Toxic Wikipedia - Action to be taken to try amd improve conduct of editors.

[Guest]

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Wikipedia is to institute a new code of conduct to battle what the firm called "toxic behaviour" by some volunteers.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation that runs the site, voted on new measures that will be finalised by the end of the year.

Wikipedia is written and updated by volunteers. 

Many, particularly women and members of the LGBTQ community, have complained of abuse and harassment from other editors.

Wikimedia's board of trustees said maintaining civility was a core value.

"We must work together to create a safe, inclusive culture, where everyone feels welcome, that their contributions are valued, and that their perspective matters," said Katherine Maher, the chief executive officer of the Wikimedia Foundation.

"Our goal is all the world's knowledge, and this is an essential step on our journey."

I wonder how many complaints it has taken to get this far.

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The foundation's binding code of conduct for members will include banning or limiting access if volunteers violate the terms.

There will be a review process for the decisions if volunteers feel more context is needed. 

Wikipedia has become one of the internet's most trusted sources for information, but complaints about gender imbalances and harassment have plagued the platform for close to a decade.

A study from the University of Washington on the gender gap in Wikipedia editors found many female and LGBTQ editors feared for their safety. Several female editors told the researchers their work had contested by male editors or that they received negative feedback from a male editor. 

A New York Times article from 2019 also highlighted the concerns some transgender editors have about volunteering for the site. One editor told the paper they received death threats. 

 

If true, and I could quite believe it, going as far as death threats should IMO result in criminal proceedings. Banning and limiting access does not go far enough.

I once photographed an LGBGT wedding here in the UK. At the time I did some support work for a Joomla company, all online. The Vietnamese company were brilliant, but some of the supporters were not. I got a lot of very nasty abuse from two American members of the team including calls for me to be chucked out, wishes of my death etc. Those two didn’t last long after that, So when I hear stories like this, from my limited experience I understand how vile some colleagues can be online. It does happen in the normal workplace too but people in general seem to be worse from behind a keyboard. 
 

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Wikipedia is not a formal social media platform like Facebook or Twitter. But its editors can interact with one another and can change the content on a page after it has been written.

This has led to a form of harassment where, after one volunteer adds to a page, another volunteer will remove or change that work moments later, forcing the first editor to redo their work and leading to editing battles.

The development of a new code of conduct will take place in two phases.

The first will include setting policies for in-person and virtual events as well as policies for technical spaces including chat rooms and other Wikimedia projects. It is set to be ratified by the board by 30 August.

A second phase outlining enforcement when the rules are broken will be approved by the end of the year, according to the board's plan.

Why does it need to take so long? 
 

Source : - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52779899

[Slottr]

Please update your title to be informative

[TempestCatto]

Xbox 360 voice chat users:

 

[Taf the Ghost]

Odds are this isn't what it seems. Wikipedia is already under the complete control of a small group of top level admins, this just let's them prevent any dissent. Don't let the press-release fool you into thinking this about improving the place.

 

This is just the Emperor disbanding the Senate. 

[lafrente]

Wiki is a joke. Do not try to learn from it anything other than proven facts, maybe physics stuff. Which you can pretty much learn from anywhere else. Wars, religion, politics etc. filled with constant edit wars which lead to what majority says being written and accepted as truth. Yet what majority says ≠ truth.

[Taf the Ghost]

Just now, lafrente said:

Wiki is a joke. Do not try to learn from it anything other than proven facts, maybe physics stuff. Which you can pretty much learn from anywhere else. Wars, religion, politics etc. filled with constant edit wars which lead to what majority says being written and accepted as truth. Yet what majority says ≠ truth.

It's good for lists of release dates of products and things that are utterly un-interesting to most people. 

[Andreas Lilja]

"Several female editors told the researchers their work had contested by male editors or that they received negative feedback from a male editor."

 

Edit wars aren't limited to the gender of the editors.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, lafrente said:

Wiki is a joke. Do not try to learn from it anything other than proven facts, maybe physics stuff. Which you can pretty much learn from anywhere else. Wars, religion, politics etc. filled with constant edit wars which lead to what majority says being written and accepted as truth. Yet what majority says ≠ truth.

Agree, basically anything that has an emotional slant to it these days is not to be trusted

[Pachuca]

2 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Odds are this isn't what it seems. Wikipedia is already under the complete control of a small group of top level admins, this just let's them prevent any dissent. Don't let the press-release fool you into thinking this about improving the place.

 

This is just the Emperor disbanding the Senate. 

Looks more like a power grab to me too. I hope this will be the final nail in Wiki's coffin. Wiki is full of shady information. I stopped trusting them a long time ago.

[Taf the Ghost]

1 minute ago, Pachuca said:

Looks more like a power grab to me too. I hope this will be the final nail in Wiki's coffin. Wiki is full of shady information. I stopped trusting them a long time ago.

