Wikimedia enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity
wikimediafoundation.org
wikimediafoundation.org
Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content.
With less than 10% of editors being women, for example, content is guaranteed to be somewhat skewed, even assuming absolutely no ill will by anybody.
Among the famous examples are a scientist's entry being deleted as "not notable" just weeks before she won the Nobel Prize. Or, if you prefer quantitative data, that articles about women tend to emphasise their relationships and children (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06307v2.pdf).
Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopedia though, not a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences.
They want to provide well-sourced information, present the major thoughts where no consensus is visible and do it in a way that every reader can go to the sources and check it. If you want more representation of $group on Wikipedia, you'll do much better by publishing more work of $group's members so that it can be cited and quoted on Wikipedia. Just having them on Wikipedia doesn't/shouldn't work, it's not a news paper where somebody may set the topics/angles to be covered.
And, of course, remember that the article isn't about "knitting", it's about "knitting patterns", so you'd need sources that concern themselves with knitting patterns _as a subject_ and not with individual knitting patterns.
There are very detailed articles about knitting, there's an article about common knitting abbreviations (which I don't believe fits into an encyclopedia, but whatever), there's plenty of other stuff about knitting.
What did you want to see on an article about knitting patterns? And, as a follow-up, why haven't you added that to the article about knitting patterns?
Then argue again that the difference in effort is adequately described by lack of sources rather than people like you actively discouraging effort being put into expanding a topic.
As to your final question, I don't really care about knitting, why should I do it in place of all the people that do?
That says literally nothing about why you should have a long article about the meta of "knitting patterns". The different types of forks don't even have their own article. Shame! Rage! I'm offended!
> Then argue again that the difference in effort is adequately described by lack of sources rather than people like you actively discouraging effort being put into expanding a topic.
Literally nobody discourages any effort. Your assumption seems to be "just add some women, they will naturally flock to articles about knitting. If the articles about knitting patterns isn't as long as the article about programming patterns, that's proof of discrimination". It's obviously wrong.
> As to your final question, I don't really care about knitting, why should I do it in place of all the people that do?
That's the real reason. Nobody cares about expanding the knitting pattern article. But most people don't have a need to be perpetually enraged, so they notice that there's an article about knitting patterns, see that there's an spin-off article about common knitting pattern abbreviations, read a thing or two and then move on with their life.
They don't construct elaborate conspiracy theories about people trying to discourage efforts to expand the knitting pattern article because of reasons. No wonder people are wary of vague CoCs. They're afraid of people like you, who don't care about the project, who don't contribute, but who need to feel powerful by injecting themselves, making silly demands and then going off about how everybody else is discouraging the noble efforts they don't care about.
This is a clear example of bias. A person holds assumptions about the depth of a community.
I read that as wikipedia should be factual and facts don't need to care about the background of the person. Citations are always needed.
Diversity in race imo is a bad diversity criteria for some things. For one, it separates people living long time at a particular place (think 2-3 generations) as different people because they are not white so they must be different.
Anyone who talks about diversity I have seen has stereotypes of their own on what people from different races are like.
The only way to do so is to discard the interests and knowledge while putting great emphasis on experiences - and immediately assume they will end manifest as bulk personal anecdotes.
Way to assume my gender and preferred pronouns. Bet you're glad that HN has no CoC that would get you a stern warning for this.
> The only way to do so is to discard the interests and knowledge while putting great emphasis on experiences - and immediately assume they will end manifest as bulk personal anecdotes.
No. One very obvious way to do so is to recognize that Wikipedia isn't about interests and experiences and the contributors/authors of articles but about sourced information. It's an encyclopedia, not a social network or a blog. The articles are supposed to represent information gathered from other sources (and they take other literal there, Original Research by the author is not desired [1]), not the knowledge, interests or experiences of the person adding information to the article.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
This has zero to do with original research, that is red herring trying to shift the topic. The whole "sourced information therefore pre-existing knowledge, interests and experiences dont play role" is obvious nonsense.
Experiences influence what you write about, what you put emphasis on and how you write.
I find the whole assumption weird that something would fundamentally change. It's not like Wikipedia claims to be "the world's knowledge at your fingertips", but is barely more than a bunch of pages on programming and ango-american cultural concepts. The English Wikipedia hosts over six million articles. Let that sink in: six. million. articles.
What are they missing, what are they suppressing, as somebody else suggested?
> This has zero to do with original research, that is red herring trying to shift the topic.
It has everything to do with it. An encyclopedia relies not on first hand knowledge, experiences and interests but on compressing third party information. It's basically an organized collection of book reports, only it's about topics, not individual books, and you get to add the bits of information that you discovered in some book to what others have discovered.
> Experiences influence what you write about, what you put emphasis on and how you write.
And, again, Wikipedia emphasizes that they do not want editorialized articles, don't want your individual writing style and personal opinions. They want a neutral point of view (that term is used so much on Wikipedia that they just say NPOV), they aim for a constant style of little variance. Again, it's an encyclopedia, not a social network or blog site. They very much do not want to give a small world to each and every editor where they can present their world view, opinions and experiences in whatever way they deem fit. There are sites for that, but Wikipedia is not it.
Here's what Wikipedia says on the topic of what it wants to be [1]: Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by acting as an encyclopedia, a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge. The goal of a Wikipedia article is to present a neutrally written summary of existing mainstream knowledge in a fair and accurate manner with a straightforward, "just-the-facts style". Articles should have an encyclopedic style with a formal tone instead of essay-like, argumentative, promotional or opinionated writing.
You may argue that it should want to be something totally different. But that's not really talking about Wikipedia, that would be watwutpedia, which might be a great project as well, but I hope you agree that it would be a different project.
Different demographics have different interests on average.
> If you add more women, will there be more knitting-articles? Won't women who studied physics work on physics related articles?
The two are not mutually exclusive. In that case there will likely get both women writing about physics and about knitting. Sometimes, it will be exactly same woman writing both articles. Kind of like same man can write about physics, wood carving, league of legends and embroidery.
> It has everything to do with it. An encyclopedia relies not on first hand knowledge, experiences and interests but on compressing third party information. It's basically an organized collection of book reports, only it's about topics, not individual books, and you get to add the bits of information that you discovered in some book to what others have discovered.
That is completely offtopic, because no one suggested people would write anything except third party information.
> And, again, Wikipedia emphasizes that they do not want editorialized articles, don't want your individual writing style and personal opinions. They want a neutral point of view (that term is used so much on Wikipedia that they just say NPOV), they aim for a constant style of little variance. Again, it's an encyclopedia, not a social network or blog site. They very much do not want to give a small world to each and every editor where they can present their world view, opinions and experiences in whatever way they deem fit. There are sites for that, but Wikipedia is not it.
Again, the only person suggesting that there would be editorialized articles or personal opinions is you.
But actually, yes, individual writing style shows up on wikipedia. Some pages are horribly written and others are well written - that is individual writing style.
It seems you focus on one small part of one study and make sweeping declarations about Wikipedia by and large.
That means it can be forked if it turns out they are doing more than protecting people from harassment. For now let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
It also has public change logs, so it is easy to have a debate about the presence/absence of censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks
Looks like you're right. Forking Wikipedia is pretty easy from a licensing perspective.
2 angry alcoholics > nobel laureate
The idea is of course nice. It would be more fun if one could easily export a category in various popular formats.
The public logs are there since ever, so does the censorship (some amount of it).
Wikipedia's protective moat isn't the licensing, it's the SEO. You can't compete with that under any circumstances. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Fork all you want, your content will never show up in Google's results with a high ranking, and as such you won't get a large enough audience or editor base to matter.
Like hacker vs cracker I suspect this is a battle you're going to lose in the long run.
Anonymity and privacy are of course highly helpful but editors should be free to disclose facts about themselves if they so choose. I think we can all agree that incivility and harassment can be a major issue in such cases.
This is very common method and actually presented in writing as how to take over any system. You deny a voice to others by presenting the claim that any opposition is based wholly on identity issues.
Wikipedia has some severe biases when it comes to what and who counts as notable. For instance, you can compare ”programming pattern” and ”knitting pattern” and try to guess which is a 50 year practice and which is as old as civilization...
