[Gendergap] Re: [Friendly reminder] Community Development Team second community call!
March 25th? If so, this notice is a little on the late side … Daniel Case Sent from Mail for Windows From: Cassie Casares Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2022 7:08 PM To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Gendergap] [Friendly reminder] Community Development Team second community call! Hello everyone, This is a friendly reminder that The Community Development team at the Wikimedia Foundation is hosting our second community call on Wednesday, March 25th, 2022 from 15:00 - 16:30 UTC on Zoom [meeting link] To join in the community call: • To attend the call, please find the link here. • Please ensure you have zoom downloaded on your personal device prior to the call. We are excited to see and hear from you in our community call! If you have any questions, please feel free to email the Community Development team at comdevt...@wikimedia.org. Thank you, The Community Development team Cassie Casares Program Support Associate Community Development Wikimedia Foundation ccasa...@wikimedia.org ___ Gendergap mailing list -- gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to gendergap-le...@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: %(web_page_url)slistinfo%(cgiext)s/%(_internal_name)s
Re: [Gendergap] Signpost op-ed (NSFW)
>In any case, it seems like it has long been settled that the general use of >profanity on Wikipedia is accepted but not celebrated. Only in >extreme cases >is it considered actionable when actually directed at an individual. So it's >hard to understand why many editors of long->tenure have reacted in such a >strongly negative manner to this op-ed; it may be the unique nature of the >Signpost, but like Gamaliel I >would be surprised to learn that many users >regard the Signpost in the same way devotees do the New York Times. The most >likely >conclusion is that profanity and vulgar language are almost >exclusively deployed by men on Wikipedia, and the difference here is that >>readers were shocked --shocked!-- to read it from a woman. While I think this has something to do with it, I suspect some of the commentators may have seen this as hypocritical: A member of the Arbitration Committee, newly elected as one of several arbs committed to restoring civility and mitigating our gender imbalance, writes a Signpost op-ed using profanity in the headline, while some users (and, more importantly, their supporters) who believe (whether reasonably or not does not matter as the belief informs their actions either way) that last year’s ArbCom results effectively painted a bullseye on their backs, know that use of such language by them in discussions is routinely hauled out as evidence against them in AN/I threads and (more importantly) at ArbCom. I don’t fault the Signpost for its editorial decision to run it. But I wonder if someone should have talked to Emily about this before she did it. Because now it’ll be hard for her to cast votes in cases where a user’s profanity has been brought up as evidence of consistent incivility without a whole host of users bringing this up immediately on the talk page. It will haunt her effectiveness as an Arb for a long time to come, I’m afraid. And for what it’s worth, it is not acceptable to curse onwiki where I have anything to say about it. I have blocked people for this when they have refused to cease and desist and/or apologize. I have declined unblock requests without review of the edit history if people used foul language (this usually results in a new request with a profuse apology and more reasonably stated case for unblock). Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] Another goodbye
>if I understand this correctly, there will be no Wikimania 2017. My understanding, having been part of the recent discussion on Meta about the future of Wikimania, is that Wikimania 2017 will take place in Montreal as scheduled. Beyond that, the question is whether the next Wikimania will be in 2018 or ‘19, since one of the options under consideration is making it a biennial event rather than an annual one. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Lists of notable deaths of 2015
>At least in the USA, we have to be cautious about "what is an obituary."
>Newspapers also run "death notices" which (both in print and >online) look
>much like obituaries, but are actually paid advertisements. I'm not even
>certain that the terminology ("obituary"=editorial, >"death notice"=paid ad)
>is consistent across news outlets, I'm just reflecting what I learned from the
>specific papers I dealt with after >my dad died.
Writing as someone who once got paid to write newspaper obits, “paids” are, in
print, always in [[agate type]], like sports boxscores; obits look like any
other story in the same newspaper.
However, textwise, the distinction may be blurring as newspapers cut back on
expenses (such as the newbies and interns who cut their journalistic teeth
writing obits. Just earlier this week, a young coworker of my wife’s died
rather suddenly; when I saw his obit in our local paper I figured they had just
printed the text the funeral home sent along since it read like a paid, with
all sorts of flowery, non-NPOV language that we never included in obits back in
the mid-‘90s regardless of what the funeral home said in the fax, no mention
whatsoever of the cause of death, and mentions of a rather wide scope of
survivors (the main reason for paids, as families of the decedents usually want
to mention relatives outside the scope of the immediate family that newspapers
limit their obits to for space if nothing else).
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Re: [Gendergap] "The Pie is Rotten: Re-Evaluating Tech Feminism in2016"
>I like a few of the ideas, such as geeky nerds may become more misogynist than >non-geeky non-nerdy men because of the bullying >they underwent as schoolkids. >I would say that fits with studies of perpetrators who end up in prison. That >could also be the reason >for >the weirdly harsh language used in some of the >Gamergate battlegrounds. You think? Sorry for the sarcasm, but as this insight has been percolating around the feminist Internet lately I’ve been surprised it took this long (I suppose it’s an example that shows that women can be just as oblivious to a male perspective as the other way around). It was obvious to me that was part of what was in play during Gamergate. In fact, having been at one time (not my whole teenage years) part of that geek/nerd culture, I could have predicted Gamergate years ago. When I was 14 or so, about 1982, I recall reading an article in Dragon magazine by a male (of course) writer calling on fellow gamers to be more accommodating to the women involved in D and RPG more (ahem) broadly at the time. He pointed specifically to a woman he knew who, in a major tournament at a convention, more or less singlehandedly saved her entire party, only to passed over for the “best female player” award or something like that in favor of what he described as a “silent, dumb-blond type woman.” But what has really stuck in my mind over the years was his account of a fellow DM showing him a list of NPCs that populated a city he’d created for one of his campaigns. The guy noted that he’d given all the women high charisma and low strength, “so they’ll be easier to rape when their city gets conquered.” The writer anticipated the likely response (which I’m sure he’d heard in real life) that that was “realistic” by asking “Does your fantasy world also have high unemployment, runaway inflation and pollution just like our world does? I didn’t think so.” Perhaps I was so aware of this that I thought, during Gamergate, that everyone else opposed to it was, too, and that their remarks were taking this into account. I began to suspect after a while that they weren’t, and now I know, unfortunately, that I was right. To bring this back to the Wikipedia gender gap issue, it is useful to remember that rhetoric treating the nerds as one and the same as the frat guys (so to speak) is likely to backfire in constructively resolving issues where that is possible (IOW, males who don’t feel they’ve been allowed to share a great deal, if at all, in this male-privilege thing are likely to deeply resent being accused of doing so). I would write more, but I have to get ready to go out and see “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” With my wife. Daniel Case (currently wearing a black T-shirt I bought at Wal-Mart depicting an exasperated stormtrooper at the Mos Eisley cantina bar framed by the meme-style words “Those were the droids / I was looking for!” ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Atlantic article..."How Wikipedia is Hostile toWomen"
>We have to do something. Suggestion: women coming before the committee could >require that certain >committee members not participate. How about anyone? (As I think your next comment seems to realize) >We could extend that to any harassment case. Or we could set up a jury system, >instead of one fixed >committee, with limited challenges permitted. Peremptory? Or not? Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Atlantic article..."How Wikipedia is Hostile toWomen"
Not to keep harping on how important it is to vote for arbcom, but I'm still just flummoxed by the fact that arbcom is elected by about half a percent of very active editors, and a smaller portion still of editors who meet the requirements and have edited in say, the last year. Speaking as someone who does vote in ArbCom elections regularly, although I rarely closely follow what that body does ... I think this might reflect the oft-unacknowledged fact that a great deal more editors than we realize do the tasks they have set out for themselves, "all alone or in twos", so to speak, managing to complete them and resolve differences of opinion amongst themselves without resorting to any sort of formal dispute-resolution process. Of course it's only going to be those who have a reason to care who care about ArbCom—and, naturally, that group is going to include a greater proportion of those who have agendas they'd like to see ArbCom promote. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Atlantic article..."How Wikipedia is HostiletoWomen"
Daniel: your suggestion doesn't reflect the fact that 2014's election had roughly 60% the voters of the year before. We definitely didn't have anywhere near that much of a drop in editing metrics. It wasn't a "suggestion". My point, more bluntly, was that there are an awful lot of Wikipedians, maybe not all or even many of them people who make edits on a daily basis, but do so regularly, for whom the ArbCom is irrelevant. And that perception would be independent of any editing metrics. On another note, was 2014 the year we went to a secret ballot to elect arbitrators? Or had that been the year before? Dan Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Atlantic article..."How Wikipedia is HostiletoWomen"
I'm pretty sure it was at least the year before, though I could be wrong. I don't agree that arbcom is irrelevant to WP editors generally speaking. Neither do I, because it wasn't a claim I was making, although perhaps I could have been clearer in my wording and said that there is a sizable group of active Wikipedians, perhaps a majority, who perceive ArbCom, when they perceive it at all, as irrelevant to them. That said, your other points are pretty much valid, although I am not sure that even everyone who has the time to become informed prior to voting will have the inclination to do so. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Atlantic article..."How Wikipedia is Hostile toWomen"
>(Minor quibbles: Eric is not an admin, and the New York Times piece was not
>written by a NYT reporter. Corrections possible?)
