Dept. of Raging Disappointment

[kaffy_r]

Boosting the Signal

Just so you folks know, I sent this email to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier tonight.

To Whom It May Concern,

This year, for the first time, I donated money to support the Wikimedia Foundation, and I thought I had done a good thing in doing so.

However, the recent news that your Arbitration Committee has made a decision to

Comments

[jessalrynn]

Journalism doesn't come from a machine, it comes from a person. As a result, there will always be a "slant". That's the point of choosing your information source or using multiple sources. There are biases, there are angles, there are various ways of looking at a single situation.

Wikipedia is meant to be a collection destination for a million points of information. Everyone is meant to be able to contribute to, and provide compliment for, its content. People who want to pick and choose what's allowed on Wikipedia should be limited to whether the statement is a fact or not, and be done with it. Hell, Wikipedia doesn't even require relevant facts in hundreds of articles, why should an alleged gender or even cultural bias be a problem for them. They are NOT a credible source. They're meant to be the beginning of knowledge, like a grade school text book, and people should choose from there.

Therefore banning people who provide to the collective body of knowledge is wrong.

Thanks for sharing this.

[kaffy_r]

Wikipedia is meant to be a collection destination for a million points of information. ... They're meant to be the beginning of knowledge, like a grade school text book, and people should choose from there.

This is something that too few people realize (even I forget, I admit with shame). It's similar to the situation with search engines; people tend to forget there are other search engines than Google.

But the key point in your comment is definitely that banning people who provide to the collective body of knowledge is wrong - especially when the banning is targeted at a specific group.

[cygnia]

Thank you for this.

[kaffy_r]

You're welcome. I'm sorry this has to be a thing that needs signal boosting, but I'm glad I could do it.

[wendymr]

VERY well done you! I've only recently started reading up on so-called Gamergate, and I've been appalled by what I found. Ironically, Wikipedia's article on the controversy does actually lean towards seeing it as a blatantly sexist campaign leading to outright acts of violence against women, and in general does not support the claim that it's about so-called 'ethics in journalism'. And Wikimedia does this?

Icon aimed at misogynistic media organisations and people.

[kaffy_r]

Yes, Wikipedia's previous attitude, and the attitude of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, of active and thoughtful neutrality-tending-towards-skepticism about Gamergate supporters, makes this action even more unfathomable.

And I credit kerravonsen for alerting me to this. I'm waiting to see if other main stream media pick up what the Guardian found, and how they play it.

[clocketpatch]

I have nothing intelligent to say, just a resounding face!palm and a very loud Urg.

[kaffy_r]

That about covers it, sadly.

[namarie24]

I didn't know about this. It makes me angry and sad.

Thanks for posting this.

[kaffy_r]

I hope that enough people engaging with the Wikimedia Foundation in serious conversation about this issue could eventually force them to ask their Wikipedia administrators to reconsider this, and perhaps to begin making more positive changes in the culture there.