Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content.
With less than 10% of editors being women, for example, content is guaranteed to be somewhat skewed, even assuming absolutely no ill will by anybody.
Among the famous examples are a scientist's entry being deleted as "not notable" just weeks before she won the Nobel Prize. Or, if you prefer quantitative data, that articles about women tend to emphasise their relationships and children (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06307v2.pdf).
That means it can be forked if it turns out they are doing more than protecting people from harassment. For now let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
It also has public change logs, so it is easy to have a debate about the presence/absence of censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks
Looks like you're right. Forking Wikipedia is pretty easy from a licensing perspective.
The public logs are there since ever, so does the censorship (some amount of it).
Anonymity and privacy are of course highly helpful but editors should be free to disclose facts about themselves if they so choose. I think we can all agree that incivility and harassment can be a major issue in such cases.
Wikipedia has some severe biases when it comes to what and who counts as notable. For instance, you can compare ”programming pattern” and ”knitting pattern” and try to guess which is a 50 year practice and which is as old as civilization...
That sort of topic bias is best solved by adding new contributors, but they will intrinsically have to be different sorts of persons, and historically that difference has caused issues for the newcomers: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-w...
Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopedia though, not a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences.
The approach, tone, use of sources, etc. should be exactly the same when writing about design patterns and knitting patterns (actually, I have the feeling pages about knitting patterns will be much more sound and factual than those about design patterns- but that's only a specific case...).
They want to provide well-sourced information, present the major thoughts where no consensus is visible and do it in a way that every reader can go to the sources and check it. If you want more representation of $group on Wikipedia, you'll do much better by publishing more work of $group's members so that it can be cited and quoted on Wikipedia. Just having them on Wikipedia doesn't/shouldn't work, it's not a news paper where somebody may set the topics/angles to be covered.
I read that as wikipedia should be factual and facts don't need to care about the background of the person. Citations are always needed.
Diversity in race imo is a bad diversity criteria for some things. For one, it separates people living long time at a particular place (think 2-3 generations) as different people because they are not white so they must be different.
Anyone who talks about diversity I have seen has stereotypes of their own on what people from different races are like.
And, of course, remember that the article isn't about "knitting", it's about "knitting patterns", so you'd need sources that concern themselves with knitting patterns _as a subject_ and not with individual knitting patterns.
There are very detailed articles about knitting, there's an article about common knitting abbreviations (which I don't believe fits into an encyclopedia, but whatever), there's plenty of other stuff about knitting.
What did you want to see on an article about knitting patterns? And, as a follow-up, why haven't you added that to the article about knitting patterns?
As for the lurking culture war and worrying about the word 'inclusivity' it is hard to imagine a less important issue. Wikipedia is one of the most structurally democratic organisations on the entire planet, and possibly the knowledge accumulating enterprise most resistant to social pigeonholing of its members. Even I could literally copy their software and content and rehost the whole thing if I don't like how the project is run. The Wikimedia Foundation can do whatever it thinks is best; good luck to them. There is no reasonable problem here, even for the paranoid.
The knitters manage to set up vast collection of patters for download just fine, and more people spent time knitting last month than there are programmers in the USA, so it is in fact more an issue of them not being present on wikipedia.
Then argue again that the difference in effort is adequately described by lack of sources rather than people like you actively discouraging effort being put into expanding a topic.
As to your final question, I don't really care about knitting, why should I do it in place of all the people that do?
Also, I suspect the actual answer is that knitting patterns as a general concept aren't actually all that interesting, what people are interested in talking about is the things you can do with them. So there are a lot of fairly old, long articles about various knitting stitches and techniques, traditional designs, yarns, communities etc but no-one created the "knitting pattern" article until 2015. The otherwise extremely long and detailed article on knitting referenced patterns even before then, there was quite a bit of information about where to get them, and the various row counters used to keep track of where you were within a pattern had a huge article covering different types and their history, but nowhere explained what a pattern was and how it worked!