I would also that the “lists” referred to were in fact the category pages, a
distinction that I allow may be lost outside of the project but means something
to us (That whole thing could easily have been avoided with a sterner reminder
to use the {{distinguished subcategory}} template in the process of sorting. My
$0.02).
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Re: [Gendergap] Linux's culture problem
>True, people are different. Some people I would like to work with, and some >people I wouldn't (like Linus Torvalds). His argument that >social norms are >irreverent to creating software (or should be) rings pretty hollow, in my >opinion. Perhaps there’s some truth in AutoCorrect there ... What, exactly, I don’t know. >Collaborating on software (or encyclopedias) is a social process, and basic >civility goes a long way towards lubricating social processes. >I also don't >buy Linus's argument that being professional is being fake. No one is asking >Linus to wear a suit and tie and use marketing >buzzwords. They're just asking >him to chill out and not be an asshole. Of course he's welcome to act out his >"normal urges", as he puts >it, but I don't think he's doing any favors for >the cultural health of the free software movement. I really wonder if we’re looking at this backward. It almost sounds from your interpretation that Linus (whom in fairness I have never met or interacted with, not least because I’m not a Linux groupie, so I can’t speak to the truth of this) seems to have founded an open-source software community as a place for people, uh, “on spectrum” to hang out online and work together on something in their preferred way, rather than had the idea for Linux and then, well, all these people just happened to gravitate to it. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Upcoming omen in architecture edit-a-thon
Oh, this is “women in architecture” ... I was thinking this might have something to do with ravens and the number of the beast. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Linux's culture problem
"Abusing people they have power over" isn't a behavior that's linked in any way to being on the autism spectrum, and I've not seen any mention that Linus self-identifies as being on the spectrum, so let's please refrain from Diagnosing People Via The Internet :) Oh, I wouldn't say he is; certainly what's been posted here about him tends to suggest that he *does* know better (if anything, all those quotes make him sound like a narcissistic SOB, which all those people treating him like a god must not do much to discourage). But the kind of community that mentality has created is certainly hospitable to *some* people on spectrum (I have a high-functioning autistic teenage son who knows better most of the time, but still tries to rationalize some of his insensitive behavior as just playing around, or says he can't help himself) who might see an environment where little attention is paid to hand-holding or social niceties as one easier to navigate than the kind of supportive community we're trying to build. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Well done, feminism. Now men are afraid to help women at work
From having looked only at the headlines: 1) I really don't see the direct relevance of these to this list. 2) Consider the sources: a British newspaper so notorious for its sympathies to the Conservative Party and its associated politics that it's known informally as the Torygraph, and an American tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch and known for similar politics. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Amazon petition
Welsh? Last time I checked you can sue for libel anywhere in the UK or in any other Western Liberal Democracy. You can use the truth of the statements made as a defense in almost all of the other western liberal democracies, however. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Amazon petition
And how is this guy, with a self-published blog and self-published books, notable enough for a WP article[?] All the third-party reliable-source coverage that things like petitioning Amazon to stop selling his “work” generates. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Women reluctant to comment online - any relation to the WP gender gap?
The newspaper that did this and heavily moderated trolling comments had higher participate by women than most news comment areas. Like. Like. LIKE. It never fails to amaze me that, for all the complaining people do about barely-moderated comment sections and the driveby hate speech they inevitably attract, how little is actually done (save making it necessary to have a Facebook account to make the comments, which is a slap in the face to those of us who, for whatever reason, don’t find it necessary to have one) to change that, especially in light of how little could be done to make a considerable improvement in the quality of the comments. It makes you appreciate the sometimes heavy-handed approach of some of our Wikipedia administrators in some instances (cough cough). Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Inspire Campaign Proposal: Request for Feedback
Hi Hahahammond, I like the idea of figuring out what Pinterest is doing well and attempting to attract some of its users to Wikimedia. Because of the visual nature of Pinterest, I wonder if VisualEditor would be helpful in this case. I also think that you might try encouraging uploads and categorization work on Commons. +1 to this. We need to keep ourselves from thinking that meaningful contribution is about more than just writing articles. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Wikipedia Day NYC 2015 mini-conferenceh for te project's 14th birthday
Yes, the idea is to be extra inclusionary by reaching out to all these groups explicitly, and in particular to representing different cultural identities in rather non-monolithic African American / African Diasporic communities. Stereolithic? Wiktionary gives “modular” as an antonym for “monlithic”, but only for the computing sense. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] The (non-existent) Farkhunda Wikipedia article--victimor rallying point
For the last two days, Afghanistan has been exploding in demonstrations over Farkhunda, a Kabul woman who was beaten to death and torched by a mob. Even though every major news source has done a piece on her, I can't find an article for her yet in Wikipedia. When it does get written, and finally starts showing up in the search engines, what will it say? Farkhunda, the logical search term? Or more likely, the more common format: the murder/lynching/battering/victimization/humiliation of [insert woman's name here]. [...] For quite some time, the article for Ozgecan Aslan was hidden from Google searches as well, because due to the English Wikipedia's unique naming conventions, the article was called Murder of Özgecan Aslan. This is a Google problem, not a Wikipedia problem. And my answer, from personal experience, is basically what you began with: Give it time. In late January I began researching (well, actually, reviewing research I had already done) and writing [[Death of Elisa Lam]], the idea being to get a hook from the article in DYK on February 19, the two-year anniversary of the day her body was found (The people at DYK were, despite the best efforts of myself and another editor there, unable to to do so, so a different hook ran two days later and did a respectable amount of page views). Even at that time, with the article having been in existence for almost a month, it still was on the middle of the second page of Google results. But now it comes up as the first result for “Elisa Lam.” Some tips for gaming PageRank when you create articles like this: a.. Make sure there’s a redirect from the subject’s name to the “death/murder of ...” article. b.. Make sure you have a few internal links from other articles. Lists are good for this: every article about a notable missing-persons case can have an entry in, and link to, [[List of people who disappeared mysteriously]]. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] The (non-existent) Farkhunda Wikipedia article--victim or rallying point
It could just as easily be argued the other way, I think. It's presumptuous and perhaps insulting to purport to create a biography on a person, under her own name, while merely recounting a single tragic occurrence in her life. Since there is often not enough verifiable information to create a biography, it makes some sense to not assert that Wikipedia is doing so. Moreover... It's generally bad practice to apply principles of search engine optimization to editing an encyclopedia. +1. I would also add two other caveats: a.. Presenting the article as a biography of the victim would also invite coatracking, the insertion of embarrassing information from the victim’s past. It’s easier to justify removing such information when the article is about the event and you can limit that information to “only if it’s relevant” to the death or murder. b.. It would also invite people to reframe the article as a biography of the suspect/perpetrator. While serial killers get this, they’re generally the exception. But I am glad that, when I expanded it, I renamed what had been [[Stephanie Lazarus]] to [[Murder of Sherri Rasmussen]]. Despite a lengthy career in the LAPD, none of what Det. Lazarus did in that capacity made her notable in the way that being investigated by her own colleagues and then convicted of a 20-year-old killing will. The crime was notable, and it got the victim’s name. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] The (non-existent) Farkhunda Wikipedia article--victim or rallying point
Hmm, it just occurred to me that Jesus was probably not notable until after his death. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to move Jesus = Murder of Jesus. I think the correct title would be “Execution of Jesus Christ”. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Random musings about a bot
You also need to avoid making such a change in uRLs and quotations, or at least quotations that were originally in English. And filenames, too, in image syntax (although of course we should probably rename the image files, too). Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Zero tolerance on FGM
The WP article is a stub, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_of_Zero_Tolerance_to_Female_Genital_Mutilation Yet at the same time we should point out that the article on female genital mutilation is not only an FA developed to that point by one of the contributors to this list, but is running on the main page (entirely by design). Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Who are the nicest people on our projects ?
