a strong sentiment coming from the community that the founder seat is not needed anymore (with Jimmy replying to it). In the otiginal proposal, they did not say anything about the founder seat.--Ymblanter (talk) 06:27, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'd just like to note that the strong sentiment to remove the founder seat is not exactly coming from the whole community, it's coming from the very small subsection that posted on that Meta page. This talk page seems to indicate that among Signpost readers, things are very much the other way around. Maybe there should be steps taken to see what the actual community at large thinks of this issue, if anything? Zarasophos (talk) 10:14, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely, I think the community is divided over the issue.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:33, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
As I suggested above an RFC might be a good thing. Paul August☎ 14:23, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Ymblanter, and thanks for the link. But I think you have misunderstood me. I meant to ask whether anyone else believes that a portion of the WMF Board wants to remove some of Mr Wales' powers for some of their ulterior motives (maybe selling Wikipedia to Google? Or censoring Wikipedia to enter China?) and are using recent events as a front for their attempt. I know that it almost sounds like QAnon, but then again it is possible..... 45.251.33.78 (talk) 14:40, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The Board seems to be proposing a lot of changes that not everyone is comfortable with, which together would make it less responsive to the volunteer communities. Maybe I'm too willing to see conspiracies where none exist, but it's getting harder to assume good faith here. -- llywrch (talk) 22:53, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
As a starting minimum to everyone here...PLEASE GO REGISTER YOUR VIEWPOINTS on meta! (as well - I've been enjoying the discussion here, too) Nosebagbear (talk) 11:53, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Nosebagbear: Can you please give a link for that meta discussion? Paul August☎ 14:26, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'd be happy to register my opposition to these changes. However, the discussion on the page you've linked to seems to have ended (it was soliciting input back in October), & the primary center of discussion appears currently to be over at FaceBook, where many of us do not want to participate. It's as if the people pushing for these changes are moving where you can add input so to reduce the objections. -- llywrch (talk) 23:13, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
FaceBook is a non-starter for me. Paul August☎ 23:53, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well... at least to me, Enwiki feels like 'friendly territory' here in a way that Meta doesn't necessarily. —2d37 (talk) 01:28, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm. The only obvious reason why anybody would wish to eject Jimmy Wales and to ignore community wishes would be to enable whoever was left at the helm to drive the ship exactly as they pleased with no interference, i.e. a totalitarian putsch. Not a happy thought. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:19, 6 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
We will have to prepare for a Post-Jimbo era eventually. Jimbo isn't immortal, and he may retire at any time he wants. If the Wikimedia Foundation wants Wikipedia to be a long term project (talking about centuries here), we need a line of succession in place and also need plans to train new generations of Wikipedians. Many policies are just Jimbo's Word. We will need to codify them properly in the future. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.175.6.205 (talk) 18:52, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@94.175.6.205: - what policies would you say exist through "Jimbo's word" and are followed but have not been codified? Given the rate of technological change, I would be amazed if we saw out one century, though that doesn't break the underlying point about succession planning. However, as a community (and the one most tied in to Jimbo) we have already done that. Power has been released steadily over time, but always with the community deciding we wanted it to go. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:47, 10 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Spooky, Wikipedia should be run by the community not by the mighty hand of the Cabal. Although obviously all hail the Cabal. If new measures are taken that reduces the communities footprint and power that Wikipedians hold, if as an example bad actors start to get into Bureaucratic positions we will be powerless to fight them. I am firmly believe the community needs to run Wikipedia. We as editors, administrators, reviewers are the ones who create Wikipedia, and therefor we should be the main force running it. Then again this might be scare mongering, however it is spooky stuff. Des Vallee (talk) 06:10, 1 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This WMF statement from 24 Sep 2020 on freezing the rebranding until March 2021 seems to show that the WMF has been forced to accept community pressure, at least temporarily. The idea of Wikipedia being a brand is fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of Wikipedia: we aim to encourage knowledge, including its NPOV nuances and cross-links between different parts of knowledge, based on the best external sources that we can find and respectful but critical debate on editing the content, while branding is about encouraging emotional gut reactions and loyalty, and discouraging real knowledge. Boud (talk) 15:56, 28 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
ArbCom election
As a small correction to the Arbitration Committee section: TonyBallioni has withdrawn from the election. Their name should be removed and the number of candidates updated to reflect this AsarteaTalkContributions 18:01, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, for those interested, WP:UPSD will highlight whenever most of these sources are cited. There are some exceptions: Life News, Bill O'Reilly, The Right Scoop, The Daily Signal and The American Spectator, aren't highlighted because it's either not immediately obvious that they are unreliable (you can be partisan without inventing things for example), or lack an WP:RSN consensus. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:44, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
No, but if you want to do the same type of thing with the UK, or France, or Germany, or ... Please just submit an article. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:53, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Very nicely written Newslinger, I've been thinking about this very thing a lot recently. CaptainEekEdits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 20:46, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well written and well argued. Well done NS! Levivichharass/hound 20:46, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for this story. I was arguing with my (more conservative) dad about this earlier, and this is a very cogent explanation. Sincerely, Ovinus (talk) 21:41, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
While this very well-written article definitely defeats the right-wing talking point about everything being biased against them, we might need to discuss how your research also implicates Wikipedia in general for having a bias which leans right. Why would that be? Is it our demographic base? Is it that the insistence on reliability and established sources also contains within it an implicit bias towards the status quo, and thus more conservative basis? Food for thought. Gwen Hope (talk) (contrib) 21:54, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Instead of comparing the total number of deprecated left-leaning and right-leaning sources, I think it would be more meaningful to compare the threshold of reliability below which sources may be deprecated. The Daily Mail and Breitbart are deprecated with, respectively, reliability scores of 31.17 and 28.60. Has the same threshold been applied when deprecating left-leaning sources? The only deprecated left-leaning source, Occupy Democrats, has a reliability score of 21.59, and a discussion at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard decided against deprecating AlterNet, which has a reliability score of 23.16. So the threshold for deprecating left-leaning sources appears to be much stricter. Vitreous humour (talk) 23:54, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Vitreous humour: the issue usually reflect actual need to take a position on specific sources. For example WorldTruth.TV at 7.0 and NewsPunch at 13.9 are completely unmentioned at WP:RSN, because no one is trying to use them. WP:RSNreacts to usage (both in how widespread usage is, and the nature of said usage) in Wikipedia, it does not anticipate it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:22, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Here's another example: according to [2], Jezebel (website) is a "marginally reliable" source, meaning it may or may not be used depending on the context. According to that page Jezebel has been discussed at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard twice, and that was the conclusion of those discussions. Jezebel has a reliability score of 26.25, lower than both The Daily Mail and Breitbart. Why did the Reliable Sources noticeboard decide that Jezebel may be used as a source, even though it is less reliable than deprecated right-leaning sources? Vitreous humour (talk) 00:38, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
To clarify my point, I'm saying that this unequal threshold can't be explained by the fact that some sources escape deprecation by never being challenged. All of the sources I mentioned (The Daily Mail, Breitbart, AlterNet and Jezebel) have been challenged at RSN, and so have other sources of about the same reliability such as CounterPunch and The Daily Kos. But only the right-leaning sources are deprecated as a result of those challenges, despite being slightly more reliable than the other sources I mentioned. Vitreous humour (talk) 01:15, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Again, deprecation vs general unreliability vs whatever else depends on how Jezebel is used and what it's used for. Breitbart was used to push lunacy as fact. Jezebel is used mostly to source opinions. It doesn't make Jezebel reliable, but there hasn't been a need to deprecated it because their is no widespread effort to use it to push for lunatic conspiracy theories. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:40, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Headbomb, you have noted the disparity between ratings by Ad Fontes Media's Media Bias Chart and our deprecation of sources. That is partially because the Media Bias Chart is not an official RS for our reliability decisions. Someone might mention it, and others might say "that's interesting," but it has no weight....yet. Who knows what the future may bring? I personally think it's pretty darn good most of the time. -- Valjean (talk) 21:41, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If I would like to notice something, most far-right sources are the most loud in declaring Wikipedia is biased. SMB99thxmy edits! 00:34, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with Headbomb. You know, there's something with a lot of conservatives these days. They don't really produce reliable information and are prone to ignoring statistics and just opinionating stuff.