That sort of topic bias is best solved by adding new contributors, but they will intrinsically have to be different sorts of persons, and historically that difference has caused issues for the newcomers: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-w...
The approach, tone, use of sources, etc. should be exactly the same when writing about design patterns and knitting patterns (actually, I have the feeling pages about knitting patterns will be much more sound and factual than those about design patterns- but that's only a specific case...).
As for the lurking culture war and worrying about the word 'inclusivity' it is hard to imagine a less important issue. Wikipedia is one of the most structurally democratic organisations on the entire planet, and possibly the knowledge accumulating enterprise most resistant to social pigeonholing of its members. Even I could literally copy their software and content and rehost the whole thing if I don't like how the project is run. The Wikimedia Foundation can do whatever it thinks is best; good luck to them. There is no reasonable problem here, even for the paranoid.
The knitters manage to set up vast collection of patters for download just fine, and more people spent time knitting last month than there are programmers in the USA, so it is in fact more an issue of them not being present on wikipedia.
And it's conceivable that it's only a relatively small percentage of all practitioners who actually upload patterns.
That holds for anything through - including programming. Why would it be so hard to accept that a group of people can be active on internet without adding stuff to wikipedia?
Wikipedia is crappy about anything sewing, knitting, embroidery etc related. But whenever I need something, I can find information on reddit or blogs or youtube quickly and easily. It is not that information does not exist on the internet in general, it is that those groups dont find wikipedia place to put stuff in. It is not even that those groups cry for wikipedia to add them in cause they are helpless without that. Wikipedia is not a thing in that space, because who cares about wikipedia and anecdotally those few who tried found it generally waste of time and frustrating.
This is wikipedia finding about situation, because its mission is "to be the largest, most comprehensive, and most widely-available encyclopedia ever written" and it is failing in these areas. And somehow people take offence on that.
Not a problem for me, I agree with your post.
Well, probably not heavy Wikipedia editors, but then neither are most heavy internet users, so concluding that they aren't heavy internet users is probably unwarranted.
Or MAYBE the Internet is structured in such a way that knitters are systematically discouraged from participating? Maybe non-knitters are getting favourable treatment?
The second question: No, I cannot explain how the Internet is structured to discourage knitters to contributing, just like I can't explain how STEM or tech jobs are supposed to be structured to exclude women.. Except, from my educations, there were _ZERO_ women from the start, so somehow, even before education started, they must have been structurally excluded, it's the only explanation, next to "the females didn't apply", which is entirely too reasonable to be true, especially considering that it's not even serving any political agenda.
Also, I suspect the actual answer is that knitting patterns as a general concept aren't actually all that interesting, what people are interested in talking about is the things you can do with them. So there are a lot of fairly old, long articles about various knitting stitches and techniques, traditional designs, yarns, communities etc but no-one created the "knitting pattern" article until 2015. The otherwise extremely long and detailed article on knitting referenced patterns even before then, there was quite a bit of information about where to get them, and the various row counters used to keep track of where you were within a pattern had a huge article covering different types and their history, but nowhere explained what a pattern was and how it worked!
(The other interesting thing is that a lot of the knitting-related articles were obviously created by women, as you might expect, but the article on knitting patterns was created by some guy as his first edit. His only other edits were an attempt to split up the content in the extremely long main knitting article into other articles which was immediately reverted. This probably does show something about some kind of flaws in the Wikipedia model, but probably not the ones you're assuming it does.)
These attempts are inherently hard to arrange, often requiring a long discussion on some agreed-upon Talk: page. Wikipedia does not have an equivalent to the git sites' "merge request" workflow where a set of diffs to multiple pages can be worked-on in "draft" status and then transparently merged; these things have to be arranged manually.
An example - there are pages which are not fleshed out as much as programming patterns such as childcare or kindergarten education which are commonly viewed as stereotypically gendered but which in reality all parents regardless of gender are actually interested in and write about.
The person you are responding didn't choose to gender the topic.
Society did that. You may not like it, but in 2020, most people do, in fact, gender those topics. Ignoring that is ignoring reality.
If we don’t acknowledge sex differences in interests of subjects, then we fail to see the true problem, and thus an actual solution. Why is it taboo to say on average, one sex is more likely to take on a specific kind of work than another? Despite evidence [0] [1]
I’m all for increasing the opportunity for everyone to participate in specific subjects. Yes, at one point in time oppression from one sex against another was real in intellectual pursuits, be it academia or certain areas of interest. And there are instances of it today. But it’s not as pervasive as so many commentators or inclusion boards want it to be.
But to try and get a 50/50 split, or whatever arbitrary ratio, is madness. It implies personality is 50/50 split, as personality is directly related to interests, among other factors (such as writing dry, technical content, which men (on average) tend to gravitate towards). These ratios are impractical, and verifiably false. Men and women on average have widely different personalities, based purely on biological sex. Evolutionarily this makes sense, as each had a specific, important role. Today we have the luxury of looking past the necessity for adhering to these roles, but denying they’re not a part of our genetics is denying reality.
It’s no different than asking why person X dislikes subject Y. Is it because of institutional oppression? Rarely, yes. But for a vast majority of people, person X just doesn’t like subject Y. And if on average, sex Z is disinterested in subject Y, then naturally we’ll see a disparity between the representation of each sex in subject Y.
Most people who knit are not biologically male. There exists male knitters, as there exists male nurses. Is there a cabal oppressing male knitting on an institutional level? Doubt it.
Using inclusivity as a goal has unfortunately become a loaded word. It’s now more akin to price control in a market, essentially forcing a metric value that is arbitrarily chosen, without understanding the implications. I’m not saying this instance in particular is using the word in such a way (though the tone of the article leads me to believe so), but for a vast majority of cases this is how it’s interpreted. We should not be striving for equality of outcomes, but equality of opportunity.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201711/the-truth... [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/
It really depends on why someone is saying it. If one is saying it as an observation of statistics, then it's fine (usually. There are contexts where it is not; it's not a set of facts you should point out to a group of students about to take a college entrance exam, for instance). If you're saying it in the context of a causal inference, such as, for example, the Damore memo, then it's falling into the trap of conflating correlation and causation that has traditionally unfairly banned women (and men) from entire allowed modes of participation in society.
> Yes, at one point in time oppression from one sex against another was real in intellectual pursuits, be it academia or certain areas of interest. And there are instances of it today. But it’s not as pervasive as so many commentators or inclusion boards want it to be.
I agree. Many commentators want it to be far less pervasive than it is. Unfortunately, it's still very pervasive. We are no more than two generations removed (in the US at least) from women being generally overtly barred from working in most industries. We are only a scant 100 years out from women in the US being allowed the right to vote. It hasn't been enough time for the difference of fact to permeate into a difference in opinion; old prejudices die hard.
For example, the rest of your comment indicates you believe that the differences we see in society are biologically rooted. That's precisely the question the jury is out on; we used to believe it was true, but psychology has come to understand much better how profoundly deep cultural indoctrination and phobia of new cultural patterns run. Before we make claims like "Men and women on average have widely different personalities, based purely on biological sex," we need to be extremely sure we isolate out cultural effects, which is damnably hard to do.
Your example of knitting, specifically, ahistorically excludes the Celtic culture [https://www.thefencepost.com/news/when-men-knitted-a-surpris...]. Any discussion of biological imperative to knit needs to explain why men knit in Celtic societies, not only why men don't knit as much in Western societies now (and given that we know how quickly genetics change, it's going to be a real chore coming up with a genetic explanation that distinguishes Celts from the rest of humanity).
This is very true. I once googled “Next.js” to try to learn more about it, and Google “helpfully” linked me to the “Nuxt.js” (note the “u” instead of “e”) Wikipedia page. I was thoroughly confused.
Turns out Next.js doesn’t even have a page! It has a draft[0], but it’s been rejected as “not notable” despite it being more popular on GitHub (in terms of stars, contributors, etc)
Having more diverse editors will lead to more diverse content.
Wikipedia pages of female scientists tend to get a lot more scrutiny than ones about male scientists [1].
There's another anecdote about moderator bias and some decent discussion on the issue overall in this thread [2].
Ultimately there are some issues Wikipedia can't solve since they are just a reflection of the rest of society in many ways.