Hmm, I think the list of most-thanked people actually tells us more about who is doing the thanking. I see at least 5 names on that list that I recognise from my watchlist and therefore I may have thanked (statistically unlikely I would recognise 5 out of 10 random Wikipedia user names) and 2 of them I know I have thanked many times as we interact regularly in two different topic areas. My takeaway from that list, for enwiki at least, is that at least a few of the names on it are admins very active in anti-vandalism work, so I would guess a fair amount of the thanks they get are from people who've made reports to AIV and are thankful for the ensuing block of the vandal (based on my experience from when I was doing that heavily). Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Who are the nicest people on our projects ?
After reading an interesting related discussion on GenderGap, I have queried the top 10 users of the thanks feature last month, on both the English Wikipedia and Commons. Snapshot image attached and report link below. I note that the Commons list is heavy with people like myself who nominate, and vote on, featured picture candidates. I have learned there that it is common to thank someone who votes in support of your nomination (nothing wrong with that). I put that practice to good use in thanking everyone who voted for my own recent nomination (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_picture_candidates/File:Chapel_ceiling_rosette,_Greenwich_Hospital,_London_version_2.jpg_), and was karmically rewarded with the first-ever featuring of an image I took myself (though I should also really thank another editor who did some late perspective correction on it). Is it possible to break down the edits that get thanked by namespace, or even a particular page? That would be interesting. And, overall, I am +1 to the idea that it makes Wikipedia a better place. My only suggested improvement would be a you're welcome button, since I receive more thanks than I generally give and that makes me look a little standoffish. (And while we're at that, is there a stat on which editors get thanked the most?) Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] press coverage of Gamergate arbcom case
The litmus test is whether what they have said is not only 'offensive' but, 'grossly offensive'. Wikipedia's internal systems and thresholds would make no difference to the authorities in the UK. It would be interesting to see what the public fall-out would be if Wikipedia decided that no action should be taken against X whilst the UK jailed him / her. Well, there’s this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Threats_of_violence which never became policy (probably because, it seems, people discussed it more in light of threats of suicide rather than threats to others). But it may be time to revisit that. I assume, in the hypothetical you’re talking about, the question would be whether someone was punished in real life for threats made on-wiki that resulted in no action from the ArbCom? Or from anyone? In the former, yes, the public fallout would be interesting; in the latter, it would depend on whether anyone with the power to take action knew. I do recall some past cases, once described on the now-deleted “List of banned users”, where the trigger for the formal ban (as opposed to the never-lifted indefinite block) was a user threatening violence against someone (usually via their latest sock). Of course, if someone were to be incarcerated in real life as a result of their on-wiki threats, any action after that other than blocking the account to prevent some hacker from making use of it would really be superfluous. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Warning: Email thread hijacking
Unfortunately despite multiple complaints about this group hijacking users from a Wikimedia list by maliciously harvesting email addresses, Google has yet to take any visible action. Fae I unsubscribed from that group after some particularly vitriolic abuse directed at Fae, something that actually managed to repulse me into hitting unsubscribe almost immediately, abuse that had absolutely nothing really to do with the purported issue under which it was raised, making it apparent that the person in question was really just looking for an opportunity to say it. I do not want that in my inbox. I recommend everyone else here who cares about the values this list is meant to uphold do likewise ASAP. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Arbcom election
What’s missing from this?: I don’t think most disputes get “resolved”. I think one person simply gives up. Maybe they don’t think the issue is that important, maybe they feel that they don’t have the time to argue it, maybe they feel that the other person involved is too unpleasant to want to try to engage with, maybe they’ve found that no matter what they do, they never make a difference. Give up? It’s “maybe one person realizes the other person was right, and does it their way from then on, without any hard feelings.” It has happened to me quite a few times. That’s the sort of outcome I was talking about. Of course, I think of these in terms of pure content disputes (should we or should we not mention something? how should we format this table? and so forth ...) because that’s what most of those I’ve been involved in have been. Disputes over someone’s conduct are something else entirely, because it’s harder for people to admit they were wrong in that department. And why I always say it cannot be repeated enough that, when you realize the argument is no longer about what you were originally arguing about but has instead become a meta-argument about the argument itself, you should stop immediately as it will no longer accomplish anything constructive to continue. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Arbcom election
There have never been anywhere near that many people voting for Arbcom elections; in fact, that's more people than voted in the last Board of Trustees elections for the elected seats, and hugely more than get a vote for the chapter/affiliate-selected Board seats. I wonder if the apparent decline in votes also has to do with the move to making the ballots secret—there are more than a few entries on the various [[WP:100]] multiples that came from the old way of open ballots, which was often an invitation for those unsatisfied with drama to provoke even more of it in the ensuing discussion threads, or by the very act of running. The fact of the matter is that not that many people actually care about Arbcom, and never really cared. +1 (and I would use a higher number, but there’s only one me). Thank you for stating one of the biggest unstated truths of Wikipedia in just so many words. The people who care are usually those who have interacted with the dispute resolution system on multiple occasions. And then stating the reason for that truth. I have always believed that the amount of drama on-wiki is overstated; most of the people who complain about it are the sort of people Risker describes above—people who have been party to ArbCom cases, have provided evidence, have supported either those bringing the cases or having cases brought against them, have been or are in some way formally involved in the dispute resolution process. Some people never go back there, or find the experience so dispiriting, even in the case of a favorable outcome, that they take a long break or leave the project altogether afterwards, because of the way being involved in an ArbCom case or some other long-running dispute just takes over your wikilife for the duration. But it seems more of those people stay and continue to focus most of their energies on the various formal and informal dispute resolution procedures, regardless of their involvement. Now, of course, having a core of otherwise disinterested “watchers” on the dispute resolution processes is not a bad thing by itself. The question might be whether we have too many, or whether some of those people should remember what they came to Wikipedia to do and go back to editing and creating article content for a while. I have also noticed it’s these people, primarily, who seem most pessimistic about the state of the project either in person, or on-wiki. Well of course they would feel that way if they have changes to ArbCom cases on their RSS feeds. One is reminded of the joke about the drunk looking for his lost keys under the streetlight. Your comment suggests an inquiry which might make an interesting paper or presentation for someone at some conference or event: See how many of the people listed (like myself) on Highly Active Users make how many edits to dispute-resolution sections of the site in project namespace like AN/I, Arbcom or (prior to its recent deprecation) RFC/U. And how much the heaviest contributors to those pages (other than active or former Arbs or clerks, who have a reason to do so) make to article namespace. I bet there’s not going to be much overlap, that the Venn diagram will be kissing socially at best. In fact, it would be interesting to see pages like HAU or whatever broken down by edits to namespace. Or have a page that recognizes the heaviest/most active contributors to article namespace. The majority of active administrators participate, for example; but the number of active admins has also nosedived, so we may be seeing the effects of that reflected in the interest in voting, and even in the number and quality of candidates. Back in the earlier days, there were often 30-40 candidates. I participate in ArbCom elections primarily because I am not just an active admin, but a functionary as well, and feel a sense of duty and community responsibility (Plus there is a higher chance, when one has one of the more advanced tools, that decisions on how to use or not use them may possibly involve ArbCom cases past, present or future, so it’s a good idea to at least keep an eye on things and say your say about who has that job). But it’s not something I’ve ever been passionate enough about to the equivalent of, say, putting a bumper sticker on my car. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] What's happening at ArbCom re WP:GGTF
Eric Corbett is going to be under a new regimen of non-appealable civility blocks under the aegis of Arbitration Enforcement. One wonders if it’s really time for someone to just initiate a discussion on AN as to whether the community’s patience with him is exhausted enough to community-ban him indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of any ArbCom case. We have done things like this before—after one such editor prompted multiple suggestions that he be banned among the many opposes he received when he ran for ArbCom with the premise of effectively abolishing it by voting against hearing any new cases, I initiated that discussion, which led to the editor in question pretty much jumping before he was pushed. And I say this as someone who has never interacted with him in any meaningful way, at least not for years, but sees and hears him increasingly discussed as the one user who represents all the shortcomings of our disciplinary processes. Whether he is a genuinely toxic person or not seems to be a matter of some debate, but I think there is no doubt that the perception that he is has increasingly mooted that question. Of course we could also consider the suggestion Jimmy had in his closing speech at Wikimania this year that we deal with toxic people on the site who also happen to be good content creators by giving them their own wikis where they, and anyone who wanted to work with them, could develop and improve whatever content they wanted to.for reimportation. Maybe part of the problem is that we offer too limited a choice of (And per other emails, this is really beyond the scope of this list, so any followups should probably directed to me personally or taken on-wiki. Besides I don’t want to ruin anyone’s Thanksgiving, regardless of whether you celebrate it or not—we all deserve a break). Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Update: Re: Polish Wikipedia Monument shows only men
Well I suppose it would be more technically accurate if 1 of 4, not 2 of 4 were women Better to reflect our goal than our reality. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Novel by Woman-Notability
She's an African woman. She's won Yale's big prize. Which, as I’ve noted, wasn’t even mentioned in the article at the time the tag was placed. She is notable except this guy thought she wasn't. The placing of the tag doesn’t mean (necessarily) that he doubted her notability, as Jodi just pointed out. It means that he didn’t see it asserted, and was perhaps trying to goad you to add that to the article. I see how they expect so much more to justify notability for a woman of color than a male author of potboilers. Well, as I did point out a day or so ago, someone tagged an article on one of Cussler’s books with the same tag nine months ago. And it’s still there. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Cussler comparison
I don't think it is helpful to assign gender based systemic bias every time an
edit is questioned on women related topic.