That's not to say that conservatives are bad. There are many categories of people in the US:
It's just sad how bad apples ruin the rest. We need diversity of good opinions and more neutrality in today's society. Firestar464 (talk) 01:18, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I don't believe that the social media analysis is good evidence that Wikipedia is "centre-right", and I think we can all come up with good reasons why there may be confounding factors when it comes to the demographics of people who share Wikipedia articles. But it's a good starting point for us to ask ourselves: what political position would we want to be, were there an accurate yardstick for measuring? If your answer is "apolitical" then think a little bit deeper. Our founding notion was political. We aim to provide educational resources for free. Many organisations and people with power throughout history have opposed and continue to oppose such aims. Such groups aren't simply bad or wrong, but acting according to their political interests. It's part of their support for the status quo in whatever class system their society has. We don't limit readership by gender. In many countries, right-wing groups use violence to ensure that girls are not educated to the same level as boys. We don't provide any different a user experience to people who pay. Contrast with state vs. private education. We don't believe in populism—we report what sources with strong fact-checking policies report, not what the majority of a population believe. (Deeper, there's something philosophically interesting here with what we think a "fact" is and epistemology.) But many politicians and journalists think that the majority is always right. We believe in the scientific method. This puts us at odds with some religious and spiritual people. And so on. These choices are all meaningfully political. This is why so many of our topics are battlegrounds for paid/COI editors, misogynists, party political fanatics, science deniers etc. It is not that these people want to impose politics on something that is apolitical. It is that they wish to change the political orientation of a very political body of work. A work which upset the status quo and balance of power by introducing people to a community-sourced, free collection of information. And when I say "political", I do mean that you can mark our principles on a position on a left-wing to right-wing scale (the centre being wherever it is in your community among the median resident). And you won't end up in the centre. — Bilorv (talk) 02:46, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Bilorv: I'd add a slight qualification to that. We do report what the majority of a population believe; it's just that we report it as statistics and opinion, not as fact. We do report who the majority of the US population believe would be better as the next President. Our mission is inherently political, yes, but it doesn't mean we should espouse those viewpoints as superior in our article content unless sources support our viewpoint. Some introspection may be helpful here as we seek to account for our personal biases. We report on the social and economic advantages of educating girls and boys to the same level, but we also report on religious views on educating women. We report science and present it as fact, but we also report the psychology behind pseudoscience and science denial (if we currently don't have content on this issue, we ought to). And we must distinguish the political orientation of our mission, which is left-of-center for reasons you mentioned, and the political orientation of our content, which is right-of-center. Our content is necessarily conservative because we report on topics only after they have been well established in reliable sources. feminist (talk) | free Hong Kong 03:43, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yesterday, Breitbart published an overview of the various studies about Wikipedia's political bias. Breitbart articles apparently can't be linked to directly, but the article can be found by searching for the title, "5 Times Studies Proved Wikipedia’s Left-Wing Bias". I understand that Breitbart itself is considered unreliable, but this article is merely providing a summary of existing studies conducted by other people. There are many possible ways of measuring political bias, but as far as I know every effort to quantify it at Wikipedia has produced more or less the same result, and that result is not that the bias is right of center. Vitreous humour (talk) 04:29, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not referring to Conservatism in the United States. I'm referring to the definition of "conservative" as "marked by moderation or caution". Wikipedia exercises moderation in its coverage of topics via its policies of verifiability and neutrality. It maintains existing viewpoints on topics until there is reliable evidence to suggest a change. It does not pounce at breaking news and developments. feminist (talk) | free Hong Kong 04:37, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
As an anecdote, I'd point to The Economist, traditionally considered a centrist publication. The Economist promotes social process by espousing ideas from both the left and right of the political spectrums in the US and UK. Wikipedia is more conservative than The Economist. Unlike The Economist, which argues in favor of or against certain viewpoints on political and social issues, Wikipedia strives towards a neutral point of view policy and does not partake in political advocacy. If we treat The Economist as lying in the center, Wikipedia is right of center. feminist (talk) | free Hong Kong 16:51, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Vitreous humour: Your last sentence means you have forgotten about the study you read about in this Signpost article. However, I'd ask which country you're talking about. Wikipedia is a global encyclopedia, but most studies I've seen are American. And the so-called "left-wing" candidate in America is often further right in many respects than the right-wing candidate in my country (UK). As for Breitbart articles on Wikipedia, they're written by a far-right misogynist who was banned from editing Wikipedia due to harassment of other editors. I notice he uses as evidence in his whining that "right-leaning editors have [...] been found to be six times more likely to face sanctions". He of all people understands that this figure is disproportionately affected by Nazis and trolls who harass other editors. Why would I trust him to not have a selection bias in the content he presents, even if I were to wrongly accept that content as factual? Anyway, Vitreous humour, you should note that WP:BADSOCK disallows "Editing project space" as an action of a legitimate sockpuppet, under the only possible SOCKLEGIT justification you could have for this account, privacy. — Bilorv (talk) 10:48, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
All very good points, feminist. — Bilorv (talk) 10:48, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
How do we burst the bubbles of consumers of right-wing media? How can we rehabilitate them and get them to trust Wikipedia effectively? How can we encourage them to write about (US) conservative politics using fact-based sources instead of their opinion-based alternatives? Giving up is not an option because these people are likely voters in America; I'd even suggest it's a duty for editors of one of the most visited sites of a country to ensure the viability of America and its institutions. feminist (talk) | free Hong Kong 03:15, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's worth making the point that sources only need taking to the reliable sources noticeboard when there is a dispute as to whether they should be used. So if no-one is using or advocating for the use of a site it won't be officially deprecated. We had this argument over the Daily Mail deprecation when we were accused of not deprecating an official North Korean government website and thereby treating the Daily Mail worse than a North Korean propaganda site. The reality is that we had a lot of content cited to the Daily Mail and a number of community members defending that, but no one was using or advocating the use of a North Korean government site. Also if you have a political system where one side is more influenced by experts, and the other more likely to think that "experts" were suborned by reptilians, then people are likely to find it easier to find a reliable source on one side than the other, and an unreliable source on the side where most are reliable is more likely to be crowded out. ϢereSpielChequers 12:23, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Some really good data highlighted in this piece, but the analysis and recommendations are lacking as they fail to socially contextualize media. Specifically, we should not be surprised