"We can't write about this scientist and her work because no one else has written about her," is a problem that Wikipedia can't solve by themselves.
[1] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/ekv3te/fem...
Can you elaborate what content you'd expect to see more of if the editors were "more diverse"? This gets thrown around a lot here, but nobody actually says what exactly they mean. There are more than six million articles on the English Wikipedia.
What would change, which topics would get more, which would get less attention if Wikipedia editors were swapped out to represent their attributed groups (along some axes; most likely gender and broad ethnicity, I'm guessing, but not social status or education) of the American society at large?
If there were more Norweigan editors then I'd expect to see more content about things that are "notable" within Norweigan history and culture.
Replace Norweigan with African American, female, etc. and you'll see how having more diverse editors would lead to more diverse content.
Like what though? Here's [1] the Portal on Norway, there are hundreds of articles on Norway and Norwegian culture. From what I can see, the Norwegian Wikipedia does not cover Norway that much more, even though you can reasonably expect that it's primarily authored by Norwegians.
There are fewer but still hundreds of pages about e.g. Zimbabwe, its history, culture, politics, demographics etc.
I fail to see what's being not presented there. I understand the concern that it may be too USA-centered, and to a small degree it probably is, but I don't believe it's anywhere near the proportions it's made out to be, and I don't believe that it would significantly shift, because it's absolutely not a special interest community that covers only their ideas. And given that the US is the lone super power right now, militarily, culturally and economically, it is to be expected that it is very well covered, even in other language versions. It's somewhat important to everyone on earth how the US works. It's less important how Liechtenstein or Lesotho are organized, and either has their own history, but their history isn't strongly intertwined with recent world history.
The super vast majority are articles that are global (in any and all meanings) in nature, explaining scientific concepts and history. You may argue that, since Wikipedia's goal is to represent the common consensus of scientists that these topics would be different if e.g. Zimbabwe had been the world's super power for the last 70 years, and I partially agree, but far from completely. We'd see a lot more information about Zimbabwean wild life, nature and environment, but we'd still see articles on lasers, genetics, space travel, the history of Arabic numerals, because there's really no reason to believe that Zimbabwean scientists wouldn't have looked into these things etc.
Like more articles about people/events/places/traditions that many Norwegians consider to be notable.
I don't know if you're intentionally being difficult, but the post you originally replied to had links to an article and some previous discussion about pages on female scientists coming under more scrutiny than pages about male scientists.
I just used Norwegians as an example of a cultural group. Replace it with female, African American, latinx, trans, etc. and you can see how if more people from those groups are a part of the site, then there will be more articles about people/events/places/traditions that are notable to those cultural groups. Because those editors will more likely recognize such articles as being notable to a non-trivial amount of people, whilst your average white guy might think it's something trivial just because they've never heard of it and "don't see what the big deal is".
"I'm triggered by the color orange, HN is SOO exclusive towards me because I cannot STAND that color, and as long as anyone dares post links to pages with orange, or that disgusting orange is used anywhere on the page, I cannot participate (checks diagnoses)"
It is one of the main methods of cancel culture, by portraying any disagreement as based in identity differences there can be no functional discussion of the facts at hand
Can you clarify how one side or another in a discussion being bigoted or racist is nonsense?
> Clearly, if the hormone levels are the issue, they should just sample the hormones of athletes at some point in their developmental process
Of course hormone levels are the issue, that's why we don't allow the use of human growth hormone and testosterone at the Olympics. It's called doping. And your proposed solution is completely impractical. In addition, your phrasing "if the hormone levels are the issue" seems to contain a veiled accusation of bigotry by suggesting that the actual issue is something else.
> Identify as a woman but your testosterone levels are outside 1-sigma from average at 13? Sorry;
Using 1-sigma in your example is a straw man. Normal female range is 15 to 70 ng/dL, normal male range is 300-1200. I suggest that if anyone has a testosterone level of 300 or more they should not be allowed to compete with women (but with that level of testosterone a human body would likely not develop as a female body in the first place). This should only apply to sports where testosterone is a direct advantage, e.g. there's no issue with a trans athlete competing in women's chess. Then again, I don't think they check for testosterone doping in chess competitions either.
See how much more difficult it is to discuss this issue without resorting to accusations of bigotry? That itself is the problem: We can't even sort these kind of problems out as a society because the conversations are shut down before they could begin.
> Using 1-sigma in your example is a straw man. Normal female range is 15 to 70 ng/dL, normal male range is 300-1200
My error; I was speaking from pure hypotheticals without knowledge of how the numbers break down. The regulations from IAAF (and the research from the IAAF) indicates "About seven in every 1,000 elite female athletes have high testosterone levels." (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190212160030.h...)
Still, their stance seems odd... That a person with naturally-occurring testosterone should be required to take suppressing hormones. If the goal is to see "natural" talent apart from doping, how does forcing athletes to take hormone suppressants satisfy that goal? It seems to pretty self-evidently be reverse-doping.
It's also unclear to me why the IAAF would consider higher levels of testosterone to be an advantage in need of intervention but not, say, being born at and training in a higher altitude, which we know increases lung capacity https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4175264/. We don't force athletes training in Santa Fe to train at lower altitudes for six months before an Olympics. Why treat testosterone levels differently?
It suggests that the issue is something else, not what was raised. It reads as an accusation that the hormone issue is just an excuse for an other agenda. If that wasn't your intention I belive you, but it can be easily misread.
> If the goal is to see "natural" talent apart from doping, how does forcing athletes to take hormone suppressants satisfy that goal?
I think the goal is both finding what humans are capable of, but also rewarding human achievement. If a world record can only be broken or a race can only be won by someone in the top 0.1% of testosterone levels then 99% of people have no reason to even try to compete.
Training at a high altitude is still within the reach of natural human ability, while taking hormones isn't. Although I would support the idea that everyone can take as much testosterone as you need to get to 1200 ng/ml (or some other reasonable threshold) but not more.
A good example of such a situation is what happened to Caster Semenya who is biologically a woman and has had her testosterone levels used against her in attempt to discredit her and her performance, despite evidence contrary to the idea that it's testosterone that gives her an unfair advantage.
And ultimately if we were to make that argument in the first place, then we should argue to limit all professional athletes (male and female) by testosterone level as it is not a consistent thing in either men or women rather than using it as a bludgeon against specifically transgender athletes.
That was surprisingly difficult. Frankly, it's a little strange to see such an illucid response being seemingly well received by HN.
> Perhaps your difficulties with comprehension regarding the comment are more orthogonal
'My difficulties with comprehension' constitute one metric. Orthogonality, in any way that I understand it, is a property of multiple such metrics.
I visited wikimedia’s HQ almost a decade ago. Back then they were trying to solve this problem by making the editor more approachable.
But when it comes to anything about diversity / harassment in the workplace, it seems like a group of people crop up needing to tell everyone that they're the real victims
There's a signicant subset of people that cry the loudest of censorship only when it comes to communities having a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia.
In any other discussion about Wikipedia, there would be a significant concensus that Wikipedia has a unwelcoming to new editors community.
The biggest factor, though, is that Hacker News is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in large internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural/national divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts, it's in a context where conflict is somewhat anticipated, such as a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends is quoting indignantly (a la "can you believe so-and-so said this"). Then you can bond with your friends about how bad something is.
The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of them, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—something more important.
This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by hostile forces, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now it feels like that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this really is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was?
Different internet communities grow from different initial conditions. Each one replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial condition was to be a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions in a bottle.
This "non-siloed" nature of HN leads to deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. It isn't framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article. It's something of a miracle of openness that she was willing to get past that—the shock experience is that bad.
This is a misunderstanding because it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to divisive issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though they certainly do. Rather, it's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even attempting to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place broke into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1].
It's easy to miss, but HN remains a single community that somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, however partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about.
Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite of that. Internet users are so unused to being in one space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the "orange site" sucks.
I'd like to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: it's a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode.
HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is uncomfortable. Peace is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring (conflicting) parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different.
I know it sounds strange and grandiose, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to move further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself.
[1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of dividing into silos? If so, I'd love to know about it.