To put it in perspective, this was the article as it existed just before the
{{notability}} tag was applied—three days after it was created, and two days
after the {{unreviewed}} tag was removed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=October_%28novel%29oldid=617753940
There is a summary of the novel, a list of characters, a statement of who the
author is and where she teaches, and two references—one to what seems to be a
review in The New Statesman (OK as far as RS goes), the other to what seems to
be a website which may or may not be considered a reliable source. There’s
nothing about the award, which would probably have kept the {{notability}} tag
at bay.
Plenty of people have similar frustration about notability tags being placed
on their newly created articles especially on niche topics.
Of course, that happens a lot less when you get to be patrol-exempt.
But even still, on the occasions (and there still are some) when I create an
article and for whatever reason can’t put refs in it right away, I’m looking
over my virtual shoulder until I can (Once I had to wait an hour, and was
absolutely paranoid that someone would tag it or—God forbid—nominate it for
speedy deletion in the meantime). Yes, even me.
I don’t how routinely we advise newer editors to do this, but the fact is that
when you create a new article, especially on a niche topic, you shouldn’t go
live in mainspace with it until you’ve got sourced assertion of notability in
it, and probably at least a few other sources as well. That’s what the newpage
patrollers are looking for.
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Re: [Gendergap] Zoë Wicomb or Clive Cussler?
Thank you. But I do not believe these Guidelines are used fairly when it comes to author's gender. Again..why would every novel by Clive Cussler get its own page but there be a notability query about one by Zoë Wicomb?? This seems to me pure gender bias. Interestingly, in the process of tagging the Cussler book articles for their referential shortcomings, I found that someone else had tagged some of them. You might find this edit particularly interesting in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trojan_Odysseydiff=572871374oldid=572871203 Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Women's biographies at the main page's DYK (Did YouKnow?)
Spot on description, Sarah, of why not to nominate an article at DYK, ... drama, rude people, too complex of a process for something so simple. Yup, DYK can be (is) dysfunctional and the DYK project doesn't take criticism well. As an admin who was heavily involved with DYK in the past but now does little regularly beyond the requisite QPQ review when I nominate one of my own articles, I’m saddened that this turnabout in our reputation has happened. It used to be that we were known as among the nicest group of admins at Wikipedia. I wonder if that has something to do with the gradual automation of the DYK process—when I was more regularly involved, there were no separate templates for nominations and we did basically everything manually, all the way to filling queues and updating the main page. We did a lot more of the work ourselves, and I wonder if that actually made us more tolerant of other people’s faults since we lived with the awareness of how easily we could screw things up ourselves and the consequences of doing so. The rules, more complex than they used to be I admit, came out of some instances where certain users, not part of the DYK process, made rude, dismissive but ultimately justifiable criticisms about some of the articles we were letting through (plagiarism issues and such). But if an article meets its requirements, it will eventually make it to the main page. So nominating more articles seems to make sense. +1. For a new user it can be a huge encouragement to see the article they developed or expanded linked from the main page. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
The UK values freedom of speech but it is on a horizontal plane along with other rights and freedoms, NOT a vertical one with freedom of speech at the top. Hate speech not only gets you blocked in the UK, it gets you jailed, and quite rightly in my opinion. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-isabella-sorley-and-john-nimmo-jailed-for-abusing-feminist-campaigner-caroline-criadoperez-9083829.html And this is how this works in practice, with relevance to Wikipedia and the issues under discussion here obvious: US: Tape of sports team owner in major market talking with his mistress is released in which he makes racist statements, where said owner has some history of making similar statements in the context of his other business interests, and the group against which the racist statements are made constitutes a disproportionately large share of the league’s players and fan base. League commissioner bans him for life from league events, including his own team’s games; he is later forced to sell team (albeit at market rate). UK: Chief executive of major sports league whose games and teams are followed by a worldwide audience as it is widely considered to have some of the world’s best teams in that sport has emails disclosed in which he talks about women, including some identifiable ones in the office, in a sexist, crude and juvenile way. He is not punished in any way as the emails were supposed to have been private and the woman he talked about (whose continued employment, coincidentally, depends on his goodwill) said she didn’t mind. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] A cautionary tale
MediaWiki's mostly impersonal interaction helps a lot here. No image avatars, no upvoting or downvoting of comments (something I don't see the utility of on either Reddit or Quora, FTM). Maybe the features are what we *don't* have. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] A cautionary tale
Actually, I think there's something to be said for downvoting. Not in the reddit i disagree sense, but in the slashdot/ meta filter comments downvoted/flagged past a certain point will be hidden/deleted sense. It would obviously take a lot of work to make that work within the media wiki software *and* the Wikimedia ethos, but it would probably save tons of grief and derails if the worst of the worst comments were limited by crowdsourced review. On the popular liberal/progressive website Daily Kos, the equivalent of downvoting, “hide rec”’ing, is meant to be used only for really offensive or out-of-line comments. Abusing that function, i.e., by constantly doing it to the same user or similar opinions reasonably expressed, can lead to sanctions against your account. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Oh man, I feel like a woman ...
Eppstein was off-base, but you escalated it into the realm of the personal attack. That's both counterproductive and even somewhat hypocritical. In particular, your blanket denigration of academics is amazingly offensive to many more Wikipedians than just your wayward reviewer. I apologize to all those who were offended ... yes, I’m not entirely outside the circle of academia myself (among which that sort of criticism is not unheard of, actually). I probably might not have flown off the handle so much if Eppstein hadn’t ended his review with something that sounded so snippy and dismissive, and it wasn’t so late. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Oh man, I feel like a woman ...