While "Codes of Conduct" are almost always a backdoor power-grab move, with Wikipedia, it's more just formally locking in the power structure that took over years ago. This will, unironically, make them more discriminatory but with official approval. It's a version of companies lobbying for laws that add more regulations because only the biggest can implement them.

[matrix07012]

Show me someone who hasn't received a death thread on the internet. This is just a power move. 

[Bombastinator]

9 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

While "Codes of Conduct" are almost always a backdoor power-grab move, with Wikipedia, it's more just formally locking in the power structure that took over years ago. This will, unironically, make them more discriminatory but with official approval. It's a version of companies lobbying for laws that add more regulations because only the biggest can implement them.

Or removal of regulations because the biggest can profit more from it before problems appear.  
 

As far as I can tell this is Wikipedia remaining Wikipedia with a lot of the same old same old.  It’s not super useful for political anything or historical stuff.  

[Slottr]

-Moved to Programs, Apps and Websites-

 

Please update your title.

[LAwLz]

I always find it weird that the people who claim to be about equality are also those who always try and segment people into groups based on things like gender.

Someone edited a Wikipedia article? Better look if that person is a man or woman! Someone deleted what I wrote on Wikipedia? It must be because I am a woman and that person is a man!

 

 

I am currently reading the Amanda Menking paper about Wikipedia and I agree with lots of stuff in it. If you make an edit on Wikipedia just for it to be edited with a remark like "you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground" then that's bad. There are nicer ways of deleting content. What I don't agree with in the report is the narrative that this only happens to women.

In the study itself, it states that 38% of Wikipedia editors stated that they had been harassed, and harassed is defined as a wide variety of things including name calling, trolling, but also more serious stuff like doxing. That's bad, but I'd say that's pretty typical on the Internet.

 

One of the interviews in the paper kind of stuck out to me and I think it highlights some of the problem here. "Anne" in the interview starts talking about how she is a "young woman" and that Wikipedia can act as a safe space for young people, particularly woman. I think one of the problems some people have, mostly some more radicalized feminist women, is that they can not separate their gender from them as a person. If they are harassed they don't think "some idiotis harassing me", they seem to think "they are harassing a woman", because their identity is based on their gender.

So as soon as something happens, it's not happening to just them. It's happening to women!

 

Anne also makes another comment in the interview which I kind of find insulting. She says that women need personal invitations to things, that women need time to process things and a safe space to contribute without fear of "people jump down their throats". To me that is insulting and basically like saying "yeah, women are weak and dumb so we need to give them more time, talk to them in a special language and can't criticise them too much". Maybe that is not what Anne meant with her comment, but that's how I interpreted it.

 

I think I align far more with Riley than with Anne. Riley has a very "don't take things personally" and even says that if you don't want drama then contribute to one of the thousands of drama free articles on Wikipedia.

 

What really ruined the paper for me is that Amanda seems to heavily imply that meritocracy is bad (page 10). That's what worries me about a lot of these "improve inclusivity" actions being taken on a lot of websites. A lot of feminists these days seem to be against meritocracy. For those of you who haven't heard about that before, meritocracy is a system where talent, effort and achievements are valued over things like wealth, social class, race, etc.

Basically, meritocracy means that it doesn't matter who you are, what race you are, etc, all that matters is what you contribute. The people who are against this will argue that things like gender, age or skin color is more important. Basically, if two people contribute contradicting things to Wikipedia and only one edit can be left up, meritocracy dictates that the person with the most experience and knowledge is the one who gets to keep their edit. The people against meritocracy often want things like personality, race, sexual orientation to play a role in who gets to keep their edit.

It's basically like saying "yeah, you have 10 years of experience in this field, but I am a homosexual black woman and you're a while man, so therefore my view on this is worth more than your experience".

That's very bad because merits are the only thing that should matter when it comes to things like contributing to Wikipedia, or basically any job.

[Carolina Bay]

Wikipedia is play to pay these days, just like all the review sites like Yelp. The days of honest and real reviews have been over for a while. Wikipedia is no different. It depends on the topic you are researching, but it is not to be trusted. They have promoted countries that engage in major human rights abuses for pay and even pages of prominent individuals like Hillary Clinton have been sanitized for pay. There are very few honest sites out there these days. It is sad, but reality. The Internet was good for a while, but when capitalism took over, they destroyed it. Even Amazon reviews are pay to play. I am getting all my reviews that are not 4 or 5 stars rejected these days, just happened twice in past two weeks. One of them was for a Seagate hard drive in their BS "frustration free packaging," which is code for OEM hard drive with no warranty. That frustration free packaging almost ensures a dead on arrival drive, too, unless you are really lucky. Regarding Wikipedia specifically, there are some really damning investigative journalism articles out there about them.