Editing Wikipedia as self-care activism | Hacker News Reader

Editing Wikipedia as self-care activism

blog.wikimedia.org

21 pointsThe_ed1744 comments

Do people just knee-jerk react to stories here after reading the title only? The "self-case activism" she talks about is adding wikilinks, adding info she just researched, and expanding a Wikipedia article. The only political things she mentioned at all were her own interests in African Diaspora and LGBT topics which she contributes to in order to "help this world become a more equal place". It is extremely common for Wikipedia editors to contribute in their areas of interest; in fact there are WikiProjects set up specifically to facilitate that. [0] What she isn't doing is adding bias, but helping to address Wikipedia's systematic bias by adding to those areas. [1] Not going around injecting bias into articles as the comments here are saying. (And even that is valuable in itself because Wikipedia is meant to be written from a neutral point of view, which requires that articles "fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources" [2])

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Director...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...

This is barely an acceptable behavior. You're supposed to use a neutral point of view when editing Wikipedia. As this editor publicly admits she's editing Wikipedia as a form of activism for her political views, she at least declares her intent to have a political effect while editing.

She may manage to make edits that remain neutral, but still the whole attitude is edgy.

There are many good reasons to be willing to edit Wikipedia, and politics is not one of them.

the nice thing about wikipedia is that usually there are enough editors from all sides such that highly biased stuff gets moved to a bottom subheading. Over time, the more factual and neutral stuff will survive and the blatantly biased stuff gets edited out.

A significant portion of people who make edits probably have an agenda. Yet, or as a result, Wikipedia manages to be an excellent resource.

I don't think that is true for anything other than articles that have a lot of eyes on them. I tried to correct wrong information with the actual information from a printed source in one article and had it reverted with the line "tone down promotional material". I've decided that their "activism" has got in the way of the actual facts.

> actual information from a printed source

Can you link to the edit? Is it possible that you were posting marketing material that may be perceived as not neutral or not authoritative?

Some context here would be helpful.

I fixed the mission and vision statement for a college and sourced it off the printed, yearly report. It doesn't get more authoritative.

Which college? Would love to see the edit history (and maybe even put it back).

http://bit.ly/2aiDI7v

Yeah -- that does seem like promotional material to me, and I looked at a couple of other university pages, and I don't see the "mission" and "values" statements reproduced on them.

This policy may be helpful in getting some context around why the reverted edit seems acceptable to me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...

Except I was fixing the previous mission statement that was there and wrong. If mission and values are promotional, then people have a really broken view of what colleges and universities are.

That's unfortunate that you were correcting something another editor felt doesn't belong in the article in the first place -- but it happens to every wikipedian at some point.

> If mission and values are promotional, then people have a really broken view of what colleges and universities are.

If the mission and values are "real", there will be actions borne of that mission and values, which are likely encyclopedic. "What happened" is not likely to get removed.

Well, they could actually explain why it was allowed and then not allowed. It is not a good way to get future participation.

Mission and Value statements are real for colleges and universities. You are judged on them in many situations. I have problems with the idea they are not important in an article about an institution. Founding values and chartered mission is a very important part of the University / College charter. Even if business makes fun of these things, it matters to others.

Given that the additions you made were of the "mission" and "values" of a college (which is different from mottos, which are prominent in articles), do you feel that these sections belong in all articles about colleges?

Just want to understand your perspective here, because that information seems promotional to me, and adding those blurbs to every college article feels like it would do basically nothing, especially since I can just go to the college's web page to get that same information.

I was editing an incorrect entry that stated mission/values that are not current. My position beyond that is that mission and values for a university / college are never promotional. I believe mottos are promotional since they don't actually affect governance.

I think the idea that if it is on the web, then it shouldn't be in the entry is problematic.

In any case, I'm done with the whole trying to fix what's there thing.

No human communication can be apolitical, since politics is just formalized social relationships.

This reply from me to you is not political.

It absolutely is if you're asserting that your statement isn't self-refuting.

Explain please: How is it self-refuting?

It's along the lines of "this sentence no verb."

it also communicates nothing ;)

Arguably it is -- it implies that non-political communication exists, which (as this thread demonstrates) is a politically-laden claim. This, of course, doesn't demonstrate that nonpolitical communication is in fact impossible, but it does show that it's harder to construct than one might expect.

Yes it is, it is overtly political dissent against their point concerning acceptable behavior of groups of humans.

What about things like "pass the salt" or "I love you"?

"I love you" is the single most powerful political statement one can make.

I think you're badly misinterpreting her use of the word "activism." The behavior she actually describes in the article is nothing more or less than a person with a particular interest trying to improve articles about their interest, which is the bedrock of Wikipedia. No one would claim that a physicist shouldn't edit articles about physics because they might introduce undue bias regarding the validity of string theory.

To me, the author is simply choosing to improve articles that are related to minority causes. That's not any more edgy than me (hypothetically) focussing my edits on Australian history articles so that Australians are better represented on Wikipedia. That's not a nefarious goal so long as I stick to the facts, and if I don't it's highly likely that someone will fix the edit - that's the whole point of Wikipedia.

There are articles about politics, and there would be no surprise if for instance articles about Marx are written mostly by Marxists. There is nothing wrong with this. But the author here is going beyond that, as she states that she edits Wikipedia for political activism, that is that she intends to propagate a political message through her edits.

As long as what she writes respects the neutrality of point of view rule, it's technically OK, but the neutrality of point of view is a blurry line on Wikipedia, and this author clearly stated her intent to walk on this fuzzy line in order to propagate her political opinions.

It sounds like you're okay with all of the author's actual actions, but are upset that she used the word "activism."

If you went around wikipedia enforcing a neutral POV, you'd be just as much a political activist as she. What is your metric for 'neutral' anyway? Refusal to use the term 'activism'?

NPOV applies to content, not the editor's motives. People have all kinds of reasons for editing Wikipedia. Trying to police those reasons would be neither possible nor desirable.

Wikipedia is a public information source, not a psychotherapy tool. People who are emotionally invested in the edits they're making hurt the quality of Wikipedia.

I find the whole of wikipedia skewed with all sorts of "activism". I find it sad how many people rely on it for information.

What would you prefer that they relied on? In my experience, it tends to be the least biased of available sources; books are usually sold to promote a particular agenda, news articles are devoid of content and without citations.

At least on Wikipedia, I can check the citations easily...

At what point do minority groups become proportionally overrepresented because of this kind of behavior?

Depends on where you draw the lines around your minorities?

Strictly speaking, Wikipedia editors are the only people represented on Wikipedia; and they are a weird bunch compared to the rest of the population, but they do cut through other lines of minorities.

> they are a weird bunch

Weird, or WEIRD? http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

I'm reasonably confident we have not yet reached that point.

I'm not sure there can be such a thing as a topic being "over-represented" on Wikipedia, only under-represented. (Though deletionists might disagree.) Historically, if a given subject is under-represented, the solution has been to either seek out experts in that subject or research and fix it yourself, not blame other editors for failing to cover topics outside their area of interest.

(That should be "or fix it yourself".)

What does it even mean to be overrepresented in a searchable database? Seems like you're making up problems.

And they probably didn't read the article

What does it mean to be underrepresented in a searchable database? Perhaps the author is making up problems themselves. Or you're wrong. One of the two.

That's not possible by definition since these are minority groups. The minorities and their views will always be outnumbered by the majority. Heck, Consider this: 8.5% of Wikipedia editors are women. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias#Women_...) That gender-gap is only widening, not closing.

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