That being said, without considering our own opinions on a given topic, you can easily reproduce the experience of visiting random HN threads and finding a well written dismissive post on top of the thread, no matter what the subject is, and almost systematically (and thus, when someone is interested in the topic, that's the first thing they see). This is hardly explained by the "monster neighbors shock" effect. If you agree with this observation, how would you explain it?
Second, though, I think you might be describing your own shock experience here. Not every thread starts with a shallow dismissal—some do, but actually most don't. (Moderation is a factor, because we downweight petty and indignant comments whenever we see them at the top of a thread.) My bet is that you're seeing these sometimes, and because they're shocking and unpleasant, they somehow expand into your experience of HN overall. That's a shock experience, because the things that strike us unpleasantly end up dominating our sense of the whole. I've written about this a lot, but in slightly different terms: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Trying to figure these phenomena out is an ongoing process.
Out of curiosity, do you have any leads on what may replace a voting system for emerging insightful content? It sounds like a job for AI, but I guess any bias in it would be hated even more passionately.
When Digg introduced voting on links, it was initially seen as having way better content than the rest. And then Reddit did it with comments as well, and nobody looked back.
The main reason, I think, is that nobody read a whole thread. They look at the few top level comments (in upvoted threads) or at the last ones (in a forum/mail threads) and will reply to that - so that the quality of the whole discussion is determined by what people see first.
That being said, it indeed comes with a lot of problems of its own. Upvotes/downvotes favor hive mind thinking (you want to be loved, so you'll give people what they want) and mobs (if something is downvoted, you'll just add one more downvote).
A couple years ago, I went back to using mailing lists and it's indeed a less frustrating experience, from my point of view. But I'm not sure it's about the technical aspect, it may just be because there are just less people in it.
There's a bit more discussion about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157675.
That is a clear, thoughtful, and worthwhile message; but not just sitting with that, you've followed it up with a goal, awareness and action
I would encourage you to write and maybe expand on it somewhere more permanent
I particularly like your ending - the nature of real peace and community! It is not your goal, but I feel this is a powerful message to both online and offline communities. Inability to live in the same room is a massive driving force in say politics and global exchanges
Maybe 'we' and 'they' will still disagree in the end, but even agreement can be meaningless if we haven't the ability to sit down together - in peace
I appreciated your technical observations on silos and voting, which are essential to running HN; but would like to suggest that you expand your vision a little to beyond HN, or to how you use even us (the scorpions in a bottle) to display these things more clearly
Many of my friends who left this site did so because of how alienating these threads can be to people not represented in this community. I think that's been overlooked.
This occurs, right now, here on HN, and IMHO it comes from the comments feed, a feature I find only useful to moderators and manipulators. Even the mention of certain topics from even a meta-discussion perspective receives down-votes, sometimes within seconds. This seems further amplified in communities where senior community members are granted super powers.
> Many of my friends who left this site did so because of how alienating these threads can be to people not represented in this community. I think that's been overlooked.
I am one of the commonly dissenting voices and nearly left about two years ago. When I decided to stay, I decided my accumulated karma was to be sacrificed in the downvotes of those lurkers who disagree without having the courage to engage.
When my karma runs out I will leave the site forever.
The goal here is to have a healthy community that's organized around intellectual curiosity. Every time we lose one intellectually curious user, to me that is a disaster that cuts into the core of the site. To the extent that people aren't here because they feel unrepresented in the community, that's a big deal. We need their curiosity as much as anyone's, and diversity—if I may use that word literally—is a must-have for intellectual curiosity to function at all. Curiosity thrives on diffs.
And of course there is a vicious circle: if they leave, then they are even less represented here. I'm open to ideas about improving this. The problem is not that it is overlooked (by us, at least). It's that the same forces that make it hard to solve in society at large make it hard to solve here, and in one respect even harder, because people misinterpret the nature of this community in the way I described above.
This discussion can be tricky because it overlaps with the ideological question, which is not the same thing. Sometimes people want us to ban everyone who expresses the opposing ideology, because that's the only sort of community they feel welcome or safe in. Even if we wanted to do that, it wouldn't work. That does not mean we don't care about inclusion. We care a lot about inclusion. In fact I spend the majority of my waking hours trying to nurture the conditions for it here.
By the way: if any of your friends would be open to it, please send them to hn@ycombinator.com. I would very much appreciate hearing their concerns.
Not everyone is comfortable talking to you privately, given all the ridiculous warnings you give out. I wanted to talk to you about turning off downweighting of my comments that you secretly enabled, but there is no easy way to say anything to you publicly.
I agree that HN has such a large userbase whilst not splintering it off in a way that division forms in sites like Reddit / Twitter is really unique.
And it's a site where excellent discourse can be had because there's an expectation of spending time to explain your point of view or back it up.
How things like dumb joke replies get downvoted is a testament to how the community wants to keep the quality up.
Personally, it's because the site is so good, that when discussion quality drops it's more noticeable.
Like in this case, I was remarking on how knee jerk the comments were that they are like predicable cliches.
But also a lot of the ideas expressed with vitriol are the majority opinion.
In the same vein. Anything that Lennart Poettering has developed seems to get the same treatment where people often respond with snark/vitriol by default no matter the reason systemd/pulseaudio or something else has hit the news.
Also a few weeks ago there was a post something to do with online game services. And a developer at a large publisher commented about how the cost of hosting servers is done on a per user basis. And they ended up replying to someone with "I've been in the industry for 6 years, I know you hate me" at the top of their response.
That kind of thing seems par for the course on Reddit / Twitter, but I guess because of the high quality of the forum, I feel sometimes that for other topics the discourse can be better.
> no other site is even trying to do this
many websites are designed this way. Really, think about it. Segregation doesn't happen automagically. Now, you could ask "but are the user bases as large as HN"? A few are and other aren't, I'm sure.
> it isn't like John Lennon's 'Imagine'
In the Anarchistic vision of 'Imagine', you would probably have a lot of HN-style arguments too, but they don't devolve into inter-national or inter-faith wars. When the "world lives as one", it's just like you describe - a lot of friction and discomfort but no segregation of hostile factions.
Finally, we need to remember that the level of hostility on HN right now is a lot for some people regardless of what they're used to. That doesn't mean we need to censor ourselves, but just to be aware that many people are more conflict-averse than the typical HN reader - and this aversion may well be correlated with, say, gender. So problems remain despite the positive view that you justly present.
Of course I may be wrong about this—I probably am. But in that case I'm curious to know what they are, so we can learn from them.
It isn't just about scale, but also scope. If a forum has a specific topic—Lego, let's say—then the problems I'm writing about are off the table, because it's easy to tell which posts are about Lego and which aren't, and the community will happily support moderation of the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYkEqDp760
TLDW: Lean into the trolling; don't just feed them, stuff them. Come at the person in good faith and respond to them until they prove otherwise. Destin's video has a lot more to it though.
Though such a 'countermeasure' is not what dang is talking about here, I think the advice is good for just about any online discussion. Lean in.
I can't think of anyone who regularly writes on HN whom I'd characterize with such words, even ones I deeply disagree with.
I'd ask you to point me to such a user, but I know that it (reasonably) won't happen given the site's rules. Still, I'm very skeptical.
If someone is espousing things like Nazism or genocide, then yes the label applies, but I've never seen a regular HN user advocate for anything like that.
I think what's happening is that there's a subset of users here who live and/or have grown up in extremely liberal environments, like San Francisco, or university campuses, who view anything to the right of Joe Biden as being "extreme" and "evil". That doesn't mean such people are actually evil, or monsters. It just means they're on the right (often even center-right) of the political spectrum.
And most of the country is entirely unlike urban liberal enclaves. I don't use that term as an insult - many great innovations and ideas come from our urban liberal enclaves. But they're not representative of the country as a whole.
(and for the record, since some will assume my politics based on that remark, I'm neither a conservative nor a GOP/Trump supporter. I'm a centrist/moderate, both by self-identification and empirically - in the form of dozens of political tests).
By the way, just so you don't think this is a general anti-HN stance, it's not. I like HN a lot, and I think that aside from political/ideological issues and moderation, mods do a great job. I also don't agree with the common criticism that HN shields or shelters YCombinator companies. At least, I've not found that to be the case.
Another word I've used to describe a related dynamic is "demons": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... That's a similarly exaggerated usage.
