zlacker

[parent] [thread] 17 comments
1. Siempr+(OP)[view] [source] 2020-05-26 06:45:26
Look at you go, immediately discarding everything that other persons could contribute on the sole basis that it would be content from people different from yourself, true meritocracy in action!
replies(4): >>hoseja+x >>luckyl+c1 >>thrwaw+p1 >>textge+8p
2. hoseja+x[view] [source] 2020-05-26 06:53:13
>>Siempr+(OP)
And yet, they're also right.
3. luckyl+c1[view] [source] 2020-05-26 07:01:39
>>Siempr+(OP)
You're misunderstanding what I wrote. Wikipedia very clearly states that they don't want original research even, much less original experiences and feelings. If you stay with the Wikipedia guidelines, a "diverse team of editors" could shift the areas of focus a bit (both within articles and on what articles get worked on), but the content should largely remain the same.

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.

replies(1): >>Siempr+Q7
4. thrwaw+p1[view] [source] 2020-05-26 07:04:35
>>Siempr+(OP)
I don't think that's what he means. You are reading too much there.

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.

replies(2): >>Siempr+29 >>watwut+ki
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5. Siempr+Q7[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 08:22:40
>>luckyl+c1
So the reason "programming pattern" has more effort put into it relative "knitting pattern" is the lack of written sources about knitting?
replies(1): >>luckyl+C8
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6. luckyl+C8[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 08:34:23
>>Siempr+Q7
I don't know "the reason", but I find "knitting pattern" to be pretty hard to write a lot about in an encyclopedic context while limiting it to exactly that term. The article as is gives a general outline of what a knitting pattern is. I'm afraid that might trigger you, but I do believe that explaining what a programming pattern is is actually much harder than explaining what a knitting pattern is, as it's much more abstract.

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?

replies(1): >>Siempr+va
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7. Siempr+29[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 08:39:10
>>thrwaw+p1
Maybe, but when someone replies to the example of a Nobel prize winner being deleted as non-notable with "[wikipedia is] not a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences", I have a hard time supposing them to have a well argued position.
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8. Siempr+va[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 08:56:27
>>luckyl+C8
Consider that knitting patterns are older than calculus, and of concern for a huge number people today, while programming patterns are 50 years old and relevant for less than half of those that concern themselves with knitting.

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?

replies(2): >>luckyl+1e >>Google+ze
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9. luckyl+1e[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 09:40:52
>>Siempr+va
> Consider that knitting patterns are older than calculus, and of concern for a huge number people today, while programming patterns are 50 years old and relevant for less than half of those that concern themselves with knitting.

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.

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10. Google+ze[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 09:47:06
>>Siempr+va
I’m curious why you think the age of an idea is relevant?
replies(1): >>UncleM+hW
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11. watwut+ki[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 10:24:14
>>thrwaw+p1
Ok, so how did he got from "different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge" to "a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences".

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.

replies(1): >>luckyl+Cj
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12. luckyl+Cj[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 10:34:05
>>watwut+ki
> Ok, so how did he got

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

replies(1): >>watwut+cl
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13. watwut+cl[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 10:44:48
>>luckyl+Cj
People write about what interests them and what they know about before starting to write. That is where interest and knowledge plays huge role. Lack of knowledge about something means you wont be able to put together good article.

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.

replies(1): >>luckyl+zs
14. textge+8p[view] [source] 2020-05-26 11:19:33
>>Siempr+(OP)
I've got to ask; given that a core point of contributing to HN is "Assume good faith." How does that marry up with this cathy-newman esque tactic universally seen when any discussions around this sort of topic crops up?
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15. luckyl+zs[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 11:47:01
>>watwut+cl
If people write about what interests them and what they know about, what change would you see when the editors of Wikipedia are changed in demographics? If you add more women, will there be more knitting-articles? Won't women who studied physics work on physics related articles? Will an African-American that works as a programmer choose to write about Basketball instead of programming patterns?

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Purpose

replies(1): >>watwut+421
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16. UncleM+hW[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 14:42:50
>>Google+ze
There is simply more content to cover. The commenter seemed to believe that it is more difficult to write an article about knitting patterns because there is just less material to cite.

This is a clear example of bias. A person holds assumptions about the depth of a community.

replies(1): >>Google+lG2
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17. watwut+421[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-26 15:08:51
>>luckyl+zs
> If people write about what interests them and what they know about, what change would you see when the editors of Wikipedia are changed in demographics?

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.

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18. Google+lG2[view] [source] [discussion] 2020-05-27 01:26:34
>>UncleM+hW
You can’t just assert that amount of content associated with an idea is just equal to how long it’s been around. There is far more research and intellectual effort going into programming patterns than knitting pattens.
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