(The other interesting thing is that a lot of the knitting-related articles were obviously created by women, as you might expect, but the article on knitting patterns was created by some guy as his first edit. His only other edits were an attempt to split up the content in the extremely long main knitting article into other articles which was immediately reverted. This probably does show something about some kind of flaws in the Wikipedia model, but probably not the ones you're assuming it does.)
And it's conceivable that it's only a relatively small percentage of all practitioners who actually upload patterns.
That says literally nothing about why you should have a long article about the meta of "knitting patterns". The different types of forks don't even have their own article. Shame! Rage! I'm offended!
> Then argue again that the difference in effort is adequately described by lack of sources rather than people like you actively discouraging effort being put into expanding a topic.
Literally nobody discourages any effort. Your assumption seems to be "just add some women, they will naturally flock to articles about knitting. If the articles about knitting patterns isn't as long as the article about programming patterns, that's proof of discrimination". It's obviously wrong.
> As to your final question, I don't really care about knitting, why should I do it in place of all the people that do?
That's the real reason. Nobody cares about expanding the knitting pattern article. But most people don't have a need to be perpetually enraged, so they notice that there's an article about knitting patterns, see that there's an spin-off article about common knitting pattern abbreviations, read a thing or two and then move on with their life.
They don't construct elaborate conspiracy theories about people trying to discourage efforts to expand the knitting pattern article because of reasons. No wonder people are wary of vague CoCs. They're afraid of people like you, who don't care about the project, who don't contribute, but who need to feel powerful by injecting themselves, making silly demands and then going off about how everybody else is discouraging the noble efforts they don't care about.
An example - there are pages which are not fleshed out as much as programming patterns such as childcare or kindergarten education which are commonly viewed as stereotypically gendered but which in reality all parents regardless of gender are actually interested in and write about.
The person you are responding didn't choose to gender the topic.
Society did that. You may not like it, but in 2020, most people do, in fact, gender those topics. Ignoring that is ignoring reality.
That holds for anything through - including programming. Why would it be so hard to accept that a group of people can be active on internet without adding stuff to wikipedia?
Wikipedia is crappy about anything sewing, knitting, embroidery etc related. But whenever I need something, I can find information on reddit or blogs or youtube quickly and easily. It is not that information does not exist on the internet in general, it is that those groups dont find wikipedia place to put stuff in. It is not even that those groups cry for wikipedia to add them in cause they are helpless without that. Wikipedia is not a thing in that space, because who cares about wikipedia and anecdotally those few who tried found it generally waste of time and frustrating.
This is wikipedia finding about situation, because its mission is "to be the largest, most comprehensive, and most widely-available encyclopedia ever written" and it is failing in these areas. And somehow people take offence on that.
Well, probably not heavy Wikipedia editors, but then neither are most heavy internet users, so concluding that they aren't heavy internet users is probably unwarranted.
Not a problem for me, I agree with your post.
The only way to do so is to discard the interests and knowledge while putting great emphasis on experiences - and immediately assume they will end manifest as bulk personal anecdotes.
2 angry alcoholics > nobel laureate
The idea is of course nice. It would be more fun if one could easily export a category in various popular formats.
Way to assume my gender and preferred pronouns. Bet you're glad that HN has no CoC that would get you a stern warning for this.
> The only way to do so is to discard the interests and knowledge while putting great emphasis on experiences - and immediately assume they will end manifest as bulk personal anecdotes.
No. One very obvious way to do so is to recognize that Wikipedia isn't about interests and experiences and the contributors/authors of articles but about sourced information. It's an encyclopedia, not a social network or a blog. The articles are supposed to represent information gathered from other sources (and they take other literal there, Original Research by the author is not desired [1]), not the knowledge, interests or experiences of the person adding information to the article.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
This has zero to do with original research, that is red herring trying to shift the topic. The whole "sourced information therefore pre-existing knowledge, interests and experiences dont play role" is obvious nonsense.