That's your own bias speaking here, HN is pretty vocal against all censorship or community hijacking efforts. It's just that in nine cases out of ten "a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia" is used performatively and in bad faith and few people here buy it or bother to pretend that they do.
The way "inclusion" in the US/UK is done is what I would consider racist and sexist. I don't want to see more of it in online services that I use. Giving someone an advantage because of their race or sex and thus discriminating against others for the same reasons is racism/sexism.
Edit: we know Wikipedia has been a battleground for US politics for a long time now. I think this is seen as a step towards one side.
I'm running some coding events and while I'm a firm believer in meritocracy often giving the space to outsiders or unusual folk end up in more interesting and new experiences for the event attendees. In my mind I see it as a meritocratic choice to diversify the floor and honestly I've never seen this "feature" being abused or cause any friction.
To me it seems like this attack vector is only when rewards are high (prize, job position) but for pay less and unappreciated work like wikipedia editing, or in my case coding presentations, I don't really see how this could be abused.
Maybe it's exclusively an American issue?
The reason this episode is relevant to your comment discussion is that Pool presents that there is this paradigm problem where certain policies intended to bring "inclusion" end up excluding something like half of the U.S. population. This paradigm Twitter management is stuck in prevents them from understanding how people outside their paradigm view their actions, and this results in effectively banning a enormous set of the population from popular discourse.
It is hard to evaluate if this is exclusively an American issue because, really, there are so few other countries that speak English.
What does speaking english has to do with this?
Regarding twitter case I feel that it's unfair to classify the issue with a single anecdote. Especially when this anecdote is about notoriously mismanaged, pointless corporation such as twitter.
> Regarding twitter case I feel that it's unfair to classify the issue with a single anecdote. Especially when this anecdote is about notoriously mismanaged, pointless corporation such as twitter.
Evaluating online behavior, which is presented in text, across all languages, is Hard.
It seems clear you didn't watch the video. Pool doesn't present Twitter as a single anecdote, but an example of a larger problem.
Addtionally, it is not clear to me that a platform as large as Twitter can be dismissed as an "anecdote".
The larger problem is people with these positions are not even interested in evaluating other positions, a claim supported by your comment and the down-voters of mine.
In my views, refusing to help people because of their gender is maliciously. Making decision about the worthiness of helping a young individual should not be about their gender. Call it a principle.
From reading about the science of discrimination and In-group and out-group thinking, there exist some key finding of human behavior and rationalization. "Us" are individuals and "them" are a homogenic group, and if you treat people like individuals you are automatically treating them as a part of "us". When someone of "us" do something wrong, it is about individual faults and circumstances. When someone of "them" do something wrong, it is a inherent trait of the group and fundamental aspect their kind.
The attack vector can only exist when a set of people are treated as a homogenic group rather than individuals. Inclusivity initiatives should in theory never do this, but defining people as a homogenic group is sadly what most of them end up doing. Maybe it because it easy and quick, or because it makes for good signaling to the in-group. The result is usually the same with the out-group feeling abused and attacked, especially for individuals who been moved from being in-group to out-group and now instinctual feel more vulnerable to attacks.
I feel that you've summarized the issue perfectly here with these two sentences.
However I feel that it's not exactly problem of diversity/inclusivity but problem of tribalism itself, though I'm not sure how practical it is to separate these two topics here.
We can hope that tribalism will go away eventually but if anything modern culture seems to be actually encouraging it instead. This in particular really perplexes me. The world is as global as it has ever been and yet people push and actively create tribes — it's this ugly human primitive nature poking it's head out and there really isn't any cultural push against that. In fact every time I try to point this out I get down-voted.
We need more anti-tribalism awareness.
I think how Guido wants to spend his time is up to Guido.
It tells them that inclusivity is against their interests. Boys growing up where they are explicitly barred from opportunities due to their gender are probably not going to be very willing to accommodate women in the future. Also things like this has shown to not move the needle, so all you accomplish is drive the wedge between genders even further down.
> I think how Guido wants to spend his time is up to Guido.
And we are allowed to criticize him for it.
I think that interpretation grossly over-values Guido's mentorship contributions.
Note that this isn't a radical conspiracy - it's already happened in some areas. There are a lot of colleges with special inclusion resources for women, even though women are significantly overrepresented in the modern university system.
I have participated in events for gifted children, including teaching python. One such child already had before they came to the event written up the whole game design, painted the different rooms and enemies, created most of the game logic and now needed help with hit detection in pygames. Hit detection is quite a bit beyond the tutorial part of pygames, but in the end we mostly accomplished the goal and they left quite happy. Did I care about their gender or even asked about it? Of course not. Here was a person who needed my help.
Maybe no immedient harm would have happened if I had rejected that child based on their gender or treated them as part of a homogenic group with unchangeable inherent traits. There is always other people, other resources, and they clearly demonstrated the ability to self learn. But what kind of person would I be if I did that?
No. They were a boy though. I'll tell you why I'm saying that with confidence: because we know men are most of the Python userbase, and they're more comfortable approaching other Pythonistas for help because they're other men. Argument from statistical probability.
That's specifically the issue Guido is seeking to address, and he's not going to do it successfully by not caring about gender. Not caring about gender tends to get us more of the status quo, not something approaching more inclusiveness.
If the kid was a girl, good for her and I commend her forwardness and bravery. We know most women aren't interested in putting themselves in that position because it's uncomfortable for them (any more than most men are interested in stepping into a knitting circle to learn more from a group of women). And if Python as a community is to grow the pie, that situation needs to change. So that it's not just you who doesn't need to care about the gender of the student; it's the student who doesn't need to care about the gender of the teacher.
Sad. He had all the fun, was pretty abrasive back in the day while hordes of men built "his" language and submitted to him.
Then he did Python 3, weeding out several big names and getting fresh blood.
Now Python 3 is done, and suddenly he is inclusive. Some boomers get it all.
How is it meritocratic if you decidedly do not consider the merits of the participants, but their attributed identity / group-membership?
I don't disagree with the idea that diversity can make for great results (though I probably disagree with you on what constitutes diversity), new perspectives and cool events. But I wouldn't say "therefore it's meritocratic", because it seems like something completely different.
This site is incapable of having nuanced conversations about this, because opinions that the loudest voices disagree with are downvoted + flagged into oblivion. This is significant when talking about diversity, because it means minority voices are silenced, and without those voices, such a conversation is meaningless.
For example, look at the comments thread whenever "James Damore," "cancel culture," or "affirmative action" comes up. That should be proof alone that HN is never going to have an actual impactful conversation about this... Ever.
I'd prefer if the mods just banned these discussions forever, because it's exhausting, and forever doomed to end up as a "diversity is bad" conversation.
Funny thing is, it looks the other way around from the other perspective.
Maybe what you're seeing is not a bias against race- and sex-based DIE initiatives, but your first taste of balance in discussions about them.
Maybe because you assume that your argument is correct, whenever you see the other side at all, you feel like there's an imbalance, when perhaps it's just that you have a warped view of the landscape of opinions on these matters.
When someone is offered a conversation and results to name-calling and straw-manning, isn't a downvote what you'd expect?
Worse, and apparently also often, these initiatives are even worse: They introduce a mechanism legitimizing instant bans following a complaint against a user, with no detailed statement of the claims against them, no ability to respond to the accusations, no due process in handling the complaint, and no transparency vis-a-vis other users. This already poisons the community atmosphere - and of course, such mechanisms never fail to be misused, adding to the acrimony.
s/virtue signaling/conspicuous expression of moral values/
Wikimedia can do as they please, and if it results in a shitshow as many such efforts have before, then on their head may it be.
I've been pretty generous with recurring yearly donations up until now but I'll honestly put things on pause until we see how some of this plays out.
If anyone is genuinely concerned about the impact this may have, I would suggest archiving a recent dump of wikipedia at the least. It's only ~25GB.
There's nothing natural or unnatural about human interpretation of abstract symbols.
something something paradox of "please ban things I don't like" something what good is tolerance if people end up disagreeing with me
A society ends up nourishing something that destroys it, because the intolerable is under no obligation to play fair.
Germany wrestled its censorship laws from hard history lessons.
Citation needed.