at the over-representation of reliable center and left outlets and a corresponding lack of highly reliable right media in the United States – this is because reliability is a political quality. The purpose of most right media is to galvanise and uphold political-right perspectives, i.e. reliability is not connected to its purpose. Former conservative activist Matt Sheffield recently shared a solid outline of what this looks like on the inside on Twitter. By comparison, centrist media is most concerned with promoting the status quo, with gradual amendments along a somewhat scientific basis – this plays into the reliability paradigm as it mostly repeats conventional thought and produces studies that do not fundamentally challenge centrist perspectives (the biases of researchers plays its role here). Left media (as the most disempowered group) typically has the purpose of criticism of non-left power structures from a hyper-democratic and collectivist perspective. Its critiques are squarely aimed at winning over people of the left and centre so often work within the scientific paradigm and appeals to logic and reason. Its pluralist qualities also reduces the formation of high level in-group biases in left media. We should understand that "reliability" has political implications – it is not a cultural concept that can be consistently applied across the political spectrum as it fundamentally disempowers some forms of political consciousness (such as identity-based belief). This dynamic also accounts for the state of Wikipedia, as its emphasis on the notion of reliability encourages a center and left lean in sourcing. SFB 13:30, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Good points; I linked Matt's Twitter thread to RSN a few weeks ago. I'd add that right-wing media, in the US anyway, appeal to fear and (to a lesser extent) rebellion.
A political viewpoint is not required to edit Wikipedia. I'm a right-wing man, but that is not the point of my Wikipedia edits. I prefer to write text without exposing political viewpoints because it's easy to do so, so as a result I get no trouble from it. I'm comfortable with such thing, so it's easy to accept me even if this website becomes re-righted. -iaspostb□x 21:26, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
To be honest I would characterize it less as appealing to fear and rebellion (whatever that means) and more as appealing to outrage. Of course this is as much an oversimplification/mischaracterization as saying the left media appeals to jealousy or outrage, so I guess my suggestion isn't any improvement. --Sephra — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.50.160.80 (talk) 11:12, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I politely beg to differ with your "social contextualization", i.e. how the right, center, and left relate to reliability or criticism. (I lean left on many issues, but not to "critique non-left power structures"; I'd like to think I hold those views because of my values/opinions of the technical facts.) And I'd like to think we at WP don't try to push any political agenda; we don't go on any crusade, no matter how just, except the crusade to provide a service of free, transparent summarization of information. In this we try to avoid bias and emotionality (again, no matter how morally justified our outrage), and by doing so provide the best service we can. I personally like the ideal of "reliability". In summary, while I see where you (@SFB) are coming from, and I have some quibbles with the article, I still say, good article by Newslinger. --Sephra — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.50.160.80 (talk) 10:19, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think what many miss is that Wikipedia's "free, transparent summarization of information" is the political agenda. By working on this, it means you are attacking those who benefit from the gatekeeping of knowledge; attacking those who stand to gain from not having their ideas challenged. This action can transform power dynamics in families and communities. It can raise political consciousness. It can create and destroy jobs. Wikipedia works against people in society who do not want this information shared or presented in this way. Many here will see that attack as justified and a positive development – our political bias is revealed in our thoughts on that. SFB 15:28, 6 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly some will be unhappy about how information is summarized but are they always the powerful? Are the gate keepers always unhappy about this? I believe (ie I'm offering this without a clear citation) there are cases where a person's career has been harmed by things said about them on Wikipedia and where the sources turned out to be people who were in some way involved with the subject of the wiki article. Every case of citeogenesis is a failure of Wikipedia and sometimes at the expense of the weak. Don't our RS and NPOV policies effectively support/enforce the power of established news/media outlets at the expense of smaller ones? When we decide some sources are reliable and make blanket exclusions directed at others aren't we reinforcing the power of some media companies and holding back others? If the NYT says X and a small source disputes X, per RS we will generally treat the NYT (used only as an example) as reliable and the small source as suspect. Doesn't that simply reinforce the power of the NYT vs smaller sources? NPOV tends to reinforce the status quo when alternative ideas are said to be fringe and excluded or treated as inferior rather than just newer and less established. Yes, often the established version is established because it is objectively better but sometimes just because it was first or popular. It seems WP is more likely to support the power of the media/news gate keepers rather than take power from them. While certainly not the objective of our NPOV and RS policies, it is at times an unfortunate side effect. The yin and the yang of our policies. Springee (talk) 15:20, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It is my goal to live long enough for the smoke and mirrors buzz phrase "fake news" to pass into the obsolete and forgotten alarmist phrases graveyard where it belongs. We are entering a new era soon, and hopefully all concerned can find the self constraint to not try to dumb us all down. I feel like we've lived four years with the news media (both the liberals and the conservatives) going with the lowest possible denominator in communication. In this place and time, it must be hard for this generation to imagine a time when we had so-called intellectuals in both government and some areas of the media. I miss intellectual commentators that focus on issues, and am saddened that what we have left are name calling and accusations, with nothing good resulting from it.— Maile (talk) 02:56, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
We are entering a new era soon fake news. Argento Surfer (talk) 19:28, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
By we, do you mean the world and not just America? If yes then you are right. Here in India, there is only one major anti-government news website-cum-channel (NDTV) but there are many pro-government news websites-cum-channels (Republic TV, Times Now, Aaj Tak and so on). Similarly, there are some non-mainstream news sources (The Wire and The Quint are against the government, Livemint and Scroll.in are somewhere in the middle, and OpIndia and Postcard News (which is not notable enough to have an article on Wikipedia) are pro-government). I have noticed that every single Indian web-based news source has apparently become less reliable (except maybe Scroll.in and Livemint, both of which have never been caught reporting something false AFAIK) but the ones that have become the worst are pro-government (which may not be a coincidence since the ruling centre-right to far-right (depending on whether you look at the more reasonable politicians or the idiots) Bharatiya Janata Party's former president and the current Home Minister of India said that any story, real or fake, can become viral if his party endorses it (does it remind you of Joseph Goebbels?) and admitted that the BJP has its own "IT (Information Technology) Cell" specifically to spread propaganda and sometimes even completely fake news on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp. As a matter of fact, there was a study mentioned at Fake news website#India saying that Indian conservative fake-news spreaders outnumber liberal fake-news spreaders 115 to 1). Regardless of who is at fault, and whether the conservatives are spreading more fake news everywhere or not, the world seems to have gone mad due to many factors including right-wing populism at such a dangerous time (and maybe even Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Jinping and Putin being in power at the same time has also made the world go mad) and something has to be done (by the left-wing politicians, of course. Would anyone expect us Wikipedians to launch an international center-left to centre-right political party to fix everything?). 45.251.33.78 (talk) 05:16, 2 December 2020 (UTC) (Last rephrased at 13:12, 2 December 2020 (UTC))[reply]