Welcome to our lives Daniel :) Good efforts all around. I stopped participating in DYK's (nominating my own stuff) after drama llamas claimed promotional language about long dead subjects and more. Yeah, well, I’ve been nominating DYKSs for almost as long as I’ve been editing, so I have come to expect some occasional obtuseness from reviewers who aren’t acquainted with my other work. But this time it felt like a forearm across the mouth. It is bad enough that, after having composed my reply/request for another reviewer, I still feel like taking a break from Wikipedia for a while and working on another project (or even TV Tropes) for the rest of the evening. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Wikimedia and revenge porn
I wondered if anyone knew of a case where any of our projects had been involved in a revenge porn incident - I.e. someone maliciously uploading and publicising pornographic pictures to control and humiliate someone else (most frequently an ex - girlfriend). Not that *I* know of, but I did initiate a mass deletion request (ultimately successful) about a year ago when concerns were raised about some photos that might have had exactly this use in mind: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_of_Austin_photoguy50 Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Blogger and Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz died whilerock-climbing
Subject: [Gendergap] Blogger and Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz died whilerock-climbing This is to inform you that one of the contributors to this list who spent a lot of time working on the Gendergap issue and ways to solve it, has died in a rock-climbing accident. http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/blog/adrianne-wadewitz/ How truly sad. While I did not work with her on any gendergap-related issues, I remember her well as a tenacious reviewer of DYK submissions, mine included. We didn't always agree, but I never doubted her integrity and commitment to the ideals of Wikipedia and Wikimedia. I would note for this list her high output of featured articles, many of them on works of women like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, from her chosen period of literary study, the late 18th and early 19th century, as well as biographies of some major and minor figures of that epoch (including the now-infamous [[Fanny Imlay]] article, one of the few nominated for deletion (albeit strategically) on the same day it was on the main page. Nobody *but* her could have defended that article on the talk page as well as she did (compare with yours truly, a few grafs down)). Oh, and a nice collaboration with another editor on [[Joseph Priestley House]]. Are there any further details on the circumstances of her death, like where and what she was doing or attempting to do at the time? I ask only because they will inevitably be reported in this year's Accidents in North American Mountaineering along with the usual critique, and it would be useful to know before reading it since names are not usually given and I would like to know so I know when I'm reading about the death of an acquaintance. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Minor explosion on dawiki
In the US we call it pink washing. It does attract some women. And then there are others who absolutely turned off by it. I'll let you guess what category I fall into ;) I wonder if this might have—or might be defended as—something to do with Breast Cancer Awareness Month: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Breast_Cancer_Awareness_Month Granted, that “National” means it’s largely (for now) a U.S.-specific thing. Starting tomorrow, over here, that color will be everywhere (and perhaps, to be fair, in Canada as well): ribbons on downtown lampposts, the lights of the Empire State Building, and the shoes worn by NFL players (and yes, there is some similar criticism of it; see the article). I suppose it could be salvaged that way, if someone wants to introduce the concept to Denmark and, by extension, Scandinavia, if it hasn’t been already. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Minor explosion on dawiki
Sladre om de andre brugere Bwahahahahaha, if that's not reinforcing stereotypes, what is? :) For those of you too afraid to try it at home, Google Translate rendered this as Gossip about other editors. (Or something to that effect). Then again, does the Danish word Sladre have the negative connotations that both that translation and its apparent similarity to slander would suggest? We may be missing something here. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Changing the Chelsea Manning article (and how womenwere shouted down)
I believe that over time the weight of coverage will change in favor of her preference, and our article can evolve accordingly. Since when is Wikipedia about beliefs? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus#Consensus_can_change Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Category:Nude portrayals of computer technology
I use Commons to look at bird pr0n (birds..like...real...birds...the one's that fly and have feathers) and pinball machines. So whatever. Confession: I have taken and uploaded one of those bird-porn photos: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cockatiels_mating.jpg We still have one of those two birds. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Accidental Troll Policy - beyond gender gap
Andreas wrote: At the moment, I believe the only editors required to identify are arbitrators and chapter members. For the first, no, all functionaries (I had to provide proof of identity when I got the oversight bit) as well as arbs have to identify to the Foundation. Chapter members ... do you mean chapter board members? Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Accidental Troll Policy - beyond gender gap
I know women (Cristamuse, Slim Virgin, just to name two) who deal with plenty of crap and *ARE NOT* admins. Actually, Sara, Slim Virgin is an admin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UserRights/SlimVirgin And are you sure you’ve got the other username right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cristamuse Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Topless image retention -don't give up
It took me one minute to find the uploads of this user: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Austin_photoguy50 Please nominate all of them for deletion. I will be interested in watching how what goes. Done. With the WMF resolution linked and quoted at length. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_of_Austin_photoguy50 Maybe we should have a drinking game based on this: One drink: Keep !vote saying all that matters is that it’s a free image Keep !vote saying it’s censorship Delete !vote from a regular participant on this list User who !votes keep following up every delete vote with a comment. Claim that someone has the subjects’ permission on OTRS if we all just wait a while. Closed by Mattbuck as keep. Two drinks: User who !votes keep following up every delete !vote with a comment that actually makes a legitimate counterargument to the delete !vote. Keep !vote from regular participant on this list. Keep !vote that trashes the Foundation and/or board in the I just like sticking it to the Man!” vein. Keep !vote arguing that society is too prudish and subjects need to get over that. Closed by another admin as keep. Three drinks: Closed by Mattbuck as delete. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Adrianne Wadewitz's new blog Who speaks for the women of Wikipedia? Not the women of Wikipedia.
Sarah wrote: Adrianne raises a good point - No women who edit Wikipedia have been featured in the press regarding the recent categorygate (As we've started calling it!). Indeed. If this were covered accurately, reporters would have to note that one of the most ardent defenders of the existing categorization scheme is an Irishwoman, BrownHairedGirl (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_April_24diff=prevoldid=552193313) (Of course, doing things that way just kicks the problem down the road that has to end at some point, as I intend to argue in a followup comment). Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Joseph Reagle on Wikipedia's category taxonomy
Compare it to the weaknesses of the current category system. 98% of editors don't know what they are doing. Categories and subcategories are applied inconsistently all the time. Nobody has an overview of the entire tree structure, or even a major branch of it. And would this be any less truer of tags? Something that is a subcategory of American novelists today may stop being one tomorrow, just by dint of a single edit, and no one would be the wiser (unless they keep hundreds of categories on their watchlist). The category tree (or weave, as categories can have several parents) changes daily, with categories created, renamed, recategorised, and deleted. There are incessant arguments about how to name, categorise and diffuse categories, and about perceived iniquities.[citation needed] In all the years I’ve been on Wikipedia I think I’ve only once been involved in any dispute over a category’s existence where I didn’t agree (and still don’t) with the outcome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_August_9#Category:Vogue_editors (I suppose it’s only coincidental here that the category in question was mostly populated by articles about women). Indeed, I find it interesting that WP:LEW includes only one example from the category namespace, with everything else very well represented. Using a defined set of basic tags in combination with something like CatScan – ported across to the Foundation server if you like, and given a friendly front-end with shortcuts to the most common searches – would do away with that. Without really solving the underlying problem, IMO, and making it harder to fix when it recurs. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Topless image retention on Commons and use on enwp
Came across this kerfuffle today. I'd love to see what more gendergap-focused people think about the following progression of events (note: the image is NSFW, but each of the links I'm providing are SFW if you don't click through to the image/article): a.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Exhibitionism#Image_at_top_of_page ---discussion about whether to use an identifiable woman's topless photo on the top of an enwp article. The person raising the discussion notes that I find it hard to believe that this woman wants her picture on WP, and I don't think we have a right to show her because of a momentary indiscretion in a public place. There’s a simple compromise solution to this which took me less than a minute with Photoshop to make possible: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mardi_Gras_Flashing_-_Color_%28identity_protected%29.jpg (link is also NSFW, if you hadn’t guessed). Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Joseph Reagle on Wikipedia's category taxonomy
This system keeps the categories more straightforward, and pretty well avoids the sort of subtle bias Wikipedia has been caught with here. Defining the precise intersection of interest is up to the user. But the corresponding weakness is that it depends on the editors hitting all the right categories to work properly (as well as the tool itself, which as heavy toolserver users know is not always the case). Someone may categorize in two of three but not the third (guess which one might get forgotten?) Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
[Gendergap] Today's xkcd
It’s not directly related to what we do here, but I thought that today’s xkcd strip gets the message just right for the broader goal of what we’re all trying to do, particularly in the STEM field: http://xkcd.com/1202/ The rollover text is good too. Since Randall licenses his strips under CC-BY-NC-2.5, feel free to print it out at whatever size you like. This would make a great classroom-wall poster; I can easily imagine it on a lot of faculty office doors as well. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] I f***ing love science
Thank you for sharing this Jane. It's amazing that it's still such an issue but yeah, a great example of how deeply rooted our presumptions are. This actually happened to me, in a way, with one now long-departed Wikipedia editor. Despite a female-suffixed username*, I assumed this editor was a male because she was a flagrant asshole in some AfDs in a way that (in my experience) only men ever are. I was actually stunned to find out she was indeed a she. Daniel Case *As most of us know, username-based gender assumptions cut both ways. Users Hersfold and Nancy (see the explanation on his userpage) are both men, yet regularly deal with new editors assuming based on their names that they’re female. And I know they’re not the only ones. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] TFA for March 16
It's witty and one of the best-written things I've read on WP. I think it was actually once proposed for the Main Page April Fool’s FA. Can’t remember why it got turned down, though—people probably thought it would be too controversial. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Open writing challenge on March 8th
My happily coincident contribution to our festivities tomorrow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Chapman_Catt_House Which I've nominated for DYK as well. It suggests to me that perhaps a couple more potential stubs could be added to the list (basically the other two corners of the love triangle around Catt in the 1920s): Mary Garret Hay (Catt's preferred partner ... was she notable for more than just that?) Mary Gray Peck (her biographer ... I think that would make her notable). Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] AfD Discussion on En WP: Birth Rape
Hmmm, I can't help thinking: every time Romney or a fellow Republican open their mouths, a new wiki article pops up? Hopefully the elections will be done and over with soon enough...! Actually, this one has nothing to do with the campaign. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
[Gendergap] Sexism in the online skeptic community
In the parallel-issues department, here’s an interesting narrative in Slate by Rebecca Watson about the experiences of herself and other women with sexism offline and on in the skeptic/atheist community. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/10/sexism_in_the_skeptic_community_i_spoke_out_then_came_the_rape_threats.html Among other things, her WP article has been vandalized (I won’t link to diffs ... anyone interested can look through the history). I daresay that it makes Reddit, even in the wake of the Violentacrez reporting, look not so bad. It has also drawn a lot more comments than the typical Slate article. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Violentacrez and civility
I'm not entirely certain that this has a lot to do with civilityalthough it does certainly have a lot to do with respect for women. (It also reassures me that my decision to not create a facebook account was wise in more ways than one.) +1 Nonetheless, one difference that was immediately apparent is the fact that Violentacrez was pretty much at the top of the volunteer heap there: he essentially had control of a large portion of their content, had permissions and accesses even higher than any Wikipedia administrator has, and clearly had direct communication and influence with the staff of Reddit. I can't think of someone who was equally trollish having the same degree of access or influence on any Wikimedia project. Yes, we have lots of loud people and rude people and trolls. But most of them are never granted adminship (and I can think of only one or two who advanced beyond that point in *any* WMF project), and none of them have anywhere near the same degree of control of content. Risker/Anne It also strikes me that there was another key difference: Reddit is owned by a large for-profit media conglomerate, giving the staff an even greater incentive to let him be as long as (as the Gawker article reported) he made their jobs much easier. Paradoxically it would seem, being run by a non-profit and having volunteers do almost all the work at Wikipedia that paid staff do at Reddit actually seems to have prevented a problem of this magnitude developing. If this does remind me of any particular Wikipedia scandal, it’s Essjay ... and that issue wasn’t so much about protecting undesirable content as it was an editor who had earned a great deal of community respect turning out to have earned that respect on the basis of greatly overstating his expert credentials (granted, probably something that will never happen at Reddit). Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
[Gendergap] Seeing diversity as well as reading about it ...
