Comment by exo762 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exo762 | Hacker News Reader

This is very peculiar. New tool is introduced, which joins a set of existing tools (bots) which address the same problem. Some comparison of quality and robustness is expected.

Instead author gives us some insight into his/hers source of inspiration:

> A feminist inspiration

> “Please exercise extreme caution to avoid encoding racism or other biases into an AI scheme.” > Wnt (from The Signpost)

And few lines below we have this gem:

> While artificial intelligence may prove essential for solving problems at Wikipedia’s scale, algorithms that replicate subjective judgements can also dehumanize and subjugate people and obfuscate inherent biases.

Essence of not being sexist or racist is not to evaluate people basing on sex or race! Author instead accents that we should totally pay attention to subjective factors (such as sex or race) instead of objective factors (such as quality of edit).

And let me guess whos edits will be targeted with extra scrutiny.. Edits of people who don't buy feminist agenda!

(Disclosure, I'm egalitarian and MRA; While I fully support women rights, I just believe that modern feminism does not have anything to do with equal rights for anyone. This post nicely fall into this pattern.)

I agree the "feminist inspiration" part is a confusing non-sequitur. I think you're missing what they're trying to say, though. I interpreted that section as "we're making our algorithms and data open so that everyone can be sure they aren't implicitly racist or sexist".

Suppose, for example, that a user repeatedly rejected edits for anyone with a noticeably feminine username. Wikimedia wants to be sure that their algorithms don't take this person's rejects to be valid data. Again, they don't really say how they'll do this, which makes the whole section rather confusing.

It's a valid concern, just presented awkwardly.

Attempting to have processes that aren't implicity racist or sexist is a feminist practice?! If that doesn't qualify as an implicitly sexist statement I wouldn't know what would.

I think poster is skeptical that this is the attempt [of feminism] - no need to sling mud.

It's the Wikimedia Foundation that is heavily invested in the more radical parts of feminism - they did sponsor the Ada Initiative, who in many people's opinion qualify as fringe. It was them who called open data feminist ideology. Is all of science suddenly feminist? After all it depends on exchange of data. That's plain barmy.

Yes, excising discrimination from processes is a feminist practice. That's not sexist, because feminism is about subtracting, not adding, discrimination based on gender.

Alright buddy, I don't want to get in a flame war here, but I'll summarize my arguments in short.

A hits B. Hard. When B tries fighting back, A suggests the world should be a fair place, and really, he doesn't support violence at all, and there should be global peace.

C turns D's family into indentured servants. When D becomes a part of a revolution, and tries to make sure no one from C's (or D's) side can do it again, C says "I'm all for equality yo, lets not be violent at each other".

F's people are particularly unfairly attacked by different members of G groups, which are in power in their country. A lot of F's die unfairly and prematurely, and are mistreated for no reason. When F's people say "our lives matter, be kinder to us", some people who are in G's side say: "hey F, ALL lives matter."

People called G's are unfairly discriminated against, overtly and covertly, but often very openly. They are called names, and their presence in public is often made very difficult, by people called H. So when G's get together and try to get this G-rights going, some H's say: "Hey, there should be equality. You shouldn't get special priviledges. If you are systematically prejudiced against, your bad, there should be equality okay". Lets call them HRA's. You are HRA, exo762.

That's lovely, thank you. Upvoted.

Your argument is in fact two arguments. First one is: "women are discriminated against". Second one is: "women are fighting back, men brought it onto themselves".

So lets go through part one, "women are oppressed", point by point.

> A hits B. Hard. ...

Violence. 70% of non-reciprocal domestic violence is committed by women against men. Article [0]. Men are primary target of every police intervention, even if it was man who reported violence committed against him by his woman partner. Lookup Duluth model. And battered men has nowhere to go - there are no shelters for male victims of DV.

> C turns D's family into indentured servants...

Slavery? What?

> ... members of G groups, which are in power in their country. ...

"Men in power". Yeah, those who are in power are mostly men. But what good comes from it for men who are not in power? Majority of homeless are men; majority of prisoners are men; majority of unemployed are men; majority of victims of DV are men. Men get longer sentences for same crimes, women get suspended sentences for things men serve time.

