Comment by scarejunba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarejunba | Hacker News Reader

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I have an anecdote to share which has (perhaps unfairly) biased my beliefs regarding underrepresented people on Wikipedia.

On /r/twoxchromosomes, a profile of a somewhat accomplished (more like John Aaron, less like Alan Turing) woman was posted. In the comments were some six to ten people lamenting that she didn't have a Wikipedia page.

I thought perhaps it had been put up for RFDs or something the way they complained about how a man in the same position would have a page. Anyway, so I waited a day to see if they'd do anything and they didn't.

The woman in question did deserve a Wikipedia page so I made one, described her story, and added citations. Within the week, various bots had made it pretty. I was then able to go request a picture for her Wikipedia page. I just checked and the page looks pretty good. Lots of people have contributed.

Nothing I did was impossible for any of them to do. So why didn't they do it? Why instead did they write absolute reams of comments about the unfairness when they had the tools to fix it? Why are they so helpless?

On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. You can be the change, quietly.

One thing I've noticed with wikipedia is that it has an insanely high barrier to entry. I will never create a wikipedia page for 1 reason: The first time I tried to edit a page was a nightmare. I was doing a degree, looked up some information, followed the source and it was very clear in the source that the equation on the page was wrong. I corrected the equation on the page. It was then reverted. I pointed out in the chat that the page was wrong and the source proved it. I was told the page was already based on the source and unless I could find a new citation to prove what I was claiming the page would stay as it is. So wikipedia is factually wrong on some basic engineering equation, and I walked away because I'm not going to wade through bureaucracy for some charitable change I was making.

Over the years I've found out that this is the standard experience for most first time wikipedia contributers. So whilst it may be easy for someone to create a page, that is not the experience for a first time user, and high barriers to entry are a great way of creating an exclusionary environment.

What you're describing is a problem not for the people in that thread. It' sa failure of wikipedia that it's created an environment where the average person doesn't feel able to contribute on a topic they know.

And where people whose knowledge is "the system" do feel able to "contribute" on a topic they don't know - but are sufficiently insistent about.

It's absurd to say that Wikipedia has an "insanely high barrier to entry". You click "Edit" and that's it - you don't even have to create an account. It's hard to imagine a lower barrier to entry. Of course, the flip side is that anybody can revert your change as well; your edit is not sacred. I mean, what alternative do you propose? That Wikipedia should never revert edits? Change into Everything2?

Not auto-reverting fixes to obviously wrong content would be a good start. I had a similar experience with fixing a page where someone had confused kilograms and pounds.

That low barrier to entry is just for the more minor changes, like correcting a typo. For anything more complex, you'd have to successfully use their editor, find acceptable sources and correctly quote them.

Even seemingly minor changes can be fraught.

The discussion about whether to use –,— or - takes several hundred thousand words, and went all the way to ArbCom. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...

For a while merely chosing a username was risky business. It's got a bit better now, but it's still weirdly complex process if someone disagrees with your choice of name.

Yep, once tried to correct a Wikipedia page about an event I had direct knowledge of, only to have my change reverted. Whatever. Not going to get into a fight when I was only trying to contribute - enjoy being smugly wrong.

I'm also sitting on a few bug fixes for open source tools because some of the larger projects have made the process for contributing just way too obnoxious. (Sign our code of conduct, sign a contributor licensing agreement, submit your pull request along with a three page explanation (making sure to use the correct cover sheet) in X format, etc). That feels like work and I'm doing this for free -- like I'm supposed to feel honored that you're allowing me to submit an improvement to your code base. Meh, never mind - I'll keep the fix for myself.

I think that wikipedia and some of the more popular OSS projects have something in common: a clique of long-serving contributors erecting barriers to entry to keep newcomers out.

For what it's worth, I've never encountered the sort of "yow, my perfectly reasonable change just got reverted with extreme prejudice and other editors are immovable" problem at all. Maybe I've just been lucky?

(I do wonder whether maybe it's not so common, but when it happens it makes a big impression and so we hear more about those cases since their victims are understandably annoyed about it and want to tell everyone.)

That's exactly my experience. I contributed to spanish Wikipedia several times. I don't really see the barrier. Yet I read about wikipedia and women again and again.

If a non-programmer critisised some part of Blender or some other large scale open source software project it would be weird to call them hypocritical for not just enacting the change themselves wouldnt it? Seems strange to pretend that there is no barrier to entry to contributing a page to an encyclopedia.

>Seems strange to pretend that there is no barrier to entry to contributing a page to an encyclopedia.

No, there actually is no barrier to entry. You can go to any page right now, click "edit", and are greeted with a WYSIWYG editor. No programming or markup knowledge required. No registration needed either.

The barrier to entry is the effort required to create a good and truthfull page.

Because people with two x chromosomes aren't capable of that?

There are many more biographies of males than of females on Wikipedia. Whatever the reason for that might be is up to debate.

Is this good or bad? Maybe because (assumption here) there are more "relevant" males throughout history?

It is not good or bad, it is what it is. Unless biographies of females are actively being suppressed, it is simply irrelevant: they are not being created because nobody cares, literally.

It's actually not that high. In the anecdote, the little page I created had two sources with citation formatting messed up and two paragraphs of text. A week later, bots had cleaned up the citation, another bot had added an infobox, and someone had added all the "Retrieved at" dates to the citations. I did so little.

As discussed further up the thread (and as per the point of the article) the barriers to entry aren't technical but social.

An example not mentioned in the article (it's kind of tangential wrt the problems of wikipedias community) but worth noting; women are still disproportionally more likely undertake caring responsibilities outside of work and so may not have as much time as men to create and edit wikipedia pages.

I did it. With a fresh account. Fresh page. They could just as well have done it.

It's a lot of work, you need good sources (better than reddit comment) and write the text; at least it's more work than just complaining on reddit/twitter. Another matter is that adding sources is complicated (at I found the process cumbersome last time I did it).

I agree that there is definitely a barrier to entry for making wikipedia articles, it definitely takes a little bit of time and effort. What bothers me is in a situation like the person you're replying to described, its hard to feel like the disgust/disappointment with the fact that this person didn't have an article is obviously overstated by the commenters. Yes, making a wikipedia article requires some effort, but not so much that if you cared at all about making one that you couldn't do it in an afternoon or two. Maybe it's an unfair assumption, but it just pushes me to further think that these people who complain about stuff on the internet don't actually care, they just want to win brownie points for appearing to care.

Also such a thread could be an easy springboard for a collective effort on such an article. One could create the article with an outline and share the link in such conversation, so that people could put their time where their mouth is.

This is also true for open source projects. You can literally start a widely used project under a pseudonym (if you really feel the need). If it is good, it will be used.

It is easier to complain, especially if these days money can be made by complaining.

And even if the page on Wikipedia got deleted (relevance or content issues or whatever) you can at least say that you tried.

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