Interesting Links for 26-04-2013

[andrewducker]

• Each can of sugary drink per day increases your chances of diabetes by 22%
  (tags: diet diabetes sugar )
• Kari Sperring - Why I started #Womentoread
  (tags: fiction writing women )
• Suicide: Probably not something you want to use to advertise your cars.
  (tags: epicwtf advertising suicide )
• BT (and TalkTalk) manage to exceed their usual appalling

Comments

[steer]

Five minutes research produces that the majority of the "Wikipedia's sexism" is pretty much one man and a bot (HotCat) doing a recategorisation with the aim of moving all novelists to female novelists and I think renaming the category to male novelists. The renaming did not start because not all novelists had been recategorised. He's not particularly sanctioned to do this. Just a category nerd. There's lots of them around. He was acting against policy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Johnpacklambert#American_women_novelists_etc
Also who the heck reads wikipedia categories anyway -- they're hopelessly inconsistent. The idea that people would go through American Novelists to find out who are American novelists is a fiction (and as Johnpacklambert points out, at least one of the women mentioned in the article was not categorised as an American novelist anyway. From article "They might simply use that list without thinking twice about it." -- really, they're just going to casually use that insane list of many thousands without thinking?
Conflating "wikipedia" (as if that's an entity with one mind) with a single person is just daft. Not contacting anyone or making a single effort on the talk page is just daft. Let's face it, she just wanted an excuse to have her name next to a list of writers you've heard of. Wikipedia, in fact, has the official policy of not having default male categories. So the actual headline should be "Man acts in a way that looks sexist, probably inadvertantly, against specific policy of wikipedia". Jimbo's talk page "WTF" is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#WTF.3F
From which "I think editors who do things like that should be banned much more quickly and firmly than our usual relaxed approach to banning.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:40, 25 April 2013 (UTC) "

If she wanted it fixed she could have spoken to the guy, asked on the category talk page, asked on her own talk page. If she wanted to drive hits to her article and promote herself while doing the minimum possible research, she could have taken the path she did.

I fixed about four or five by adding "american novelist" to see if they would get reverted they have not so far. Wikipedia is a lot more "reverty" than it used to be (perhaps because a lot of articles are nearly done). I didn't continue because it's clear this will be fixed by consensus vote. Maybe they will as a vote is ongoing and will either Dual categorise as American Novelist and American Women Novelist or split and rename Americna Novelist to something like Male American Novelist.

Incidentally, quite bizarrely WP has a category for women novelists (sparsely populated) but not novelists (or rather that is meta category with no entries). WP categorisation is a mess and everyone knows it.

[innerbrat]

I read Wikipedia categories.

[steer]

Then you must have noticed they're hopelessly broken?

[innerbrat]

They are!

I was just pointing out that people use them.

[steer]

Yes... sorry, over generalisation, my apologies. :-)

[kerrypolka]

I do too!

[steer]

Apologies also to you then for my lazy generalisation.

[andrewducker]

I don't know it.

And if I saw something wrong on Wikipedia I emphatically wouldn't go and just change it myself, because I have had it hammered into me over the last decade that unless you know the culture of Wikipedia and are willing to engage with it and work within the way that it does, that your changes will simply vanish shortly thereafter, either because someone else is doing things a different way, or because you didn't realise how you were supposed to do things.

Which doesn't mean that changing things wouldn't work - but it's a massive problem that Wikipedia has with its perception. At least 50% of articles I've read about Wikipedia have been about the battles that people have over what content belongs in it, how it should be organised, etc. If I saw an ongoing change in a direction that I didn't like then I suspect that I, too, would just complain about it publicly and hope that this triggered the people who edit it to have a discussion and change direction. I certainly wouldn't feel confident that I had the time and energy to engage with the Wikipedian Edit Culture.

[steer]

Sorry, you don't know what? Oh, that WP categorisation is broken? Heh... you do now... it's really awful.

I've always just got on and edited things on WP. That fixes it. I didn't really learn a culture nor did I feel I needed to. My changes are rarely reverted but perhaps because I don't make contraversial ones. If someone reverts, I readd and fix.

But in this case actual editing wouldn't work as the guy was using a bot. Politely asking him... that would probably have worked.

[andrewducker]

Yes, but my point is that if you're not a Wikipedia person then you don't know how to find that out. And while the stories I've read have probably been overblown, certainly when I see other people's opinions of Wikipedia they're of the order of "It's a bunch of teenagers and people with OCD who will pile on you 4Chan style if you dare to disrupt their carefully cultivated area of control."

Which is why I would totally understand if someone's response to "Someone on Wikipedia is doing something I don't like." is to call attention to it publicly rather than try and deal with that.

[danieldwilliam]

I've certainly been put of getting involved in WP by my perception of the culture.

[steer]

See below... if that is the culture it's a change that's happened in the last nine years. When I was active I found wikipedia to be unfailingly polite and helpful.

[steer]

I started editing wikipedia in about 2004... made a bunch of fixes to things and added detail on short articles. Got really into it and started editing things. For three years I was really active got one of my articles to good article status, learned about procedures and so on. I never had anyone say a rude word to me the whole time. Early I made some mistaken edits and people helpfully corrected me. The only time I got reverts which put me off editing was the article on sci fi which some people were fiercely protective of and I just backed off. They were polite but they were also clear that they did not want major changes to it in the way I did. I stopped editing things in 2006 as it was taking up too much time. I don't know if that makes me a wikipedia person. I don't think it does I've no formal role, I'm just a guy who logged in and made a bunch of edits. The experience was great... really great, people would complement me on my articles, occasionally question what I'd done but usually fruitfully. Had a slightly heated exchange where I was a bit rude about someone on an article about traffic lights (in retrospect he was correct -- but not citably so) but to be honest, it was no more than a slight brusqueness of the tone between the two of us. I have more heated discussions on your journal most weeks.

Since then I've done almost no editing apart from fixing typos, then not logged in. Probably the most major change I've made in the last few years was adding Duke Nukem to the list of games which had major financial losses. That was reverted twice then accepted. That surprised me. The guy doing the revert was polite and gave reasons and then accepted the change.

It would sadden me if wikipedia's culture had changed to be what you described but I have never ever seen it at all. It may be that it has changed massively, we're now nine years after I was actively involved in regularly editing.

I still make small edits and the culture does not seem to me to have changed except that maybe people are slightly more revert happy.

[steer]

But look, let's test the hypothesis. For this month, find me some things that are broken in WP articles, email me the links and I'll edit them. At the end of the month we'll see how many were reverted.

Wikipedia supposedly has this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revert_only_when_necessary
but I think it is obeyed less and less.

[andrewducker]

To be clear, my difference of opinion is not over "Would it be possible to just go and change it" (arguable, but clearly an option), but with "The only reason to write this was to self-servingly raise her own profile" (which seems to me to be lacking in empathy, or understanding of the reputation that Wikipedia semi-deservingly has).

[steer]

It's possibly she's just a very lazy bad journalist who couldn't find the time to talk to anyone knowledgable about wikipedia and didn't have the ability or knowledge to track down what really happend so by accident wrote a stupid article that happened to self-servingly list her on the list of great female american novelists. Honestly, though, how is she not embarrassed to publish something without even finding out the slightest thing about it... especially something which is so open and easy to find out about. I'd be embarrassed to put that little research into something I wrote for a well-read blog, never mind the New York Times.