Great article. Thank you sir. I found your comparison of the Media Bias Chart with WP:RSPSOURCES, and your observation that the center right doesn't have many news sources, fascinating. I was also surprised to learn how highly the far right sources rank on Alexa. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:54, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think this was a good article but it shouldn't stand as any proof that Wikipedia doesn't (or does) have a bias in how things are presented. I think Vitreous humour's concern about the margin cases is legitimate. This wouldn't come into just deprecation but also cases where we are asking should source X be treated as generally reliable vs say use with caution. We have many marginal cases and if those margin cases are decided with unintentional bias it can still shift the overall results. I say if because I don't have a list of examples so I would like to treat this as something yet to be proven or disproven. Also, using reliable sources is only part of IMPARTIAL. How facts are presented, does the lead start with a basic description or a subjective, sometimes negative, assessment of the article subject? How much weight/space do we give to a laundry list of criticisms? What is the threshold for something being on that list? This general topic NPOV was the focus of a recent Village Pump topic [[3]]. Overall I think Wikipedia does a good job but that doesn't mean we can't be better. Springee (talk) 14:40, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Nice article, Newslinger! I knew that someday the Signpost would see an article discussing these far-(insert either left or right) jerks trying to hijack Wikipedia. I was just wondering, have you already discussed the non-American portion of the "news" cesspool (OpIndia for example) in some other article on the Signpost or is that something you may do later? 45.251.33.78 (talk) 04:16, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This article blames the public (our readers) for any bias that appears here. That might not be a wise piece of finger-pointing. The main argument in the piece in The Critic isn't that right-wing sources are deprecated; it's that Wikipedia is institutionally biased. Before asking our readers to support a different kind of commercial news organization, might it be wiser to ask if we at Wikipedia have done everything that we can to minimize the (perceived) biases that we present? EddieHugh (talk) 23:05, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Newslinger argues (persuasively, in my view) that what the Critic authors perceive as "bias" is in fact an appropriate result of proper application of site policies and guidelines. I agree that it's important to be aware of our implicit biases (and, frankly, we have huge blind spots when it comes to race and gender, among other things), but the idea that there is a systemic bias against conservatives or against right-leaning sources (as posited by the Critic authors) doesn't really stand up to examination. At least that's my interpretation of Newslinger's analysis. MastCellTalk 19:56, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Newslinger mentions only "deprecating more right-wing sources than left-wing sources" from The Critic article, and then analyses that. But there's a lot more than that in The Critic article – that's why I wrote "The main argument in the piece in The Critic isn't that right-wing sources are deprecated; it's that Wikipedia is institutionally biased." Newslinger has addressed only one part of what The Critic deems to be institutional bias, so the point is far from dealt with. EddieHugh (talk) 14:46, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This article makes the case that there simply aren't many right leaning sources sitting in the realm of, if you will, second tier, right leaning news sources vs second tier left leaning. By second tier I don't want to imply low quality but these are the sources that are less likely to do the basic, just the facts reporting. Using the Ad Fontes Media chart [[4]] let's say sources with a reliability over 36 but outside the green "most reliable" box. Note that there are far more sources on the left vs right when that cutoff is applied (looks to be 7 vs 1). So how does this impact our impartiality when reporting on a topic? Let's assume the next Milton Friedman (a darling of the right) publishes a book on how to fix the economy/education and all 8 sources review it. The 7 on the left say it's a bad book, the 1 on the right says it's a good book (for this example I'm indulging in assumed partisanship). How should we cover that? Do we treat the one reviewer who said it was good as fringe? Do we assume the 7:1 split is the natural split or just the split among sources we have? What if one of the 7 reports on an event and the other 6 sources re-report the claims of the first. Do we treat that as 7 sources or just one with the others simply trying to steal away some traffic for the sake of getting ad revenue? Our NPOV rules say we need to report based on the balance of sources but is that going to result in a neutral article if we have 7 sources with some level of echo chamber effect vs 1 that has a different perspective? If we have 7 sources vs 1 and we say we have to treat the 7 as the majority POV, is that likely to deliver a neutral article or one that treats the bias of the 7 as if it were neutral? I'm not suggesting we dump our balance of sources approach as it is like democracy, the worst form of government, except for all the others. Absent a wise, benevolent, dictator of impartiality I'm not sure how we would come up with a consistently better way to try to balance views. Still, if the balance of sources is so skewed to one side we shouldn't assume it won't result in our articles skewing to that same side. I'll close by noting that my example required two big assumptions. First, the sources would reach conflicting conclusions based on their bias. Second, no other sources (higher or lower) would report on the topic/details in question. I don't think it hurts to ask, how/where might our current system deliver sub-optimal results. Even if we don't/can't correct that it's worth being aware of it. Springee (talk) 21:09, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Springee, I love your 7vs1 example! @feminist I love the way you present your points across this thread. Re: "How do we burst the bubbles.." First, you say giving up is not an option, but there is a popular saying that even in technical empirical fields such as hard sciences, revolutions are sometimes carried out not by force of fact but by old adherents passing on. In fact, patience could be part of the answer to your question. I don't mean to wait and see and do nothing but to lead people to more patience, which is the opposite of "Consume (media and products)! Like! Follow!", which consumption of media is how we got to this mess in the first place. To answer your question directly, I would advocate a personal, change-starts-at-home approach. I have occasional conversations with my parents about their right-leaning news sources and views (some non-English from their home country). Sometimes I learn new things and agree, if not with their conclusions, at least with where they're coming from. Just because they live in a conservative bubble doesn't mean they're bad people. Sure I also get tired and frustrated at leaning in but in the end I'm OK with it personally. I think patience and compassion are important in dealing with older conservatives, even over the internet. I've found it easier to change minds if I'm willing to give a little and change myself. I'm sorry if I don't suggest quick fixes (I wish there was a technomagic-3d-printed-blockchain-AI-WP solution to fake news and biased emotionality but alas) but in my opinion a systemic problem requires a systemic solution. I think even more important is to make sure the next generations, vulnerable and impressionable, are brought up properly - not with biases, not even our own - but with the power to think for themselves. I am hopeful WP will help with this goal and the future may not be so bleak. --Sephra — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.50.160.80 (talk) 11:56, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I also think that there could be a worldwide analysis of the deprecated sources rather than only focusing on American sources.Ahmetlii (talk) 14:23, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Newslinger, thanks for such a good analysis of the situation. You really get it.