Experiences influence what you write about, what you put emphasis on and how you write.
These attempts are inherently hard to arrange, often requiring a long discussion on some agreed-upon Talk: page. Wikipedia does not have an equivalent to the git sites' "merge request" workflow where a set of diffs to multiple pages can be worked-on in "draft" status and then transparently merged; these things have to be arranged manually.
If we don’t acknowledge sex differences in interests of subjects, then we fail to see the true problem, and thus an actual solution. Why is it taboo to say on average, one sex is more likely to take on a specific kind of work than another? Despite evidence [0] [1]
I’m all for increasing the opportunity for everyone to participate in specific subjects. Yes, at one point in time oppression from one sex against another was real in intellectual pursuits, be it academia or certain areas of interest. And there are instances of it today. But it’s not as pervasive as so many commentators or inclusion boards want it to be.
But to try and get a 50/50 split, or whatever arbitrary ratio, is madness. It implies personality is 50/50 split, as personality is directly related to interests, among other factors (such as writing dry, technical content, which men (on average) tend to gravitate towards). These ratios are impractical, and verifiably false. Men and women on average have widely different personalities, based purely on biological sex. Evolutionarily this makes sense, as each had a specific, important role. Today we have the luxury of looking past the necessity for adhering to these roles, but denying they’re not a part of our genetics is denying reality.
It’s no different than asking why person X dislikes subject Y. Is it because of institutional oppression? Rarely, yes. But for a vast majority of people, person X just doesn’t like subject Y. And if on average, sex Z is disinterested in subject Y, then naturally we’ll see a disparity between the representation of each sex in subject Y.
Most people who knit are not biologically male. There exists male knitters, as there exists male nurses. Is there a cabal oppressing male knitting on an institutional level? Doubt it.
Using inclusivity as a goal has unfortunately become a loaded word. It’s now more akin to price control in a market, essentially forcing a metric value that is arbitrarily chosen, without understanding the implications. I’m not saying this instance in particular is using the word in such a way (though the tone of the article leads me to believe so), but for a vast majority of cases this is how it’s interpreted. We should not be striving for equality of outcomes, but equality of opportunity.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201711/the-truth... [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/
Having more diverse editors will lead to more diverse content.
Wikipedia pages of female scientists tend to get a lot more scrutiny than ones about male scientists [1].
There's another anecdote about moderator bias and some decent discussion on the issue overall in this thread [2].
Ultimately there are some issues Wikipedia can't solve since they are just a reflection of the rest of society in many ways.
"We can't write about this scientist and her work because no one else has written about her," is a problem that Wikipedia can't solve by themselves.
[1] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/ekv3te/fem...
I find the whole assumption weird that something would fundamentally change. It's not like Wikipedia claims to be "the world's knowledge at your fingertips", but is barely more than a bunch of pages on programming and ango-american cultural concepts. The English Wikipedia hosts over six million articles. Let that sink in: six. million. articles.
What are they missing, what are they suppressing, as somebody else suggested?
> This has zero to do with original research, that is red herring trying to shift the topic.
It has everything to do with it. An encyclopedia relies not on first hand knowledge, experiences and interests but on compressing third party information. It's basically an organized collection of book reports, only it's about topics, not individual books, and you get to add the bits of information that you discovered in some book to what others have discovered.
> Experiences influence what you write about, what you put emphasis on and how you write.
And, again, Wikipedia emphasizes that they do not want editorialized articles, don't want your individual writing style and personal opinions. They want a neutral point of view (that term is used so much on Wikipedia that they just say NPOV), they aim for a constant style of little variance. Again, it's an encyclopedia, not a social network or blog site. They very much do not want to give a small world to each and every editor where they can present their world view, opinions and experiences in whatever way they deem fit. There are sites for that, but Wikipedia is not it.