Germany has had strict censorship laws since forever. They obviously did not stop the Nazis. If you're arguing that censorship is required to stop the Nazis, that's a point you should address, especially given that they had specifically added censorship laws against right-wing extremists in the Weimar Republic in the Republikschutzgesetz.
Anything short of that and the logic falls apart -- there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them.
> there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them.
If that intent is demonstrable, there's no reason to assist them in their goals.
The paradox isn't "you don't have to tolerate intolerant people because they're bad and tolerance is our goal", the paradox is that tolerating people who then proceed to seize power and outlaw all disagreement with them undermines tolerance.
Unless there's a credible threat, it's a misuse of the quote.
If you're talking about anti-Nazi laws in Germany, fine, but I see the quote trotted out all the time to justify eg twitter banning some alt-right-adjacent nerd for having bad opinions.
Nobody paid much attention to what that guy on gab was saying to like-minded folk on gab... Until he grabbed a gun and massacred everyone in a religious building.
When the threat evaluation models aren't trusted, the spread on evaluation of "credible threat" increases.
The paradox of tolerance would be if we decided to be tolerant of a pro-mosque-shooting political party and they took power and instituted mandatory mosque shootings every Friday. We would have messed up in that case.
It's not, "I demand people who disagree with me on less clear-cut issues be silenced because they're bigots, according to me".
Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Do we all agree? I think a lot of people do. There's a disturbingly large number who do not. And there are corners of the Internet perfectly willing to entertain their fantasies of establishing such a political party.
I think whether one should cut that off at the knees by monitoring such sites and, when necessary, squelching the channel or one waits until someone has grabbed a gun to act on the ideation is an intensity slider on paradox of tolerance that reasonable people can disagree on.
Given the sliding scale, it's probably a case-by-case issue. Hard to come up with a general principle that's going to universally apply; give an example of something people have been silenced on that they should have been allowed to continue, and there's debate to be had, but on the general principle, both sides can probably agree that there's times to silence and times to not.
Or glam metal albums that glorify satanism?
We've been through this before.
> Would you also support banning hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?
If we're talking no-platforming, I don't think the question is whether society bans it; I think the question is "Would you compel Wal-Mart to sell hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?" And I would not. But it's a sliding scale which is, as you've noted, tied to the likelihood of the group in question seizing enough power to concretize their ideas. In the US at least, hip-hop artists aren't an organized political structure intent on overthrowing the US government.
White supremacists are another story entirely. It's pretty unambiguous what "blood and soil" or "Jews will not replace us" mean. And a lot of Americans are deeply concerned with the risk that that ideology has its tentacles extremely deeply embedded in one of the two primary parties at the federal level in the US.
The conclusion was that parental advisory stickers are cool and will help sell your album, and I'm glad we got there as a society.
Incidentally, Wal-mart in particular was on the conservative side of that culture war episode, and they did in fact refuse to sell those albums while also selling entire racks of guns.
Indeed they did. And the US government did not compel them to sell the albums, nor should they have. The albums found their audience in spite of some channels deciding it wasn't a kind of speech they would tolerate on their premises.
Similarly, some of the speakers who have been no-platformed will find their audience without a university's help; that doesn't imply the universities should be compelled to help them. And some toxic moderators and editors will continue to be toxic on some other site; that doesn't imply that site must be Wikipedia.
But I was mostly just nitpicking improper usage of the paradox of tolerance. Righteous censorship of 'bad' ideas might feel good but it's probably not a great instinct to have in the long term -- this cultural moment will pass, the meta-ideas about when it's ok to censor are longer-lasting.
Wal-Mart carries plenty of stuff, though. If you're going to move towards that kind of regulation for free information services, there has to be some other basis for it.
There are plenty of other places to go if Wal-Mart doesn't sell a CD. Not so much in Twitter or Wikipedia's case. Some alt-right 'competitor' with 30 users isn't really a substitute.
Your phone carrier is a service provider that is constrained by the FCC. Twitter is one of many broadcast sites one could go via a phone carrier. But the US, to my knowledge, has never recognized anything approximating a right to broadcast. Not even freedom of the press implies freedom to spew signal over the airwaves, for instance (because the radio spectrum is finite and shared).
Freedom of the press has never implied freedom to use someone else's press, and telecommunications hardware providers aren't in the same category. If your phone carrier cuts you off, nobody on the Internet can read your signal; if Twitter cuts you off, they've merely taken their megaphone out of your hands.
We don't have jurisprudence saying so for websites, because this is new, but it could be argued that a number of websites have reached a sort of monopoly status. Facebook is probably closest, but Twitter and Wikipedia both occupy unique places in society to the point where it's not, just, "go start your own website".
As far as business freedom, remember the gay wedding cake guy? Where were all these "you're not entitled to Twitter's megaphone" people then? On the exact opposite side of the principle, mostly.
I think people having different attitudes regarding the three categories of service is reasonable.
Mind you, I'm not saying that we should tolerate such folks, either; and once you get past their tiresome, narcissistic self-aggrandizement, it's not like they have anything worthwhile to say. But that's a different argument than Popper's; it assumes the existence of some minimally basic ethic of thriving, and says that no, you can't aim to destroy the world around you even if you would be quite OK with everyone else doing it back to you in return.
But lacking any chance of success, there is also no reason to allow their existence to spoil my goals; that is, liberalism.
I feel like some people read Popper and advocate Censorship as almost the last tool, whereas some people read him and advocate it as almost the first!
lacking any chance of success...
Fascism can take over a government faster than people think, and we're in a global cycle of democracies dallying with fascism again. This is not a safe time.
I moderate a small community. When we introduced new moderators, we had to formalise the unspoken rules that governed our moderation habits.
Now, we follow guidelines instead of intuition. Writing things down forced us to think about our behaviour, and to discuss the flaws in our unspoken rules. It makes our behaviour more consistent, especially towards content we personally don't like.
A code of conduct can be just that. A formal, consistent rulebook for a community.
A code of conduct promoting civility should be sufficient.
Dogfooding, essentially. This guarantees that all participants eventually become broadly competent at using it.
There are newer tools to streamline common interactions, though personally I think they make the learning curve steeper in exchange for making it start off a little easier.
Plus, wiki is often an exceptionally good way to hold discussions. The fact that other contributors can, e.g. fix broken links and that freeform layout can be used... that multiple contributors can seamlessly collaborate on a single comment. It's very powerful.
Wiki for discussion also builds community and trust, because people could screw up your comments but they don't. (and if they do, it'll get fixed promptly and they'll have helpfully identified themselves as someone either totally clueless or having difficulty with self control)
I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency.
Also if this just formalizes existing practices why creating a "retroactive review process"?
Know the phrase "follow the money"? In this case, follow the power.
To be caught up arguing about codes of conduct in general is a distraction.
>I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency.
Remember that time the Wikimedia office banned a user for unclear reasons, without engaging community governance that would typically handle the banning, and the row it caused because that wasn't the normal way of doing business? If you doubt how huge the separation of responsibility between the people who work FOR wikpmedia and work ON wikpedia is, see: https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/wikipedia-fram-banning-...
This release from wikimedia says that they're going to be taking top down control, but unless you're already versed in the structure of the system you just hear names of groups without understanding the boundaries they represent.
> Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve?
Either, the wikimedia board is again trying to "fix" wikipedia engagement with all the insight, art and tact of people that wouldn't be caught dead participating as editors within wikipedia's self governance system.
Or, a wedge issue has emerged that will allow the foundation to take more direct control while minimizing the appearance of ramping down wikiepedia's self governance.
Well done. I like how Wikimedia works with many languages and helps to share human knowledge. It is a great institution and a good example on how humans can collaborate to create something great. Inclusivity is at the roots of humanity at its best.
It is sad to see the unconstructive cynical comments in this post. We need more people to build a better world. Cynicism is a good tool agains tyranny, used agains a foundation that has done so much good is just a cheap shot. Be civilized, be constructive.
Most other open source software projects have adopted similar guidelines and they're thriving as well. Taking Rust as an example, they manage to put out high quality releases every six weeks. Thousands of developers of all backgrounds have contributed, which makes me think that the Code of Conduct has encouraged more participation rather than less.
There are dire warnings in this thread about how Wikipedia is going to burn to the ground because of this change. Based on experience of Go and Rust, I'm somewhat skeptical.