It is a frequent daily occurrence that clearly right-wing editors and visitors complain about the left-wing bias here, and mistakenly conclude that our choice of sources is because of personal bias, and not because most right-wing sources are not reliable, as noted above by Newslinger. Some editors are well aware of the article at The Critic and actually believe its mistaken premises. That's sad.
One editor recently resorted to accusing other editors of creating "barriers of entry" as a means to "own the topic" and "control the narrative,"[5] rather than recognizing that their own favorite sources were so extreme that they were not reliable enough for us to use.
Does Wikipedia have "barriers to entry?" Yes, we do have them. They are called RS, and source reliability is judged by accuracy, not by any particular bias, be it left or right.
As is always the case with politically relevant facts (IOW not all facts) and how sources relate to them, there are those sources which agree with those in power, and those sources that do not. This is a factor in what's known as "disinformation laundering": "The U.S. media ecosystem features several spheres that partially overlap and constantly interact with each other....The mainstream media... The conspiratorial media... and Disclosers."
Currently, with few exceptions, the right-wing media has become (especially since Trump) so extreme that it is the described "conspiratorial media," with some extreme left-wing sources also in that group. At some other point in history, the roles might be reversed. It all depends on which narratives, true or false, are favorable to those in power. With Trump and the GOP, they have clearly chosen disinformation and conspiracy theories to stoke Trump's base, and he often gets those narratives from sources like Fox News, Daily Caller, Breitbart, RT, Sputnik, and Russian intelligence efforts to plant propaganda and fake news, which he then repeats. He literally "launders" that disinformation.
My points:
Yes, Wikipedia does have "barriers to entry," and we should be thankful for them, not criticize and undermine them.
When people buy into Trump's "All RS are fake news!" mantra, they follow him down a rabbit hole that excludes RS, so they cannot self-correct. He allows no crack for "the light to get in". Being a die-hard Trump supporter has serious consequences here. This extreme media bubble of falsehood does not exist on the left, as left-wingers tend to use a much wider variety of sources, so they discover errors and self-correct fairly quickly.
What lessons does this situation have for editors here? Are we willing to do anything about it?
Newslinger brought us an interesting perspective, and I applaud his efforts. In reading some of the responses, several editors touched on some important issues. The ones that struck closest to home for me were the responses by WereSpielChequers, Headbomb, Springee (liked his 7-1 example), and SFB's comment: "...but the analysis and recommendations are lacking as they fail to socially contextualize media." Common sense tells us people who lean left are likely to align with left-leaning sources and will naturally consider them neutral and accurate, whereas those who lean right will have a similar belief about their chosen right-leaning sources. Both sides will probably believe their respective political party is the best, and that all the others suck. But finding RS involves so much more than simply being able to identify political bias and recognizing the difference between subjective and objective reporting in our media news feeds. Spin, focus, and propaganda are all part of the issues we must sort through, and it has become a global issue with the increased use of the internet, clickbait and intense global competition. The digital age gave us McNews and we can watch it 24/7 while eating a McRib, but fast food is not always healthy or easy to digest.[stretch] National and local news broadcasts are still very much in the game, but rather than rambling on any further, I'll just quote a small excerpt from the Sharon Beder article Moulding and Manipulating the News, in Controversies in Environmental Sociology, edited by Rob White, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2004, pp. 204-220.
The rhetoric of journalistic objectivity supplies a mask for the inevitable subjectivity that is involved in news reporting and is supposed to reassure audiences who might otherwise be wary of the power of the media. It also ensures a certain degree of autonomy to journalists and freedom from regulation to media corporations (Entman 1989: 32; Nelkin 1987: 94). However, news reporting involves judgements about what is a good story, who will be interviewed for it, what questions will be asked, which parts of those interviews will be printed or broadcast, what facts are relevant and how the story is written:
value judgements infuse everything in the news media … Which of the infinite observations confronting the reporter will be ignored? Which of the facts noted will be included in the story? Which of the reported events will become the first paragraph? Which story will be prominently displayed on page 1 and which buried inside or discarded? … Mass media not only report the news – they also literally make the news. (Lee and Solomon 1990: 16)
Journalists are free to write what they like if they produce well-written stories ‘free of any politically discordant tones’, that is, if what they write fits the ideology of those above them in the hierarchy. A story that supports the status quo is generally considered to be neutral and its objectivity is not questioned, while one that challenges the status quo tends to be perceived as having a ‘point of view’ and therefore biased.