Here's what Wikipedia says on the topic of what it wants to be [1]: Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by acting as an encyclopedia, a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge. The goal of a Wikipedia article is to present a neutrally written summary of existing mainstream knowledge in a fair and accurate manner with a straightforward, "just-the-facts style". Articles should have an encyclopedic style with a formal tone instead of essay-like, argumentative, promotional or opinionated writing.
You may argue that it should want to be something totally different. But that's not really talking about Wikipedia, that would be watwutpedia, which might be a great project as well, but I hope you agree that it would be a different project.
"I'm triggered by the color orange, HN is SOO exclusive towards me because I cannot STAND that color, and as long as anyone dares post links to pages with orange, or that disgusting orange is used anywhere on the page, I cannot participate (checks diagnoses)"
Or MAYBE the Internet is structured in such a way that knitters are systematically discouraged from participating? Maybe non-knitters are getting favourable treatment?
This is very common method and actually presented in writing as how to take over any system. You deny a voice to others by presenting the claim that any opposition is based wholly on identity issues.
It is one of the main methods of cancel culture, by portraying any disagreement as based in identity differences there can be no functional discussion of the facts at hand
Can you clarify how one side or another in a discussion being bigoted or racist is nonsense?
The second question: No, I cannot explain how the Internet is structured to discourage knitters to contributing, just like I can't explain how STEM or tech jobs are supposed to be structured to exclude women.. Except, from my educations, there were _ZERO_ women from the start, so somehow, even before education started, they must have been structurally excluded, it's the only explanation, next to "the females didn't apply", which is entirely too reasonable to be true, especially considering that it's not even serving any political agenda.
Can you elaborate what content you'd expect to see more of if the editors were "more diverse"? This gets thrown around a lot here, but nobody actually says what exactly they mean. There are more than six million articles on the English Wikipedia.
What would change, which topics would get more, which would get less attention if Wikipedia editors were swapped out to represent their attributed groups (along some axes; most likely gender and broad ethnicity, I'm guessing, but not social status or education) of the American society at large?
It really depends on why someone is saying it. If one is saying it as an observation of statistics, then it's fine (usually. There are contexts where it is not; it's not a set of facts you should point out to a group of students about to take a college entrance exam, for instance). If you're saying it in the context of a causal inference, such as, for example, the Damore memo, then it's falling into the trap of conflating correlation and causation that has traditionally unfairly banned women (and men) from entire allowed modes of participation in society.
> Yes, at one point in time oppression from one sex against another was real in intellectual pursuits, be it academia or certain areas of interest. And there are instances of it today. But it’s not as pervasive as so many commentators or inclusion boards want it to be.
I agree. Many commentators want it to be far less pervasive than it is. Unfortunately, it's still very pervasive. We are no more than two generations removed (in the US at least) from women being generally overtly barred from working in most industries. We are only a scant 100 years out from women in the US being allowed the right to vote. It hasn't been enough time for the difference of fact to permeate into a difference in opinion; old prejudices die hard.
For example, the rest of your comment indicates you believe that the differences we see in society are biologically rooted. That's precisely the question the jury is out on; we used to believe it was true, but psychology has come to understand much better how profoundly deep cultural indoctrination and phobia of new cultural patterns run. Before we make claims like "Men and women on average have widely different personalities, based purely on biological sex," we need to be extremely sure we isolate out cultural effects, which is damnably hard to do.
Your example of knitting, specifically, ahistorically excludes the Celtic culture [https://www.thefencepost.com/news/when-men-knitted-a-surpris...]. Any discussion of biological imperative to knit needs to explain why men knit in Celtic societies, not only why men don't knit as much in Western societies now (and given that we know how quickly genetics change, it's going to be a real chore coming up with a genetic explanation that distinguishes Celts from the rest of humanity).
Wikipedia's protective moat isn't the licensing, it's the SEO. You can't compete with that under any circumstances. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Fork all you want, your content will never show up in Google's results with a high ranking, and as such you won't get a large enough audience or editor base to matter.
