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

[andrewducker]

Wow. That's an absolutely appalling thing to say.

The culture of Wikipedia is fairly universally, in my experience, seen as awful. It's possible that it's not that bad - but I have almost never bumped into articles about the welcoming presence, and I have regularly read ones about bad behaviour.

I didn't find her article lazy or bad, and think your approach to this is close-minded, and frankly, unpleasant.

[steer]

How is this an apalling thing to say? We absolutely should call out lazy and bad journalism whenever we see it. This is lazy and bad journalism. Charitably, you're correct and she was too intimidated by wikipedia's "bad culture" to want to edit even a talk page or find out anything about how to use it. She could, however, quite easily have contacted one of their media representatives who would have corrected her mistaken impression.

If writing an incorrect article wrongly slating an organisation and publishing it in a major newspaper without making any attempt to contact that organisation isn't bad and lazy journalism then what is?

[andrewducker]

No, it is not lazy and bad journalism.

It's reporting a situation. She doesn't owe Wikipedia a phone call to ask them to change things - all she owes anyone is writing up a situation, as she sees it.

She doesn't have a duty to rewrite things. She doesn't have a duty to go and spend time with the Wikipedia editors. All she has a duty to do is report what she sees.

And she was not mistaken - the situation was exactly as she reported it - the women were being taken off the list and put onto a separate one, as she said.

[steer]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree here. For me her article was about what Wikipedia's policy was. Wikipedia's policy is the opposite. Anybody with any level of knowledge about computing could have checked that in ten minutes... it wouldn't need to be wikipedia specific knowledge. A journalist has a basic responsibility to fact check especially if they are going to write something damaging about an organisation. By fostering an impression that an organisation is sexist when it is not you discourage participation by women. If she'd have given a draft to just about anyone with basic IT and said "could you fact check this" it would have stopped right there. If she'd have talked to anyone in the organisation it would have stopped right there

[andrewducker]

It doesn't say anything about the official view of Wikipedia, it makes it clear that Wikipedia is edited by its users. It doesn't say there's a pervasive policy - it says that she noticed something odd. It's an op-ed, not a journalistic investigation.

And it is perfectly accurate, so far as I can tell.

[steer]

OK -- if you don't think the article is wrong then we're not going to find any agreement here.

Sorry this discussion got more heated than I intended. I thought you also believed the article was incorrect when I pointed out what I did -- hence my comments were made from the point of view that you and I commonly believed that the journalist had written an incorrect article. I was wrong to attribute that belief to you and this led me to assume a commonality of approach ("she is wrong, let us ask why is she wrong, could it have been prevented? Was she wrong maliciously or by accident?") where none existed. I always enjoy our exchanges even when we disagree.

[andrewducker]

I don't recall agreeing that it was wrong :->

Now, if it had been a journalistic takedown of how Wikipedia had sexist policies, and the journalistic hadn't contacted them and presented a balanced view of both sides, then I'd agree with you.

Re:

[steer]

No, purely my mistake in assuming that and I recall making a similar mistake in an earlier discussion with you some months back (assuming we shared a belief and arguing from that perspective).

Interesting your point of view of OpEd vs "journalistic". I had not included that perspective.

Re:

[andrewducker]

Heh. We clearly failed to learn from history! (Not helped by anger, and me replying in-between board games at my brothers place).

Oh, and yeah -I consider Op Eds and the Guardian's Comment Is Free section to be basically semi-curated blogs.

[steer]

Oh and every single wikipedia page has "Conact wikipedia" link which leads immediately to a contact page for press. This really surely is basic stuff.

(Bloody LJ is losing half my comments here).

I'm sorry, but I really see her behaviour is awful and suspect it is also cynical.

[nancylebov]

It wouldn't surprise me if Wikipedia is composed of a large number of subcultures, so editing some articles could be a very different experience from editing others.

[steer]

This is possibly true. Editing stuff about mathematics, historical and literary characters is perhaps a "nice" crowd.