To have a better understanding of the news one is being fed, it helps to know who is feeding it. This is one of the reasons I have always emphasized a cautious approach to all news sources, and closer adherence to WP:RECENTISM and WP:BREAKING. The kind of information that may prove helpful is knowing how the "business of news" actually operates, which includes knowing their targeted demographics and advertisers, especially now that so much of our news is controlled by conglomerates like Amazon. They aren't generating advertising dollars so they can provide news as a public service - no, no, no - they're providing the kind of news that will attract a targeted demographic in order to generate more advertising dollars; follow the money. I've provided some links if you're seeking a better understanding about the true nature of news media. Yes, context does matter relative to grading RS, and yes, I have concerns over our current system of grading at WP:RSP, and the direction we're headed. See the following links: Trends in media pluralism[6], Profiles Of News Consumption: Platform Choices, Perceptions of Reliability, and Partisanship[7], Political Polarization & Media Habits[8], Understanding news outlets’ audience-targeting patterns[9]. Atsme💬📧 03:02, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The combination of the immediacy pressure of the 24 hour news cycle, and the collapse of the business model that used to sustain a free press, means that things are not looking good. I predict that some of the sources that we currently rely on will either cutback on fact checking or fold in the future. One possible future for global news is that the ever improving auto translation will mean that we have more access to reliable sources in other languages. Another possibility is we'll live in a paywalled world where most people access week old news for free and a small elite are more up to date. Or perhaps we'll see a completely new business model for news, such as media departments for major universities being seen as trusted news sources, financed as loss leaders by their university as readers send their kids to the universities they trust. Or maybe people will cut out the middle man, and increasingly subscribe to the latest from the politicians they find interesting. I hope we will still have an important place under any of these scenarios, but a tertiary source needs primary and secondary sources. ϢereSpielChequers 11:36, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
WP is fact-based, expert-based, and centrist. The right increasingly denigrates facts and expertise, so many of them will label WP as "radical left", to borrow a phrase from someone unnamed. Tony(talk) 08:21, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Atsme: Your video link failed - it was kicked off by YouTube, probably for copyvio. Use the official YouTube version [10] per WP policy. Nice song but lately I've been thinking about Willie Nelson. That song applies here also - it seems to apply everywhere now! Smallbones(smalltalk) 00:09, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
That's weird. The link works fine for me, and it's properly licensed (see the YouTube license notice in the info section Music in this video), but thanks for sharing the others! Willie never ceases to amaze! Atsme💬📧 10:05, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
id say it would be hard to get conservatives to trust Wikipedia as it technically isn't a reliable source, anyone can edit it, and it is just as fallible as a peer reviewed study. a long time ago I was just as liberal as many Wikipedia Editors are, and after being attacked attacked, smeared, hated, vilified for holding different viewpoints that were once considered LIBERAL a decade ago, I understand how conservatives feel and ended up becoming one much to the ire of my own mother who tried very hard to put in an anti conservative bias into me. Most people do not understand what it means to be a conservative or what a conservative really is. we get called fascist just for being for american jobs staying in america, protecting American labor, protecting american energy independence and calling out poorly legislated welfare pieces that exist to move money upward to the rich... its silly but that is how society treats us.
Wikipedia had shown conservative leaning people in the past with biased pages on things such as "Gamergate" that allowed for the activity of trolls to override a movement led by activists who wanted transparency and ethics in gaming journalism. but because the press was slandering the movement, it got biased pages on Wikipedia. in general there are a lot of bias amongst the left where they support things that generally moderates and conservatives see as entirely wrong, yet the press, the media, celebrities and influencers peddle it daily thinking its nuanced because they do not challenge their own views. Even Glenn Greenwald spoke out about the state of journalism, many journalists have been irk'd by the pay for play/reporting and the general misinformation campaigns led by a dying legacy media who takes money on the site to back up private corporate and political interests. so in short, there are tons of reasons conservatives do not trust Wikipedia, and its not just because of the tabloids that conservatives pass off as news...
there are many sources just as bad as conservative rags, fake news sites and right wing tabloids that Wikipedia trusts as a news source. many opinionated pieces are marked as sources on Wikipedia, many editorials and smear campaigns are considered factoids to be tagged onto pages. places like snopes that have lied about many things, and put out misinformation by manipulating the claims they "fact check" are considered valid and truthful sources even tho the internet at large considers them to be ultra biased and propaganda. even sources like buzzfeed are trusted more than the DailyCaller for some reason. and despite the lawsuits of Libel, the Southern Poverty Law Center is still considered a valid source for info about "Hate groups" and hateful people, despite the obvious smears. there are a lot wikipedia could do to maintain neutrality, mainly on the political end. a lot of internet users some reason think politics is black and white, no middle ground for truth, no groups taking money for putting out an occasional smear piece or deceptively edited video like AJ+, NowThis, and buzzfeed puts out.
much of the media IS biased against conservatives, many in the media grew up constantly thinking conservatives were the bad guys because of how the media framed it, and now those who grew up on said media continue the trend and stereotyping of conservatives. 0.6% of the population that is actually white supremacist get painted as if they represent all conservatives, the small portion of firebrand evangelicals and baptists get painted as if they speak for all Christians and Catholics. Not every Bigot is a monolith for the entire spectrum of the right, we are fine with black people, tons of us love gay and trans people and are gay or trans themselves. Because of this bias, many feel as if conservatives are the bad guys and that everything the left does is good, intended to be good and will have a good outcome as if somehow our legislative process cant be lobbied foreign or domestically if someone has a (D) next to their name on the ballots. Conservatives realize this, they understand not everyone in a party they like will be a good working class advocate and that the system lies for its own profit, which is why many do not vote. Even tho they care about working class issues, they don't vote because nothing changes despite what party is in power.
I understand this is an OLD OP-ED piece but I hope this viewpoint from another perspective outside of yours helps. In 2021, conservatives more rely on commentators than legacy media and online news articles and FYI Fox News is just as bad as CNN and MSNBC, both lie their butts off everyday through half-truths and misrepresentation, only difference is that one bias is obvious to you, the others get praised due to confirmation bias. You have the privilege of being within the pop-culture, not the counter culture. remember, just because idiots fall for tabloids and rumor mills, doesn't mean you should entirely discount policy and economic opinions of a spectrum of people on that side because you other them.
and what we do now, echoes forever in eternity.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." -Groucho Marx
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right." -H. L. Mencken
"If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it." - Mark Twain Daggerfella (talk) 12:52, 17 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There are many things that famous people should have said but didn't, but this is one that Mark Twain didn't say because he disagreed with it.