I visited wikimedia’s HQ almost a decade ago. Back then they were trying to solve this problem by making the editor more approachable.
Like hacker vs cracker I suspect this is a battle you're going to lose in the long run.
That was surprisingly difficult. Frankly, it's a little strange to see such an illucid response being seemingly well received by HN.
> Perhaps your difficulties with comprehension regarding the comment are more orthogonal
'My difficulties with comprehension' constitute one metric. Orthogonality, in any way that I understand it, is a property of multiple such metrics.
This is a clear example of bias. A person holds assumptions about the depth of a community.
If there were more Norweigan editors then I'd expect to see more content about things that are "notable" within Norweigan history and culture.
Replace Norweigan with African American, female, etc. and you'll see how having more diverse editors would lead to more diverse content.
Different demographics have different interests on average.
> If you add more women, will there be more knitting-articles? Won't women who studied physics work on physics related articles?
The two are not mutually exclusive. In that case there will likely get both women writing about physics and about knitting. Sometimes, it will be exactly same woman writing both articles. Kind of like same man can write about physics, wood carving, league of legends and embroidery.
> It has everything to do with it. An encyclopedia relies not on first hand knowledge, experiences and interests but on compressing third party information. It's basically an organized collection of book reports, only it's about topics, not individual books, and you get to add the bits of information that you discovered in some book to what others have discovered.
That is completely offtopic, because no one suggested people would write anything except third party information.
> And, again, Wikipedia emphasizes that they do not want editorialized articles, don't want your individual writing style and personal opinions. They want a neutral point of view (that term is used so much on Wikipedia that they just say NPOV), they aim for a constant style of little variance. Again, it's an encyclopedia, not a social network or blog site. They very much do not want to give a small world to each and every editor where they can present their world view, opinions and experiences in whatever way they deem fit. There are sites for that, but Wikipedia is not it.
Again, the only person suggesting that there would be editorialized articles or personal opinions is you.
But actually, yes, individual writing style shows up on wikipedia. Some pages are horribly written and others are well written - that is individual writing style.
Like what though? Here's [1] the Portal on Norway, there are hundreds of articles on Norway and Norwegian culture. From what I can see, the Norwegian Wikipedia does not cover Norway that much more, even though you can reasonably expect that it's primarily authored by Norwegians.
There are fewer but still hundreds of pages about e.g. Zimbabwe, its history, culture, politics, demographics etc.
I fail to see what's being not presented there. I understand the concern that it may be too USA-centered, and to a small degree it probably is, but I don't believe it's anywhere near the proportions it's made out to be, and I don't believe that it would significantly shift, because it's absolutely not a special interest community that covers only their ideas. And given that the US is the lone super power right now, militarily, culturally and economically, it is to be expected that it is very well covered, even in other language versions. It's somewhat important to everyone on earth how the US works. It's less important how Liechtenstein or Lesotho are organized, and either has their own history, but their history isn't strongly intertwined with recent world history.
The super vast majority are articles that are global (in any and all meanings) in nature, explaining scientific concepts and history. You may argue that, since Wikipedia's goal is to represent the common consensus of scientists that these topics would be different if e.g. Zimbabwe had been the world's super power for the last 70 years, and I partially agree, but far from completely. We'd see a lot more information about Zimbabwean wild life, nature and environment, but we'd still see articles on lasers, genetics, space travel, the history of Arabic numerals, because there's really no reason to believe that Zimbabwean scientists wouldn't have looked into these things etc.
> Clearly, if the hormone levels are the issue, they should just sample the hormones of athletes at some point in their developmental process
Of course hormone levels are the issue, that's why we don't allow the use of human growth hormone and testosterone at the Olympics. It's called doping. And your proposed solution is completely impractical. In addition, your phrasing "if the hormone levels are the issue" seems to contain a veiled accusation of bigotry by suggesting that the actual issue is something else.