When we’ve focused on making article content more gender-inclusive here, we’ve usually considered only the text. But a recent edit of mine reminded me that that’s not the only place we can do this. A month or so ago, on a short train trip to a city near us, my son (at my suggestion) took a video of the conductor of what was to be our train home lining the switch (point to those of you English speakers outside of North America) to bring the train onto the track next to the platform for boarding. He and I have been making videos for Wikipedia since Wikimania (when I realized that we could do it, and it occurred to me for other reasons that this might be another way to make the encyclopedia more welcoming to female readers and editors) and I had noticed that [[railroad switch]] had neither photo nor video of someone actually making the adjustment, an operation that takes place thousands of times a day on railroads all over the planet and is fundamental to rail transport (yes, there was a video of some tracks in Hong Kong being switched, but it was so short and subtle as to be nearly useless). It took me a while to get around to editing the video and convert it to .ogv format, then upload it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NJ_Transit_conductor_lines_a_switch_in_Port_Jervis,_NY.ogv). Only after I did, and then added it to the article, did I pleasantly realize that it showed a young African-American woman (so score that double for diversity of representation) doing something not always associated with women (although, of course, as we all know, there are many women who work as passenger rail conductors). Of course, when I look at the “Videos of women” category on Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_of_women) and see both how underpopulated it is and how it’s subdivided, I remember that we still have a lot of work to do. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Violentacrez and civility
One reason Violentacrez continued to occupy such a high-profile position on Reddit was of course his free speech rhetoric. But Violentacrez has historically had a close relationship with Reddit's staff, a fact far less well-known than his controversial behavior. For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across. Wow, it's like Wikipedia's civility vs. established editors dynamic but with more misogyny, homophobia and racism... I had just been reading all the underlying links from the Slate story (http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/11/reddit_bans_gawker_links_over_adrian_chen_story_about_porn_purveyor_violentacres.html). I was wondering when someone would post it here, and I was going to myself if no one else did. The similarities to issues we've had on Wikipedia, albeit ramped up somewhat, are really interesting. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Marketplace.org: Inside the sexual harassment in onlinegaming
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/inside-sexual-harassment-online-gaming I just caught this on the podcast. They mentioned trolls (that some people say to just ignore them) but no mentions of Wikipedia. -Jeremy This coincides nicely with this highly-discussed article on the same subject from yesterday’s New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/us/sexual-harassment-in-online-gaming-stirs-anger.html?src=meref=general Likewise, no mention of Wikipedia, but there are some interesting parallels. For one thing, there is a guy at Microsoft with a thankless job—or I would call it thankless if I weren’t already a Wikipedia administrator and thus able to empathize: Stephen Toulouse, who was the head of enforcement for Xbox Live from 2007 until February, policed the most egregious behavior on the network, owned by Microsoft. And women were the most frequent target of harassment, he said. In that role, Mr. Toulouse experienced the wrath of angry gamers firsthand, who figured out where he lived, then called the police with false reports about trouble at his house (more than once, SWAT teams were sent). If players were reported for bad behavior, they could be disciplined by being muted on voice chat or barred temporarily. At least once a day, Mr. Toulouse said, the company blocked a specific console’s serial number from ever accessing the network again. But policing the two or three million players who are active on Xbox Live at any given time is hard. Just as on the broader Internet, there are people who delight in piquing anger or frustration in others, or “trolling.” For trolls, offensive language — sexist, racist, homophobic comments — are interchangeable weapons that vary with the target. Mr. Toulouse, anytime you want to come over to Wikipedia, your mop is ready. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
[Gendergap] Notes from an edit-a-thon
A little over a week after Wikimania, where I participated in the “10 women in 10 minutes” session Sarah led, I have gotten the article my group worked on, [[Adrienne Bolland]], through DYK to the Main Page queue, with two other editors who worked on it sharing in the credit. It is currently scheduled to run on July 25, in the evening rotation in Europe, afternoon here in North American Eastern time where I live and morning on the West Coast, and early morning July 26 in Oceania/Asia. I have two takeaways from the experience to offer anyone else participating in, or running, one of these events. 1.. Cast a wide net for sources when looking to expand a stubby article. I was attracted to this one because the Francophone Wikipedia has a longer article on her; unfortunately it’s tagged as lacking sources. But at least I can read French well enough to figure out what should have been included in the English article, and that helped to guide us. Reflecting the multilingual group we were, the final article has sources from not only French and English (Monash University in Australia has a nice set of pages on aviation pioneers) but German and Spanish as well (The German book we cited actually seems like a good source; it seems to be meant for younger readers and thus was at about the right level for me to read—somehow, when I looked at it, German (which I’ve never formally studied) came through clearer than it ever has. Unfortunately the Google preview ends right when the story starts getting good. Perhaps some German reader can find the hardcover book and see if there’s anything else worth adding). Other sources tapped include the Air France inflight magazine, a school website in France and the World Postal Union website (which would seem to be a good, reliable, authoritative source for stamp information). 2.. Not all the work done by editors physically collaborating shows up in the history. Sitting there putting our heads together, we were able to come to a consensus on whether a particular source was reliable and, when two of our sources conflicted as to a particular fact, which to include. I hope you like the final result as much as I liked writing it (Mme. Bolland makes a nice feminist role model—after her aviation career, she was in the French women’s-suffrage movement, then supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and was active in the resistance during the war. The more I researched, the more I liked her and felt honored to be improving her Wikipedia article. Now, I hope, the French article can be properly referenced and the other articles expanded. User:Maire, who was in our group, promised she would get around to doing a Polish translation, which left me with Russian among the languages I’d feel comfortable editing in that aren’t represented yet among the interwiki links. Which I’ll do when I can figure out how to properly transliterate her first name and which of four possible pronunciations I can think of for her last name is the right one. Or someone else here can take up the challenge. It’s worth it. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Larry Sanger's blog post: Where is the pornography?
From: Risker On the Commons side of things, I think there has been an over-aggressive campaign to extract license compliant images from Flickr and other non-WMF repositories that include subjects who were very unlikely to know that their image was going to be made available on Commons. I believe that whoever uploads those images to Commons has a personal responsibility to verify that all of the subjects in those images was aware of, and agrees to, the licensing terms. I also believe that it should become part of the process that prior to uploading such images, the person uploading to Commons confirms with the Flickr uploader that the terms of the license are correct, and that there are suitable model releases where applicable. This has always been one of my concerns about the superordination of free licensing in our image policy, both on Commons and enwiki. Any other issues with the image are downplayed in favor of archiving all the free images possible. I am not sure, for instance, that many of the Flickr users whose pictures have been used are quite aware of what the CC license means. Some of them seemed to think at one point that it was the only way to make their pictures publicly viewable, or did so because of peer pressure to do this good and cool thing without really understanding the legal implications. I have often wondered what we do if confronted with a situation where there was a notable person with plenty of good-quality copyrighted images, but the only free one would be one that was rather unintentionally revealing (upskirt, say) while still showing their face. Could some editors insist on using one of the copyrighted images in that case even though the NFCC would not allow it because an equivalent free image was available? Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] civility/behavioral standards
Given this, I'm going to change how the moderation of this list is handled a little bit moving forward. Previously, there has been no hands-on moderation of this list. Then how come I had two posts returned to me last week with the message: 5.x.0 - Message bounced by administrator They were arguably trivial and off-topic, so I accepted that decision. But now someone says that decision wasn't being made? If there are three moderators on this list, are all of them on the same page about what the moderation policy is or isn't? Will they be in the future? Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Fwd: [Wiki Loves Monuments] Fwd: [cultural-partners] Wiki Loves Monuments... 2012!