Oh, and the diagnosis one is Ernest Benn. Marx, or at least this one, seldom used such long sentences.Jim.henderson (talk) 17:17, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have to laugh at this article and its pompousness. What you utterly fail to realize is the speed at which you Newslinger, and Wikipedia editors like you, are fast to write off sources as "far right" and therefor "unreliable". Have you ever stopped and thought why "center right sources" are in short supply? It isn't some mysterious circumstance. American political discourse has shifted radically to the left in the last 40 years, with viewpoints that were once mainstream right now becoming "fringe" right to those who don't hold them. It's to the point that the modern American leftist classifies anything to the right of Joe Biden as far right. The mainstream media, likewise, has followed this undeniable leftward shift - and they incorporate this bias into their reporting. But because their reporting massages the worldview of the average leftist - which the majority of active Wikipedia editors have been proven by independent research to be - they are quick to label them "reliable". Wikipedia's criteria for deciding the bias and reliability is thus all one big circlejerk, with forgone conclusions of which ideological biases are reliable and which are not. And any honest person knows it. Partisan right wing media wouldn't be nearly as popular in America if the mainstream corporate outlets did their jobs fairly and accurately. But as Larry Sanger said, rather than recognizing this truth about modern media, Wikipedia editors would rather live in a dream world of their own making. Coinage1 (talk) 22:49, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the well-written piece. I've said this before, but I'm still a firm believer that we should ban all editing for pay or other remuneration (even if that would terminate our successful partnerships with other organizations). — Javert2113 (Siarad.|¤) 17:58, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the kind words. I won't go so far as saying that paid GLAM Wikipedians-in-Residence should be banned. Their input is really needed, and there seems to be controls so that W-i-R's don't break the rules. I've never even seen a reasonable dispute about what they do. But commercial paid editors on the other hand = it's hard to remember when I've seen one of their edits that I didn't suspect something was wrong. IMHO we should just limit them to talk pages (not even AFC - nothing else but their own talk pages and article talk pages) where they can point out that a proper press release has been issued. The current system is worse than just quoting press releases. And of course we don't have to quote press releases! Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:54, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, the editing patterns and lack of WP:LISTEN of paid editors reminds me of bots. Is there merit in requiring paid editors to edit with a kill switch ? Widefox; talk 19:11, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Widefox: I won't make any claims about the merits of their edits, but I think there's merit in providing paid editors with some form of a process/policy that governs their activities as contributors. They're definitely going to do it (or attempt to) regardless what we say is banned, or is/isn't permitted. They have zero incentive to observe any such bans, after all. So if we offer a process that provides at least more incentive than that, then we can at least have them here on our terms and under our explicit oversight. Seems better than incentivizing banned editors to come up with increasingly sophisticated methods of making (or arranging for the making of) those same edits, but in a much more clandestine fashion. So we might as well give 'em a little rope. They'll almost certainly end up publicly hanging themselves with it. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 00:42, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
That first cite is worth the click (from within Incognito mode if you aren't a Times subscriber). I'm always up for a good "Hemingway casually being a dick for no reason" tale. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 00:42, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes indeed. A good Hemingway and Fitzgerald story. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:23, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I have been involved in dealing with spam and bias in many areas, including corporate, for many years. This is an ongoing problem, but playing the devils' advocate, why do we get upset when COI is involved with money and power, but much less for cultural or religious issues? Is a corporate lapdog on a payroll less biased than someone with strong religious, nationalistic or simply fandom-related views? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:41, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This is an excellent point that gets lost all the time, especially in response to the first comment here that wants to see a complete ban on paid editing. Paid editing isn't always problematic editing, just as volunteer editing is not always virtuous and neutral editing. We have many times more problematic editors who are unpaid but decrease the quality of Wikipedia – fandom, academic boosters/proud alumni, religion, nationalism, regionalism, fetishism, you name it. So I'd like to see a more sophisticated way of thinking about the broad spectrum of paid vs volunteer editing and conflicted vs unconflicted contributions. The faster we move away from "paid" being always a dirty word, the better. -- Fuzheado | Talk 18:46, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Piotrus and Fuzheado: There are a couple problems IMHO with this critique of this article. It comes down to "there's other stuff going on too." I'm sure you've seen discussants at academic conferences critique a paper something like this "It's all fine as far as it goes, but you should have gotten additional data from a, b, or c and considered factors w, x, y, and z and used the methodologies shown in q, r, s, and t." The proper answer to that of course is "Those are my next 10 papers - but you should feel free to write those up yourself." Yes, please feel free to address the problems of biased political, religious, or cultural advocates. Those are all worthy problems, but to a large degree different from commercial advocates. Right-wingers, left-wingers, and other wing-nuts may be editing in good faith with strongly held beliefs, But it's hard for me to see good faith in somebody who calls themself a "good corporate lapdog". I've tried, but the result seems about the same every time I take an in-depth look. There's a problem of volume as well - as soon as we say something like "if you've got sales over $1,000,000 and have been mentioned in two newspapers, then you can post your own press-release on Wikipedia," we'd have several million "articles" on low notability businesses very soon. That's what corporations are supposed to do. Maximize earnings (via free adverts or whatever other resources are available) and that's what they will do if we allow them to. Folks like Wiki-PR will get rich off of Wikipedia, and of course they are not going to allow anybody to make a few rules that will get in their way. When have they followed our rules anyway? They'll end up making the rules if we are not careful. One billionaire could easily take over Wikipedia (not legally, or ethically, but defacto) if we are not careful.
So if you have something to say about the politicians, religious folks, and proud nationalists please do. Submit it here and I'll likely publish it. But please don't use "other stuff is going on" to critique this article. Smallbones(smalltalk) 01:15, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
A strongly held opinion or belief is absolutely not the same thing as a conflict of interest. COI is a rather universal problem across many different fields, cultures and historical eras, and it frequently involves money. It's naive to assume that Wikipedia is the exception because we can sprinkle our magic wiki dust on the issue and dismiss it with a "more sophisticated way of thinking".
And the argument that not all problematic editors are paid strikes me as unconvincing whataboutism. Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:54, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
No, sadly @HaeB and Smallbones: you are missing the point and I never raised the language of WP:OTHER or whataboutism, and I fear your use of that shortcut is a blasé dismissal of what are very serious and consistent attacks on the transparent and overwhelmingly productive activities of those who do abide by the rules: Wikimedians in Residence (WiR) and even educators caught in that WP:PAID dragnet. I said "I'd like to see a more sophisticated way of thinking about the broad spectrum" because if you have seen the approach to addressing "paid editing" it is usually a license to assume bad faith by default, and folks who are in fact working transparently and in good faith are getting caught in the dragnet. It is not whataboutism. I am talking about specific, targeted and bad faith proposals to restrict community members in good standing simply because the word "paid" happens to appear. See the recent moves where:
The COI policy was unilaterally changed so that PAID editors "must put new articles through the Articles for Creation (AfC) process instead of creating them directly." This was reverted and the resulting pseudo-RfC didn't pass, but resulted in an extended and heated debate. [11].
Or the requirement that all paid editors need to disclose their usernames in all correspondence and web sites with no exemptions for Wikimedians in Residence (RfC narrowly passed, with questionable WMF involvement affecting the vote) [12].