As for clear legal discrimination, there are multiple examples of it. Fathers' rights are a joke, draft is still for males only, selective service is for males only; men can't opt-out from parenthood, while options are available for women. As for legal discrimination of women - there is one clear-cut example and it is access to abortion.

As for your second argument. "Men had it coming, now repent for your sins". This argument is dumb beyond recognition. Even Joseph Stalin said that "The son is not responsible for the father's deeds". You seems to be not agreeing with him on only thing everyone agrees with him. And you basically place blame ON HALF OF HUMANITY, collectively. Good job!

[0] http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id...

If you want more sources, go here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/wiki/faq. FAQs don't bite, and I've spent enough time typing out this answer.

EDIT: word of warning, /r/MensRights is a bad place, too much vitriol. Go to /r/FeMRADebates instead.

If a bot can detect that you "don't buy feminist agenda," then it is evaluating based on content, not on sex or race.

The two can correlate, so "based on content" isn't enough, "based objectively/justifiably on content" is.

e.g What if the basis was about the non-/usage of gender-neutral pronouns?

+1 for Egalitarianism. So, when I use the word "feminism", I'm referring to the academic field that explores power structures in social systems. These power structures go far beyond gender issues despite what the label "feminism" implies. It's this broader sense of justice/morality in social spaces that I would like to engage with and draw inspiration from.

There are two core bits of feminist theory that I draw from as inspiration in organizing our work on this system:

* Empowerment vs. Power over -- I'm a computer scientist and I've been studying quality control in Wikipedia for 10 years. That makes me very powerful in this conversation. I could use that power to browbeat Wikipedians into changing their quality control practices to what I think we should do. But on the other hand, I don't think that my perspective is absolute. A lot of Wikipedians know better than I do how they should curate the encyclopedia. So instead, I'm trying to empower Wikipedians and our community of tool developers to imagine how they'd like quality control to work. My research[1,2,3] suggests that we need reform here and I'd rather see that reform through innovation than command and control. Honestly though, I don't need to look to feminism for this insight. I came to the same conclusion after considering Wikipedia as a complex social system[4].

* The potential for systemic biases -- As other comments have pointed out, there's inevitably systemic bias in people's behavior as they evaluate good and bad edits in Wikipedia because these judgements are inherently subjective and there's a strong incentive to push back against anything that is new and unusual -- especially, things that don't follow the western scholarly traditions of reference information. Once encoded into a black box algorithm, these biases can become even more hidden and substantially more impactful. One bias that is plainly obvious at the moment is against anonymous editors. While a lot of vandalism may come from anonymous editors, so does ~25% of productive contributions to Wikipedia articles (it's my job to measure these things). We're actively working to nerf the "is anonymous" feature and find better sources of signal.

1. Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2012). The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist, 0002764212469365. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_an... 2. Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., & Terveen, L. G. (2014, April). Snuggle: Designing for efficient socialization and ideological critique. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 311-320). ACM. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Snuggle/hal... 3. Halfaker, A., Kittur, A., Kraut, R., & Riedl, J. (2009, October). A jury of your peers: quality, experience and ownership in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (p. 15). ACM. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/A_Jury_of_Y... 4. Halfaker, A., Kittur, A., & Riedl, J. (2011, October). Don't bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work. In Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration (pp. 163-172). ACM. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Don't_Bite_... 5. Geiger, R. S., & Halfaker, A. (2013, August). When the levee breaks: without bots, what happens to Wikipedia's quality control processes?. In Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (p. 6). ACM. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/When_the_Le... 6. Halfaker, A., & Riedl, J. (2012). Bots and cyborgs: Wikipedia's immune system. Computer, (3), 79-82. http://stuartgeiger.com/bots-cyborgs-halfaker.pdf

Sorry about the formatting issues. I can't seem to edit the post :/

Ironic, given that Wikipedia is one of the least female friendly sites on the net, with around 10% female contributors, who are constantly harassed. As well as the systemic bias against topics regarding women.

"Feminist Inspiration". Like straight out of South Park.

Basically I am counting this as anything remotely critical of any subject that the "good guys" have decided is flawless will be censored. https://twitter.com/keksec_org/status/672447312044650496

Maybe it's too cynical as it might just pandering to a bunch of Fratboys... PC-Fratboys.

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