From: Sarah Stierch Hi everyone - this is the announcement for WIki Loves Monuments. The US will be participating (in some capacity) for the 2012 event, and we're of course looking for participants around the world. And since this is gender gap - perhaps you know some cool women's groups, or yourself - who would like to step up and help lead a group or your country/state/chapter into the WLM event. I should also add a plug here for the National Register of Historic Places WikiProject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NRHP) on the English (and German) wikipedias ... on the former, we’ve been photographing and writing articles about the 80,000+ properties on that particular heritage listing since late 2006. I’ve done everything from 17th-century Dutch Colonial stone houses here in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York to ski lifts in Aspen. I mention this because writing about (and photographing) local listings is a great way to get people contributing. If you live in the US, particularly outside of a major metropolitan area, and you’re trying to show people what they can contribute, you might want to look up the “National Register of Historic Places listings in ...” page for your county and see what photos can be taken, what articles can be created or expanded. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Written like a personal reflection or essay vs.Encyclopedic style?
Do you think whoever flagged it really meant it just needs to be cited better,
or is there something I'm not seeing?
Thanks,
Alexa
I think they used the wrong template ... {{story}} would be more appropriate
for prose like this:
“Mrs. Kealy, however, seemed to think that by bringing her over, they were
getting an unpaid servant.”
“After war officially broke out, about a month later, Mrs. Kealy pointed out
that she didn't even know if her parents were even alive anymore.”
The first one uses “however”, which we used to counsel people to avoid (at,
what else [[WP:AVOID]]). The second uses a contraction in something that is
neither a possessive nor quoted matter.
While the text isn’t too problematic to me, it does need to be made drier and
more encyclopedic. I would rewrite the first sentence as “Mrs. Kealy believed
she would work for the family as a household servant” (There also needs to be a
footnote after that graf). The rest I leave to you to edit, although if you
want help do feel free to ask.
(Years ago, in my early days, I made a similar mistake of writing prose that
was a bit too novelistic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_Cokeoldid=18530528, (see the
History section) and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:New_Coke#Reads_too_much_like_prose).
Daniel Case
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Re: [Gendergap] WP stalking
Wow, did everybody here just blame the victim? “If you had done x this wouldn't have happened.” No. This is exactly the point that keeps women from participating in everything, incluiding being visible in Wikipedia and talking openly about their interests! It was inappropriate of the guy to stalk you and inappropriate of the church to confirm your number without your consent. It's not inappropriate to be visible as a woman! I should add that such stalking is not limited to women. I don’t deny it’s more likely, but I have been stalked as well. The acolytes of a notable banned user, a film producer who had at that point long been trying through a variety of ways, mostly disruptive, to get the article on himself deleted, tried to come after me when not only did I block one of his socks, I traced the IP to a prominent production company and referred his misuse of their network to security there, which apparently took it seriously (at the time, it would never have occurred to me that someone would constantly add material to an article about themselves accusing themselves of child molestation as a way (they thought) of getting the article deleted) ... I really thought I was being helpful). Needless to say, he took umbrage at my going above and beyond our usual procedures (not usual for me, however ... I believe any egregious misuse of an entity’s computer systems to maliciously edit Wikipedia, use that usually violates terms of service, should be reported to the responsible personnel at those entities, and there are students at school districts throughout the US and Canada who’ve been disciplined as a result of reports I’ve made to the appropriate administrators). He complained about this on a forum thread at his website, and one of his acolytes apparently took it on himself to post a version of my home address (easily findable online since I use my real name and the region I live in on my userpage, and in any event a close examination of my edits would probably narrow down the community I live in, since I have heavily edited and expanded the article, and it remains on my watchlist) that was just incorrect enough to not be findable on Google. That person, or another, created a username with that address and, using it, inserted themselves into a talk-page discussion I was participating in. I later blocked the account and redacted the edits from the page. I can’t say I wasn’t a little unnerved by all this. Daniel Case P.S. I do think the real failure here was the church. They just gave out your phone number to some stranger who called? Without any apparent need for said stranger to use any [[social engineering]] skills? I would bring this up with the board of trustees or elders or whatever ... especially with this incident already having occurred, the church has serious liability exposure if it doesn’t make any policy changes before, say, this happens in the case of a stalker with much more malevolent intentions. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] the state of civility on en.wiki
The use of the term collegial to describe the editing milieu. Anyone who has spent much time in the academe will recognize a lot of the problem behaviours we see on our own project, particularly personalization of disputes, which is one of the major elements leading to the perception of incivility. Indeed, some of our most significant problem areas involve editors with academic credentials behaving pretty much within the norms for their profession, i.e., pretty unpleasantly toward those who don't agree with their educated opinions. In other words, as a community we create a climate where poor behaviour is the most effective means to motivate needed changes, where our policies and practices can be used as weapons both to support negative behaviour and also to punish positive behaviour, where the boundaries of unacceptable behaviour vary widely dependent on a large number of factors and enforcement is extraordinarily inconsistent, and where we openly claim to follow a behavioural model that *sounds* progressive but is in reality possibly even more nasty than our own. Exactly. We should keep in mind that many of the complaints about how Wikipedia’s conduct policies do and don’t work are, IME, hardly unique to us but quite common in many college and university faculties. Perhaps one of the accomplishments of Wikipedia is that it has allowed laypeople to get a taste of that. And not just. It occurs to me how my own way of staying around echoes my father’s advice to any young lawyer joining a large enough firm: find a niche for yourself that will make you an asset to whichever faction is running, or perceived as running, or trying to run, the firm (and there will be factions). Do that and do it well, and don’t get too involved in firm politics, or more than you absolutely have to. He’s told me he was pleasantly surprised to read Richard Pipes, the historian, draw similar conclusions from his experience of the Harvard history department. He’s actually shared a draft of a PDF expanding on this, and it struck me how much his descriptions of a typical law firm echo some people’s descriptions of Wikipedia. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Wikipedystka
Risker wrote: I confess that this post made me smile. Back in the day when my feminist streak was first being nurtured, the differentiation of men and women doing the same job by the use of suffixes was a major thorn in the side of most feminists. Over time, there was often a complete change in terminology, e.g. steward/stewardess to flight attendant, or manholes becoming maintenance accesses since not everyone working in them was a man. Some occupations dropped the 'feminine suffix entirely, usually as that was the preference of the women who worked within that field. (Comedian and actor are particularly noteworthy examples.) It seems we may be coming full circle, in that an increasing number of feminist women are seeking to return to the sex-differentiated terms. My observation: As I noted a long time ago, at the beginning of this list, yoga (a field overwhelmingly, but hardly of necessity, female) is a notable exception, so many female practitioners embrace yogini, the female form of yogi. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Gender neutrality template
I love the idea of having articles of gender concern in a one stop shopping
space. Going through the NPOV collection is long, painful and is filled with
lots of advertising articles for tech companies. Blarg
-Sarah
I agree with a gender-specific tag as well. NPOV is (by design) vague and,
to me, not quite the fit we need as it is best applied to allegedly non-neutral
use of language (in obvious cases of POV language, I just fix it ... there's no
need to discuss). We ourselves already have {{globalize}}
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Globalize
for the situation of articles reflecting only the experience of one
particular region of the world or country. I don't see why gender bias couldn't
be addressed the same way.
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Re: [Gendergap] Fwd: The Feminist Movement in Museum Technology startstoday at the Smithsonian!
The GLAM industry is a female dominated industry, and this is the first conference of it's type to examine feminism, technology and museum culture. I encourage you all to follow the conference throughout the weekend... -Sarah As an aside, I've noticed how a lot of active female editors are themselves GLAM-sector people in their day jobs as it were, or have editing interests that correspond to it. I strongly suspect that our GLAM outreach projects may be one of the best things we have done, and continue to do, to increase female participation. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
[Gendergap] Dubious talk page discussions (was:Re: An example of clothed model in medical document)
I don't have very good examples in mind, but maybe user Valorum27 fits the description here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sleeveless_shirt#Is_this_necessary.3F He is alone in this example but if there were more, it would bring back sexual focus. A better example is this, which personally I find pathetic : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Skirt#Sexist And it's the user who didn't want female content who started it, albeit with good intentions certainly. I imagine that if on the contrary you'd let viewers look away without mentioning decency, it would be much better, and more proper to focus on the clothe. On the other side, years ago, when I saw this discussion (at the top of the page), I blanked it right away because it didn't belong on the talk page: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Miniskirtoldid=115184039 Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Calling all neutral user names She?