A CoC can make complete sense for everyone and still be abused or misinterpreted to fit a bias. The reverse is also true.
I don't actually mind them. They pretty much can all be boiled down to please act as a reasonably well adjusted and decent human being to a point I don't really see what they actually aim to achieve. I fail to see how writing a set of vague rules are supposed to solve deep cultural issues in a community but I guess that at least signal a willingness to tackle the subject which might in itself be enough. Anyway, if it gives some people a warm fuzzy feeling, I'm all for it.
What I find really amusing however is what they say about the culture of the people writing them. For exemple, I have always found it very amusing that the Rust code of conduct feels the need to explicitely address avoiding overtly sexual aliases as its second point, a long time before condemning harassment.
Nothing is stopping you from expressing yourself however you want - just elsewhere, if you can't follow the rules.
fwiw, this very website has its own code of conduct: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It focuses on different things than the Wikimedia one, but it's fundamentally the same thing. For both of them, I'd suggest that if there are things that you feel are detrimental, you specifically address them.
Making an empty comment like "new wave of censorship" achieves nothing except saying "I don't like the rules". In which case, fine, there are plenty of other places on the Internet.
From my perspective it's naked entryism, striking at the centralised weakness in an otherwise robust, decentralised system.
And then there's Wikipedias in other languages and other Wikimedia projects, which come with additional cans of worms.
It definitely happens, but the influence and uncivil behaviour by longtime editors are always, in my experience, very well disguised under a veneer of civility and lawyering. So the CoC will be completely useless against that, which is IMO the serious issue with Wikipedia right now.
No, they're essentially just a list of vague rules that are at the sweet spot of "vague enough that I can make anything you write fit into it" and "vague enough that you can't point to it and definitely say that somebody else does it to you". It's basically a very rough outline of laws, with everything in between to be filled out by a judge on a case by case basis, without precedents or abstraction.
They are an instrument to strengthen the power of whoever is enforcing those rules. There was a fun read some time ago where Chinese princelings were showing off their riches, dollar bundles, rolexes, cars etc, one-upping each other. The person who won just posted a badge of attendance at a conference of the party's committee tasked with enforcing the party's moral standards (or something similar, Google is shit, I can't find it again). That's power, not being an editor with a thousand articles.
> Codes of conduct aren't censorship... It is essentially a list of "how not to be an asshole".
It would be great if that were true.
But it's not, and we both know that.
A Code of Conduct a thinly-veiled justification to harass and bully your ideological opponents.
There's an XKCD that talks about this. Dumbest thing Randall Munroe has ever written: https://xkcd.com/1357/
You can "show someone the door".
And there will be a welcome mat, doughnuts, and a lot of friends on the other side.
But that doesn't imply one needs to let the Stormfronters hang out in one's digital lobby instead of directing them back to their own donuts in Stormfront.
That argument doesn't work if it's a monopoly or a near-monopoly, which Wikipedia is. Also YouTube etc.
People have set up alternative data sources to Wikipedia. Conservapedia has existed for years. Its relatively smaller size says more about its relative utility then about anything ill Wikipedia has done.
The other reason it didn't really work out well is that people need an audience. Voat was and is much smaller than reddit, so they had less reach. What I'm trying to say is, is that it's not a technical challenge, those have been solved already. It's people with extreme views who want to be able to express themselves where those views are not tolerated.
I'll join the protests once they actually start censoring, but if it's just like hey: don't be an asshole or you can just be an asshole somewhere else... I'm fine with it.
I impatiently await to see how it's going to be received by the international Wikipedia community. If I had to guess, I would say with a large dose of scepticism but who knows, that might work.
There is no need to fork. Wikipedia is a US originated project but it's also very much an international project already with a presence in 300 languages and 39 local chapters which are independant but affiliated with the foundation.
There is a reason the press release talk of a _universal_ code of conduct.
IME, bourgeois identity politics is mostly popular in members of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletarian intelligentsia (which maps loosely to the dominant American use of the term “upper middle class”, which is really tied to any coherent model of economic class), but seemingly slightly more (Proportionately) in the groups it on its own term seeks to extend inclusion to than Whites.
The attitude that your comment reflects crops up a lot in relation to, for example, the Washington Redskins naming controversy. Folks who like the current name are always bringing up a couple of examples of Native Americans who say they “don’t care” about the name, and claiming that it’s really only white liberals who are offended; meanwhile, in my experience, the large majority of Natives actually do care very much, and are upset that a racial slur used for their ethnicity is being used as the name of a sports team.
I found this comment rather funny, because if CGP Grey is correct [0] the preferred term by American Indians is "American Indian", NOT "Native American". So you're claiming knowledge of the general opinion of a group, while not using the group's preferred name for themselves.
This is one of those things you can find out for yourself: go to a pow-wow (non-native visitors are typically very welcome) and ask the people there how they usually refer to themselves.
The top item links to article 'Help:Editing'. This page is -not- for beginners.
The article: 'Help:Wikipedia' does not mention editing. It does lead to 'Help:Menu'. It offers general help.
Anyway, I had to wander around a while to find this article: 'Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Editing for the first time'. This page also tries to do too much.
It seems clear that a site this size, trying to attract new and diversified editors, could afford to invest in a 'tutor-text' approach to taking on different kinds of editing tasks. Beginners could jump in at 'adding a link' or 'changing a spelling' or 'rewriting a sentence'. Each would offer them a sandbox to try out something they want to learn to do. After couple of dozen of these, they'd feel more at-home in the editing environment.
As an example, some parts of the internet ostracised Brendan Eich for a personal donation he made to support a Californian ballet proposition on same sex marriage; forcing his resignation. There were no complaints about any of his behaviour or actions at Mozilla whatsoever.
That's not a good thing to be doing.
As another example, the recent Stack Overflow changes where a controversial, over-empathsised policy change on respecting pronouns (also pretty much a non-issue, I have never seen pronoun complaints come up on Stack Overflow) has forced multiple community moderator resignations and a widespread community revolt.
These changes are often negatives for the projects involved.
Eh, there are. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean there aren't any reports.
Could you expand on this? My naive impression is that VCs do their best to make hard-nosed expected-value-in-USD estimates, perhaps specifically estimating the likelihood the company will be worth >$100M/$1B or whatever; and that acting like that is probably in their job description because they're investing other people's money who expect a return.
How does the phenomenon you describe fit in? Is there some group of VCs that believe that championing "diversity and inclusion" is likely to lead to 10x growth? Does the company making the pitch make that claim—or, as one reading of your words suggests, claim that not having achieved 10x growth in the past is due to the lack of such championing? Or do VCs face social pressure (from, I dunno, other VCs, journalists who write about them, whoever else they talk with) to make it look like they're funding virtuous causes (er, companies)? Seems like the last is most plausible.
But bear in mind San Francisco is incredibly liberal, SF programmers even more so. Companies based there will make overtures toward diversity & inclusion rhetoric to keep their workforce happy.
[1] https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/4467.jpeg
Companies with a strong business model don't seem to do this whole bullshit virtue signaling, whether it's about diversity/inclusion or "values" unless there is an actual problem with one of those things.
The VC-funded ones that usually have no long-term, profitable business model are the ones to brag the most about "diversity and inclusion" or similar things. It's as if they were saying "we'll run out of money in 3 years, we pay shit, but hey at least we're diverse and inclusive and (pretend to) have values; wanna work for us?".
One company went as far as banning words and idioms like "blacklist" and "elephant in the room". I mean come on, were these words even being a problem or are you just looking for a problem so you can push your virtue signaling to the next level and obviously write the obligatory blog post?
Whether that actually translates to more VC funding or not is unclear, but the majority of VC-backed companies seems to be doing this charade nowadays.
What to you may be just another opinion is another's legitimacy of them being them.
Maybe it's because I see myself as a progressive, I understand why people were mad at Eich and petitioned his removal. Him being the face of one of the biggest tech companies in the world actively working against your best interests must be hurtful. In my bubble it's absolutely normal to be gay, gay marriage is also nothing to be frowned upon, my country (NL) was the first in the world to legalize it. I realize a large portion of the rest of the world sees it differently, but I'd place it in the same category of a CEO donating money to the KKK or other extremist groups - should black people just think well hey he's doing a good job right? Who cares he's funding a group that actively detests me not for who I am but the color of my skin? Just like gay people think he's funding a group that detests me for something that isn't even my choice?
