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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Can Wikipedia really be a fair, neutral, and global resource if its code of conduct includes political and cultural positions? For example this code of conduct mentions gender identities and pronouns, a topic that is the subject of significant debate and also very much a product of the American progressive perspective rather than universal. Whether a trans woman is actually a woman is not only controversial (rather than decided), but also a political war over a definition change in one language and culture. There are other cultures where there are instead three categories of gender identities, and the existence of these concepts predates western civilizations even. Given there is this diversity of opinions, it seems strange to require participants in Wikimedia adhere to one set of views.

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Hopefully I’m living in a place where this pronoun thing have not been imported, but if someone is ever trying to bully me with his invented words (acknowledging self-declared gender with existing ones is totally fine, using "hir" is not), I’ll ask for reciprocity and I’ll impose the use of a made up pronouns that contains some of my favorite writing systems (they’re all logographic) and a few Unicode characters outside BMP. If they don’t want to play that game, why should I play theirs? It will be an easy way to uncover a lot of hypocrisy.

Come on, new words are created all the time. What do you call the grade before “1” in old English? Didn’t exist. The word is a loan word from German.

Language changes to suit the users of the language. Taking a hardline “you made words up so I’m going to retaliate to make words up” is no doubt fun rhetoric online but to do so in the real work... just makes you an asshole.

Why calling someone by their preferred names and pronouns is so difficult is beyond me. If your friend said “I’d prefer if you didn’t call me dick, please call me Richard” surely you’d grant such a trivial to you, yet important to them request.

Despite internet memes to the contrary, the use of very new pronouns (such as xie) is not super common. I’ve never seen someone get upset at being called “them”. Or structure your conversation and avoid pronouns: it’s super easy. I can’t remember names so I talk in such a way as to avoid names. Since pronouns and names fit in the same place syntactically, I can also magically talk to someone without using pronouns.

> Why calling someone by their preferred names and pronouns is so difficult is beyond me.

Read me again. If someone wants to be called he or she I have no problem with that. What is totally ridiculous is coming with things like hir or xeir which are made-up pronouns. The real assholes are the people coming with this crap and force them in other people throat.

The last part of your post is disconnected from reality. It’s not my job to contrive my speech to avoid pronouns in languages where they are mandatory. You also contradict yourself since you used "I" a lot in a sentence advocating the removal of pronouns.

Fix your heart.

There is a point at which empathy does not supercede the mental and societal burden required to appease people

Fix your grammar.

English is the only foreign language I can read where I routinely have to pause to wonder and read sentences again to be sure of what’s going on because of purposely messed up pronoun usage. Normally I’m lucky as the rules are the same as my native language (his encompass both genders when speaking of a group). However recently I’ve come across usage such as singular they and even more striking ‘her’ to encompass both gender. This bugs me out each time, not because I’m trying to be offended of everything I read (that’s an easy game...) but because if a text is deviating from convention it’s normally to put the focus or emphasis on something. In the case of her for example, this screams "warning: in this sentence the human under discussion is a woman and this is a very relevant fact for the understanding of the text". So I naturally start paying more attention to that. Except it’s not an important detail at all so it doesn’t need any attention whatsoever. This is the infuriating thing. The most ridiculous recent example of this I read was a technical document written by a Microsoft employee, where her was used as the default generic pronoun for programmers... I took me a few seconds to realize I wasn’t reading doc written in a parallel universe. For made up pronouns, they require searching on the web which is super annoying too.

So yes, I refuse to play the attention game of a few people that are decided to ruin fluid reading for anyone else for their own self-important interests. They are doing the same in my native language on a larger scale and my opposition is consequently stronger there. Language is a shared good and is the basis of human communication, so it must not weaponized by an infime minority to create division among people.

I think you're just going to accept that there are going to be some things that Wikipedia and friends are going to assume as the state. An example is that maybe you think people whose name starts with R are morons who shouldn't be able to add to Wikipedia. Well, Wikipedia, the cultural imperialist that it is, will choose not to entertain this, even if you find a sizable following in some nation.

In any case, this one variant of "Can an encyclopedia be objective?" is not a particularly interesting¹ angle. It's just folded into the general question of how Wikipedia can be objective. For instance, WP has to cover criticism of itself and one can hope that we can aggregate that into some semblance of neutrality.

¹ In the ... mathematical sense of interesting. Like talking about characteristics about a+b√2 that are all shared with a+b√p which we've already discussed.

English language Wikipedia will clearly have places in culture and politics. For a start it shuns advertising, because of the perverse incentives it brings. Some newspapers (Daily Mail, UK, to name but one) are specifically censured as prospective sources because they are so partisan as to be unreliable. Now Wikipedia has adopted a policy on pronouns used by authors which amounts to "accept what people say about themselves", and that is the moment when the question about politics gets asked.

Deciding that a news source is too partisan is, itself, a partisan decision. Last I checked, Wikipedia accepted numerous traditional publications that have veered off the path of news into spreading unverified nonsense and lies of omission.

Things that can be plainly falsified aren't true. That isn't partisanship.

There have always been behavioural requirements in Wikimedia. The obvious example is that vandals don't get to roam free because blocking them would be non neutral. Its also always been the case that if you are enough of an asshole, you will eventually get blocked. It can't possibly work otherwise - a social project that fails to prevent antisocial behaviour cannot flourish. Having no behaviour standards is just as much a failure case as having the thought police.

So whether or not we do this is not new. The question is where is the line. I am of the view that requiring people to not engage in bigoted behaviour that is likely to drive away a specific group of people, is reasonable.

They seem to have written this as basically “If someone wants to be referred to a certain way, please acknowledge that in good faith”. I don’t see any mention of anything specific to the American progressive movement.

So if a Thai writer identifies themself on a Talk page as a gender or orientation you aren’t familiar with, it would be polite to acknowledge them and use the pronouns they prefer.

So basically if I want to refer to someone using a pronoun, I have to first go to their profile page to look up what their preferred pronoun is?

If there’s no clear indication, I usually just refer to people I meet on the internet with “they”. If they indicate a preference for a pronoun, I use that.

But it is something so specific that it shouldn't have a place here. You could also say "respect others opinion". This tries to normalize some language practices that are kind of ridiculous in my opinion. I use pronouns out of decency, but this is extremely out of place.

While I agree in principle, in practice, most articles are entirely community-generated. Avoid the big-ticket articles and it shouldn’t affect you.

However I otherwise agree. My donations to the foundation will certainly cease now (okay, you got me, I never donated and never planned to).

What is "fair, neutral, and global" is also all debatable, especially when it comes to human interactions, and ultimately distills into arguing epistemology.

A code of conduct's purpose is to bound and define the operational environment towards facilitating and progressing the foundation's goals by minimizing distracting or otherwise negative impacts of any particular action, regardless of what those actions may be and who perpetrates them.

There is no prerequisite of objectivity to such a code, nor can anyone say what is objectively true in these situations. There's a reason juries aren't algorithmic.

You can only try to determine what is the most conducive approach to the goals of the organization in the cultural frame it operates in, which it seems they have done.

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