Feel free. I'm going to continue to use they, which usually fits without violating gender grammar too much. I use they when referring to the third person of a gender-unknown someone I'm not expecting to join the conversation and s/he when I am (possibly as a prod to clarification on said person's part). I don't think xe, which some people have tried to use, really works ... people often think that it was a typo, and the first time I saw it at the head of a sentence I scratched my head and wondered what xenon had to do with any of this. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Pregnancy article lead-image RFC and the lack of junk in articles
Sarah: I was trying to think of an example of something that might be relevant to men. I looked at the [[vasectomy]] article and was happy to see that there was a medical drawing of a groin, and not someone's privates at the first image (aguug), but, you scroll down a bit and there it is, but, I expected it. Myself: There actually has been sort of a precedent with a male-relevant article. I'm sure others with long wiki teeth will remember it once they see the link, but for those who don't, it's at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Semen/Archive_3#Survey_to_gain_consensus_to_remove_an_image and you can scroll up and down at your leisure, and follow the links to the controversial image. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Pregnancy article lead-image RFC
It's actually a serious point, though. It would be great to provide images for those articles that don't portray women the way certain men want to see them portrayed. I recall the Body Shop did that a couple of decades ago -- started using images of women that fell outside the usual range that tended to be objectified (older, not thin, etc). They produced some very good ads as a result. The difficulty for us would be in finding those images, then in maintaining them on the pages. Do we have an article on that women's club somewhere in England that, one year, put out their annual calendar showing them going about their regular club activities (gardening, tea, etc.) nude? IIRC, they were all in their fifties and sixties at the time, and the calendar sold quite well. I wish I could remember more details. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Childless couples
The article for [[childfree]] is just as weird, including this odd photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childfree#Motivations So glad we have a photo of a guy doing research to illustrate this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childfree#Statistics_and_research The same user, Tesseract2, added both photos: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Childfreediff=409889868oldid=409888607 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Childfreediff=405980864oldid=405979924 Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs ofwomen
(I am particularly concerned with bulk uploads from other services that don't have such policies in place, such as Flickr, because provenance and consent becomes very difficult to trace in that case.) climb on favorite hobby horse at first This is, of course, another side effect of our overly dogmatic fair-use policy, where it's free like speech as well as free like beer takes precedence over it's a good-quality, responsibly-taken image (I bet we didn't have these problems when fair use was permitted more broadly). Yesterday after reading Sarah's comment about [[Pregnancy]] still leading off with an image of a naked woman, I not only added my voice to the talk-page consensus that such an image was not necessary (WhatamIdoing made the very relevant point that it's not necessary to depict mammary swelling since it does not always occur during pregnancy and, at that range, it's small enough that it wouldn't really be well conveyed in a picture anyway), I looked at the Commons category, not just the well-populated Nude pregnant women one but the broader Pregnant women one. There are certainly better images like the USDA one that seems to be the favored replacement, but I did notice a lot of the Flickr scrapes, and I really wonder if we should be rewarding exhibitionists just for using the CC-BY license (and Phoebe's complaint also fits in the broader issue of Flickr's apparent disdain for enforcing copyright, to the point that we have a whole page at Commons of blacklisted Flickwashers). This has come up before, with a whole bunch of homemade porn on Commons that was uploaded under PD-self so people could use them to vandalize articles. The vandals have long been blocked but the pictures are still there. /climb down Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] an example of the unwanted attention problem
I think you'd make a darned fine admin, and would be glad to support you. We need more than just the technogeeks; indeed, virtually ZERO of what I do as an admin is technogeekery. +1, Sarah (and I say this with even more conviction having met you in person). Wasn't there some data recently showing that women who become admins are actually more likely to stick with it? Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Why don't people edit wikipedia? Small survey results provide some insights.
Ryan wrote again: It may not be statistically meaningful, but the results are certainly valuable to discussion. The idea that women have better things to do, i.e. don't think contributing to Wikipedia is valuable, is a new one for me. Since I consider editing Wikipedia to be one of the most valuable ways I can possibly spend my time (more so than raising children or curing cancer), this idea had never occurred to me. Is it possible that men are more indoctrinated to value knowledge, information, epistemology, etc. and thus see Wikipedia as inherently more important than women do? I'm not saying this is the case—indeed, it seems like too easy a scapegoat—I'm just wondering if it's a valid hypothesis. Perhaps someone should conduct a survey asking How valuable do you consider Wikipedia? and correlate this with the respondent's gender. This also seems to relate to empathizing–systemizing theory,[1] which controversially suggests that men (whether due to social or biological factors) prefer systemizing over empathizing, while women tend towards the opposite. It may also relate to the fact that men are much more likely than women to be diagnosed with autism and Asperger syndrome, although no one is sure why. These are just hypotheses, however, and we shouldn't jump to any conclusions. I do think, however, that we should incorporate this idea into future research and see if there are any significant results. I comment: I do recall someone (a woman, don't remember who) observing in the halcyon days of blogging that while most women blogged about their personal lives, men blogged about anything but (again in line with frequent clinical and non-clinical observations about gender differences in preferred topics of conversation*). I suspect that has an effect on an Internet user's desire to edit Wikipedia ... adding information about baseball statistics, medieval Turkish sultans or reporting and blocking vandals falls far more readily under anything but. Daniel Case *I really ought to post those excerpts from You Just Don't Understand that I've been meaning to.___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Mostly about fem-edits dilemma
Ryan Kaldari wrote: If women don't edit Wikipedia because they don't have free time, why are there more women bloggers than men? Keeping a blog requires a lot more time and dedication than editing Wikipedia. I respond: As someone who has extensive experience with both, I humbly submit that this assessment of the comparative time requirements of editing Wikipedia and blogging is not a universal truth. While blogging, when I was doing it at my peak, certainly did take a measurable number of hours (assuming the following tasks: writing and researching your posts and putting links into them, reading other blogs you follow and following links from them, and adding comments to posts elsewhere that may or may not link back to your own posts (and this is assuming you don't have a comments section of your own to manage)) from my day, it's been about five years since my last blog post because, among other things, Wikipedia was beginning to claim more of my interest. Today I honestly feel I spend more time editing/taking pictures/processing and uploading pictures/doing administrative tasks than I ever spent on my (anonymous, and it's staying that way for now) blog. For the stereotypical momblogger that we seem to be talking about here, I think it would take less time to blog (And I can also speak from experience as the stay-at-home parent for this time period, too) than edit. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Today's featured picture
I am struck by how few voices of reason there are on this mailing list, and this post is a prime example of why those people have probably mostly thrown up their hands and left. If the suggestion that we put more hot guys on our main page was a joke, it was was not constructive; if it was serious, I think you need to reconsider your participation here. It was indeed a joke, and I apologize for bad late Sunday-night judgement. However, as I type this, I think I recall a week or so ago that a female poster here referred to a male participant on this list, who is also a Foundation employee with a highly visible role that has him appearing in a few videos so most people know what he looks like, as that cute guy May I suggest for future reference that this list's cause is not helped by any discussion of physical comeliness or the lack thereof on anyone's part, by anyone? That is all. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
[Gendergap] Today's featured picture
Remote possibility: Would more front-page featured pictures like today's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MARTAKIS1.jpg perhaps entice at least some women to edit who aren't otherwise doing so? Or at least even out the Wikipe-tan effect? Cf. this album cover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frampton_Comes_Alive! and its purported effect on the sales of said album (not mentioned in the article, but maybe it should be). Just a thought; else, hold that thought. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] What motivates women to edit??
Before I say anything: Happy International Women's Day, everyone! Fred wrote: Having some experience in caring for elderly parents, that is one activity which, restricting your movement and forcing you to stay home, offers a great opportunity to get involved online. My response: From the other end of that spectrum, having a young child, especially one with some special needs, has the same effect. In my first years on Wikipedia I had a fair amount of childcare-related downtime (I'm the stay-at-home parent, more sort of by accident than design) when I couldn't just go out. So I killed time online. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Women's issues noticeboard
I would suggest we not create not a noticeboard for this issue specifically. How about putting it in the form of a Systemic Bias Noticeboard? That way it could accomodate other such issues we may uncover, or already have (i.e., U.S- and U.K.-centrism, general English-speaking world-centrism). Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