I followed the SO debacle and what I gathered from it was that there were a couple of individuals who made some very very poor decisions, ruled with an iron first, and any dialogue was not only suppressed but the mod in question was booted in such a despicable way that the rest of the community followed. I don't think they're comparable.
At the very least, that depends on whether you take his position as being an extremist "anti-gay" one, or simply as upholding the then-current status of traditional, cross-sex marriage. It should be noted that same-sex marriage has not been introduced by overt policy in the U.S.; it has acquired its status via a judicially-introduced "extension" of the usual cross-sex marriage. This surprising development has contributed to its wide-ranging acceptance in a way that shouldn't be misunderestimated; far from being something "contrary" to existing tradition, same-sex marriage has simply joined a lengthy list of comparable legal fictions known from the history of Western jurisprudence.
Ironically, progressives say this piously while failing to extend it to those with conservative (or even moderate) beliefs or religious beliefs.
(For the record, I am a non-religious classical liberal, part of which means I am against the intolerant aspects of progressivism.)
Obviously harassment and toxic behavior are bad and should be discouraged but all this will accomplish is that politically-inclined editors will have even more weapons in their inventory to throw "harassment" and "toxic behavior" accusations at one another.
The bar to start contributing to Wikipedia is already very high: the way it works in practice, one must familiarize themselves with hundreds of pages from the WP: namespace, and learn how to use them strategically to defend their contributions. No wonder few people have the time and inclination to do that. To encourage more inclusivity this burden should first of all be lowered, not raised.
So, if more inclusivity was really the objective here, a better experiment would be to remove all the current policies except a dozen of the most important ones decided by popular vote among editors, and then edit them even further so that they fit on a single page, leaving these as the only rules in force. From then on, not more than a single policy change could be made per month, and all of it should still fit on the same single page. This would give new users an equal footing with the entrenched ones, with rules straightforward enough for everybody to understand and follow, which in turn should empower people to use their own judgement instead of being micromanaged. Disagreements would have to be solved by discussing the matter at hand, as opposed to flinging projectiles from the safety of the WP: namespace. Wikipedia could learn something from how remarkably simple the HN rules are in comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
OK, maybe the above is not the greatest idea but it'd at least rattle things a bit in the right direction if done as an experiment. On the other hand, much of what Wikimedia Foundation has been doing recently is tangential to the development of a free encyclopedia, and this press release is no different: it reads like an exercise in corporate bullshit that checks all the right boxes but will change exactly nothing. The response to the failures of bureaucracy is more bureaucracy: "What we were doing so far has failed, so we urgently need to do even more of the same. This time it'll work."
>Lisa Lewin, Managing Partner at Ethical Ventures, a New York City based management consulting firm, will be the newest member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees
>Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new member and leadership appointments to its Board of Trustees. Shani Evenstein Sigalov, currently an EdTech Innovation Strategist and lecturer at the School of Medicine in Tel Aviv University
I wonder if these new board members were involved in the new CoC and inclusivity rules.
And, yes, it is likely that these board members were among the board members that voted on this proposal, considering they are members of the board, and the board voted on it.
Is there any specific problem you see with these two as opposed to other board members, or why do you feel the need to point them out?
The web page points them out as "RELATED" (emphasis in original) at the end of the press release. It's not clear if that was done manually or algorithmically. If algorithmically, perhaps it's one of those unintentionally bigoted algorithms?
To me, (most probably because the language of this has been shaped by progressive politics in the west and the article is written in English and Wikimedia is primarily English speaking) this might well be an experiment with applying the western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well on monocultural programming and tech communities to a really globally diverse and actual multi cultural project.
There really is no other global project like this which spans and crosses actual cultures and languages. None.
This will be fascinating to watch, I hope they get it right, or at least publish their failings if they don't.
Says who? Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic folks, of course. Don't get me wrong, there is an underlying reality behind the oft-repeated claims of 'Whig history' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history . In particular, democratic and classical liberal values seem to do an unusually good job of de-escalating unwanted social conflict: NPOV (as known on Wikipedia) is at its root a "liberal" idea, not an authoritarian or intolerant one! But these overbroad claims should always be treated with plenty of caution.
This is probably the main reason why I hate these discussions whenever they appear in HN. It's not because of whether I consider that initiatives for "inclusivity" are "baseless, performative and counterproductive at worst" or "the right step into promoting a more dynamic exchange of ideas", but because one side of the discussion never stops moving the goalposts.
The conversation only stops when one side has successfully shouted out dissenters, and not out of any actual solid argument made in their favor.
When one side of the debate is clearly completely operating in bad faith what do you do? I think by now anyone who's joined these debates is familiar with the tactics seen.
- The attempt to exhaust the opposition by wasting debate asking for clarification/examples of things that are common knowledge and to try and drown out core arguments with word salads and getting side tracked in arguments over semantics.
- The tendency for every argument to effectively follow the narcissists prayer.
- The tactic of spamming the same illogical arguments over and over despite the fact these have been refuted before; seemingly in the hope that if enough of their own side pile on with enough logical fallacies it will get too exhausting for the opposition to repeatedly tear down the same arguments over and over again while having to remain civil.
Ironically it's the one thing I can think of that even comes close to aligning with the tolerance of intolerance argument.
And that's exactly why Wikipedia has such a problem with its editors. They're so good at getting their way while appearing to just have logical arguments, as has been stated elsewhere in these comments.
So that either makes it an incredibly on-point joke, or actually a statement that anecdotes aren't facts, and I can't even tell which for sure.
> Developing and introducing, in close consultation with volunteer contributor communities, a universal code of conduct that will be a binding minimum set of standards across all Wikimedia projects;
> Taking actions to ban, sanction, or otherwise limit the access of Wikimedia movement participants who do not comply with these policies and the Terms of Use;
> Working with community functionaries to create and refine a retroactive review process for cases brought by involved parties, excluding those cases which pose legal or other severe risks; and
> Significantly increasing support for and collaboration with community functionaries primarily enforcing such compliance in a way that prioritizes the personal safety of these functionaries.
The first thing they state is creating a universal code established by some hand-picked team.
The second thing discussed is how this code will be enforced.
The third thing discussed is rewriting everything published to be sure it conforms to the new code.
The fourth thing discussed is building a wall around the functionaries. It seems notable they have chosen a word which describes an obtuse rule enforcer.
These activities do not describe the way to create anything "inclusive" of anything that is not in service to some very specific set of viewpoints.
why not make the mobile theme the default theme?
it has better readability. works on both desktop and mobile. i find myself always adding "m" in the wikipedia urls to get to the mobile version. also started updating all my bookmarks.
China has "harmony". We have "inclusivity". But ultimately, it's all about control and manipulation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
“ The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.”
Things came to a head last year when a prominent editor was harassing users for years and the English wikipedia failed to address it. It came to the attention of Wikimedia foundation who took action against the editor, and that caused a storm.
Personally I think they need to do a lot more than a CoC, especially if it's going to be applied by Wikipedia.
I don't get why projects think a top-down straighten-up-and-fly-right edict is how you retain driveby contributors (I get why they do it, I don't get why they make that the primary/only change). That's a highly visible but overall small part of the barrier to entry. Online volunteer collaboration projects often assume anyone motivated to participate will self-train. Making the surface level language nicer only keeps people reading long enough to find out that they've walked into a busy office full of people working with tasks, process and goals they don't understand. Lots of the day-to-day in an office puts efficiency above approachability, and I don't think that's always wrong.
Surely WMF would have better results if they actually worked on the barrier to entry by explicitly adding to staffing(/recruiting volunteers) to onboard new editors. e.g. shepherd their work through onboarding-focused helpers until the newbie is ready to drop into the office proper. Use the failures of conversion to identify where there was a lack of handholding (and build a system for that), vs a lack of interest.
An argument could be made that RNC operatives do this because, in fact, they have benefited the most from such efforts.
I don't know why so many people making these conspiracy claims and only consider the single, most obvious party as the one that must be engaging in such actions instead of the party that has actually benefited the most.