> Identify as a woman but your testosterone levels are outside 1-sigma from average at 13? Sorry;
Using 1-sigma in your example is a straw man. Normal female range is 15 to 70 ng/dL, normal male range is 300-1200. I suggest that if anyone has a testosterone level of 300 or more they should not be allowed to compete with women (but with that level of testosterone a human body would likely not develop as a female body in the first place). This should only apply to sports where testosterone is a direct advantage, e.g. there's no issue with a trans athlete competing in women's chess. Then again, I don't think they check for testosterone doping in chess competitions either.
See how much more difficult it is to discuss this issue without resorting to accusations of bigotry? That itself is the problem: We can't even sort these kind of problems out as a society because the conversations are shut down before they could begin.
> Using 1-sigma in your example is a straw man. Normal female range is 15 to 70 ng/dL, normal male range is 300-1200
My error; I was speaking from pure hypotheticals without knowledge of how the numbers break down. The regulations from IAAF (and the research from the IAAF) indicates "About seven in every 1,000 elite female athletes have high testosterone levels." (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190212160030.h...)
Still, their stance seems odd... That a person with naturally-occurring testosterone should be required to take suppressing hormones. If the goal is to see "natural" talent apart from doping, how does forcing athletes to take hormone suppressants satisfy that goal? It seems to pretty self-evidently be reverse-doping.
It's also unclear to me why the IAAF would consider higher levels of testosterone to be an advantage in need of intervention but not, say, being born at and training in a higher altitude, which we know increases lung capacity https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4175264/. We don't force athletes training in Santa Fe to train at lower altitudes for six months before an Olympics. Why treat testosterone levels differently?
It suggests that the issue is something else, not what was raised. It reads as an accusation that the hormone issue is just an excuse for an other agenda. If that wasn't your intention I belive you, but it can be easily misread.
> If the goal is to see "natural" talent apart from doping, how does forcing athletes to take hormone suppressants satisfy that goal?
I think the goal is both finding what humans are capable of, but also rewarding human achievement. If a world record can only be broken or a race can only be won by someone in the top 0.1% of testosterone levels then 99% of people have no reason to even try to compete.
Training at a high altitude is still within the reach of natural human ability, while taking hormones isn't. Although I would support the idea that everyone can take as much testosterone as you need to get to 1200 ng/ml (or some other reasonable threshold) but not more.
A good example of such a situation is what happened to Caster Semenya who is biologically a woman and has had her testosterone levels used against her in attempt to discredit her and her performance, despite evidence contrary to the idea that it's testosterone that gives her an unfair advantage.
And ultimately if we were to make that argument in the first place, then we should argue to limit all professional athletes (male and female) by testosterone level as it is not a consistent thing in either men or women rather than using it as a bludgeon against specifically transgender athletes.
It seems you focus on one small part of one study and make sweeping declarations about Wikipedia by and large.
Like more articles about people/events/places/traditions that many Norwegians consider to be notable.
I don't know if you're intentionally being difficult, but the post you originally replied to had links to an article and some previous discussion about pages on female scientists coming under more scrutiny than pages about male scientists.
I just used Norwegians as an example of a cultural group. Replace it with female, African American, latinx, trans, etc. and you can see how if more people from those groups are a part of the site, then there will be more articles about people/events/places/traditions that are notable to those cultural groups. Because those editors will more likely recognize such articles as being notable to a non-trivial amount of people, whilst your average white guy might think it's something trivial just because they've never heard of it and "don't see what the big deal is".
This is very true. I once googled “Next.js” to try to learn more about it, and Google “helpfully” linked me to the “Nuxt.js” (note the “u” instead of “e”) Wikipedia page. I was thoroughly confused.
Turns out Next.js doesn’t even have a page! It has a draft[0], but it’s been rejected as “not notable” despite it being more popular on GitHub (in terms of stars, contributors, etc)