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Charles ☭ H

@tarheel

This is a social problem, not a tool problem.

Wikipedia's way of dealing with this has been to try to recruit more diverse editors by doing edit-a-thon type meetups. The pages set up by those carry social weight and don't tend to get deleted. Which sort of helps for only those pages.

The only way I know of to escape the not-blokey-enough filter against all new Wikipedia articles to to start with a stub that establishes notability only and build on it after it survives. That's for pages about white men written by white men. Software will not fix this level of institutional toxicity.

Stopping institutional racism at wikipedia would require a massive institutional shakeup that would completely transform the culture of the site. A lot of people would leave or see their cultural capital diminish. It must happen, but there's no leadership on it right now.

10 Dec 2022 at 19:01 | Wall-to-wall | Open on lgbt.io
5 comments | Expand all CWs
Steffen Christensen

@celesteh @tarheel I used to be a huge fan of wiki moderation until well-connected WP:N maximalists started deleting perfect good pages and information because it didn't pass their bar for notability.
Including obviously political moves like deleting "list of billionaires", since being a billionaire is apparently not notable.

It's been a downhill slope from there.

11 Dec 2022 at 1:38 | Open on mastodon.social
Ian Ramjohn

@celesteh @tarheel I only half agree (for context, my experience is being a nonwhite Wikipedian since 2004, admin since 2005). I don’t disagree with the idea that systemic white supremacy is present throughout Wikipedia (and it’s institutionalise in reliable source policy, or really in the evil trio of verifiability, notability and reliable sources that is *also* the bulwark that keeps disinfo out)
But racism as such is much more complicated…

11 Dec 2022 at 4:54 | Open on mastodon.social
Ian Ramjohn

@celesteh @tarheel On one hand, most Wikipedians are well meaning liberal(ish) people whose views uphold the patriarchy because they haven’t been asked to examine them. For ever person who feels “knowledge equity” is an outside imposition, there are several others who say “this is a great idea”. But only a handful who ask “how can I change”
That said, I think anti-Blackness is a real problem in quite a different way from “simple” racism…

11 Dec 2022 at 4:59 | Open on mastodon.social
Ian Ramjohn

@celesteh @tarheel Anti-Blackness plays out differently. A tech-utopian sees “bias-free application of the rules”. A person whose life experience teaches them to see racism sees the racism in those rules and pushes back. And another “difficult editor who had so much promise” is banned because they can’t follow what the established folks genuinely see as the neutral application of rules

11 Dec 2022 at 5:08 | Open on mastodon.social
Ian Ramjohn

@celesteh @tarheel I no longer believe in the idea of vested contributors with too much social capital to lose. So many of the editors who feel like unassailable institutions today have joined the project in recent years. And the old stalwarts continue to flame out

11 Dec 2022 at 5:15 | Open on mastodon.social
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