Or a recent clash on WP:COIN suggesting all paid editors (even WiR) be required to note on the Talk page of every article that they are WP:INVOLVED, with more onerous terms than in the WMF's TOU (after pushback, seems to have settled into a stalemate) [13].
This is the context for the "more sophisticated" comment - the number of editors that automatically assume bad faith when the word "paid" comes up and want to a hobble a class of editors (with no exceptions for WiR, or even educators and students) is alarming. I know for those in the trenches of WP:UPE and vandal fighting, it may be hard to see the nuances of this issue because the bad actors are indeed problematic and dominate the landscape where you operate. I've done my share of vandal fighting and telling corporate shills to keep their hands off Wikipedia, so I'm no stranger to that. But we need a balanced approach where we are not subjecting some of the best people in our community to the friendly fire of WP:PAID crackdowns. Certainly you can understand that sentiment? There is a user group Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network where we have been monitoring these issues within the community, and we may produce a white paper or summary of concerns. It may be useful in the future for Signpost to publish it. -- Fuzheado | Talk 20:47, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Agreeing here with Fuzheado. From what I've seen, the primary difference between paid editors with a COIN vs. problematic editors with a COIN is that those doing it for money reach a point where they give up long before the fanatics do. The first group we had a problem with weren't paid editors, or even religious zealots, but the followers of Lyndon LaRouche. (A former Trotskyist who led a RWNJ cult until his recent alleged death.) And I've noticed that many biographical articles are clearly white-washed: for example, the last version of Winston Churchill barely mentions the man's love of liquor. As long as there are people who want their POV to be the only one the public knows about, they will use money or fanaticism to push it into Wikipedia. -- llywrch (talk) 23:52, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting, I've noticed similar issues with the Reinhard Mohn article, which appears to have been heavily edited by someone employed by Bertelsmann. The article currently fails to mention he was a multi-billionaire, and I suspect there are similar issues with some related articles such as Liz Mohn. LittleDwangs (talk) 13:01, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
A great article about an important topic. Thank you. –Novem Linguae (talk) 13:16, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Language matters: Paid editors or promotional editors[edit]
Hi Smallbones, thanks for a very detailed interesting piece. Thanks too for your kind words about Wikipedians-in-Residence. ("I won't go so far as saying that paid GLAM Wikipedians-in-Residence should be banned. Their input is really needed, and there seems to be controls"). Speaking as a (former) WiR, I feel frustrated that the language used about this issue tends to skew the argument. People use the term "paid editing" but the problem that they oppose might more accurately be described as "promotional editing".
Every WiR I've met would agree that writing with the intent to introduce bias is undesirable. Use of the term "paid editing" lumps together a WiR who adds unbiased high-quality information about a topic (e.g. medicine, fashion) and someone who tries to whitewash or promote a person, company, or product. Yes, they're both paid. No, they aren't (by definition) both promotional.
I see the appeal of thinking in terms of "paid editing" -- Whether or not someone is paid is relatively easy to determine. Whether or not someone is promotional is more difficult to establish, and can involve lots more argument. -- The term "paid editing" makes it easy to oversimplify the issues involved. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 03:45, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Mary Mark Ockerbloom: Sorry, it seems beyond cavil that paid editing is an entire industry damaging to Wikipedia, as this reporting yesterday and the regular reporting like it demonstrate as a matter of fact. As you suggest, distinguishing promotional editing from paid editing is very difficult, so the search for other controls is bound to continue. Not only are WiR's a tiny group so they are a manageable number, but with WiRs there are many controls where assuming they are not being promotional is not what's relied upon - good Wikipedia work is instead required to be actively demonstrated by WiRs (not assumed), and it begins with who and how they are selected and agree to work and the relationships they must maintain with the rest of us, and so as not damage their institution; but such things are either impossible or most-improbable for the 99.99% of the paid rest -- the very real and huge paid-editing industry. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:58, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Alanscottwalker: I absolutely agree that there is an entire industry damaging to Wikipedia. I will even go so far as to say that Wikipedia is an important battleground in a war of information and disinformation. My concern is that unless we are specific about what it is that's wrong, the term "paid editing" will be misapplied and overapplied. WiR, library and information professionals, archivists at cultural institutions, educators, and teachers currently engage in activities beneficial to Wikipedia, as part of their work. We need to recognize and support the 'good hats' and be clear that what they do is not the problem, or they are going to be lumped in with the 'bad hats' under the label "paid editing", to everyone's loss. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 19:40, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Have to disagree, the WiR regime demonstrates not that paid editing is not the problem - paid editing raises real and palpable conflicts of interest, and that it is hidden from our readers. Rather, WiR demonstrates targeted regimes of controls are the least way to manage paid editing. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:04, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think "Shoah", the Hebrew term for "The Holocaust", is a lot more obscure in the English-speaking world than, well, "The Holocaust". Obviously, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with calling it "Shoah", but it's probably best to gloss it at the first use. The research is interesting, but the presentation seems a little reader-unfriendly. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.7% of all FPs 01:31, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Point taken, I should probably have used "holocaust" in the headline and maybe add an illustration or two. (I spent less time than envisaged on writing up this month's "Recent research" issue, having decided to cover a different topic over at "News and notes" shortly before the publication deadline.) Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:08, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I can't argue much with that. I'm still working on an article tht's been delayed twice. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.7% of all FPs 17:36, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hey now, Clone High is not "forgotten"! Especially since it features the best take on Gandhi in all of Western media.
(Though the Gandhi from the original 1991 release of Sid Meier's Civlization would've been a close second, if only the story of an integer underflow bug that flipped peace-loving Gandhi's Aggression stat to maximum and turned him into a warmongering Nuclear warlord were actually true. But alas, as our own article notes, there's no evidence to support the bug rumor. And fairly compelling evidence that the whole thing was fabricated decades later, for the lulz.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 04:50, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Can afford not to hear about American politics" I really don't like it when Americans think non-American people have it better at their home countries -Gouleg🛋️ (Talk • Contribs) 15:37, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think the author's nationality matters in this comment. Think of us all as Wikipedians. But I'd guess the author is not American in any case. Smallbones(smalltalk) 01:25, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Badly written. U.S.-centric. A disgrace. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 04:02, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's U.S-centric because it reflects a period where everyone (though possibly mostly Americans) went checking on every article related to the election. And continuing the short discussion above, a great reminder for this Brazilian writer that the politics are as bad there as in his country. igordebraga≠ 16:26, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Congratulations to Lee Vilenski and all the other finalists for such exceptional content achievements in what was a very competitive WikiCup, with a lot of competitors having more time to dedicate to Wikipedia as a result of the pandemic. — Bilorv (talk) 01:29, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
