Wikipedia launches new global rules to combat site abuses
reuters.com
reuters.com
No source link anywhere or link to more info, and frankly banning harassment and undue bias doesn't sound very new for Wikipedia to me. Not sure what impact this will have on this valuable resource. Perhaps someone should, I don't know, do some journalism here.
How on earth would this be provable or enforceable?
I wonder if "harassment" will be in the eye of the beholder. If you read someone's Tweets and find an opinion that you think is insulting towards the rich or immigrants or men or women, is that grounds to get that person's Wikipedia account deleted?
Abusive language, slurs, ad-hominem attacks are not ambiguous. Neither is 'putting words in other's mouths', which is against this (HNs) site's rules. Lets do better.
I'm sorry if I misunderstood you, jumped to conclusions, or phrased my question poorly, but I hope you can forgive me for finding those two approaches very similar.
If you think there is a universal unambiguous system for deciding whether a claim is "insulting" then I'd be happy to learn about it. For example, I can imagine people disagreeing about whether the statement "Country X has a problem with corruption." is insulting to people in country X.
If an editor hold political opinions that the arbitrator agrees with, he will suddenly find various things to not be insults, which he would have, were he to politically disagree with the editor.
It is often quite easy to make black and white rules with no ambiguities, but then one would have to accept actually not having dual standards.
Nuance and letting human heart play a factor, is a requirement for the man who espouses dual standards.
These rules carry the stench of only being enforced when the powers so will it.
Not as though that would make a difference, hitherto they could surely find a way regardless.
Rule of law has never existed anywhere, especially since those who desire most to be the arbitrators of the law are also the ones who desire most to bend it to their will. The man who desires to be a judge is often indeed quite judgemental.
I personally won't donate a single cent until Sefidari and Maher are replaced with people who can focus on the real priorities.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317921 for earlier discussion.
However useful the project often be, it's no longer something I'm willing to support as a charity.
I can easily identify several contradictions in the guideline, in particularly the concept of no exceptions.
Regardless of my own personal opinion about the practice, there is a reason why the law against discrimination here in Sweden has a explicit exception that state that discrimination is not allowed unless it is for the purpose of reducing discrimination against marginalized groups. It also seems to the favored method of choice since the 1980s.
For conferences, for which this document seems partially focused on, it has always been clear that respecting disabilities follows cultural norms. If cultural we see the disability as inconvenient, a problem which the disabled individual should be ashamed of, and trait of low social status, then people rarely care about it.
> It also bans deliberately introducing false or biased information into content. Wikipedia is a relatively trusted site compared to major social media platforms which have struggled to curb misinformation.
I'm a little confused. Weren't hounding and introducing false information already against the rules? I'm pretty sure they are, and I'd also be sure most of the other stuff is too (except maybe the "off site" behavior stuff).
I guess the inclusion in the CoC just adds more options for enforcement.
The purpose is to expand these rules to some of the small properties (Gaelic Wikinews or whatever) where they lack due to omission: admin teams are small, resources scarce, etc. No community has ever decided "no, we believe harassing women is great" (is there a gop.wikisomething.org?). The just haven't gotten around to putting it in writing.
It'll also make it easier to work across projects, because you won't have to familiarise yourself with the nuances of local rules in easy cases. Sort-of like the EU's harmonisation of customer rights across jurisdictions makes it easier to order from France or Italy.
But, mostly, a non-event. I'm sure there'll be hot debates and open letters and then everyone will forget about it.
https://conservapedia.com/Main_Page
I have been aware of this site for a while. I always thought it was a parody because everything is so over the top. But a few years ago the admin got in a fight with a left wing YouTuber I watched and I learned it is apparently a real and serious project.
It will probably shock you to learn that both sides declared victory.
Thus, it seems that Andrew Schafly does not recognize it as such, because it does not meet his stereotypes, and I have seen him speak of what he calls “machismo” which seems to more so align with the aforementioned image created by the actual “gay community”.
It wouldn't surprise me if Andrew Schlafly indeed would believe that the suggestive pictures are indeed intended as promoting male fitness, as it was originally said to avoid the censor.
https://i0.wp.com/www.towleroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/...
They are but fitness buffs, socializing, respecting each other's bodies and efforts.
I mean, the Amharic Wikipedia used to ban people for being gay. And I think I remember things like that happening on some other small projects.
How is it any website's business what happens OFF their site?
If an article says a country has 7.6 million pop, or some software was released in 2015, 2017 and 2019, it's likely true.
But when it comes to "opinions", I have my own and don't care whether it was written by a diverse team or not. In fact don't read those articles anyway.
Wikipedia already requires a Neutral Point-of-View as one of its' five pillars [1].
So this policy doesn't affect the content of articles, but it does ban editors who say something that disagrees with an admin's bias, before the editor get a chance to respond e.g. by citing reliable sources that argue their case.
Wikipedia editors and admins are already biased towards the far-left [2]. I'm a liberal, and I've seen them routinely wipe away conservative viewpoints, slander conservatives, and ban people who seem to support conservative views. But today, a ban only happens when editors can see a conservative breaking some other rule, such as "edit warring", which they will raise to admins, who will examine the complaint and block the conservative's account. This takes a lot of work. But now the wiki-activists can ban conservatives just for saying something conservative, which is what they've really wanted to do all along.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
[2] https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
Exactly. This is always the point of CoCs that punish offsite behavior and include "hate speech" and such as an offense. The language is always humpty-dumptying and a preemptive mott-and-bailey. Say you're banning "harassment and hate speech", then in the future claim that "a machine can not make a sneetch into a star-bellied-sneetch" makes you feel unsafe and magically you've created ideological homogeneity.
The intent it to make sure you're not allowed to speak views that oppose the orthodoxy and still exist online.
The crux is that it be proportionally featured in what are considered “reliable sources”, but Wikipedia has no definition of what makes a source “reliable”.
The other issue, of course, is that this U.S.A. “left vs. right” debate is often considered as though the U.S.A. be the only place in the world. The reality is of course that most continental Europeans will say that both the “left” and the “right” in the U.S.A. are very much “right” in their opinion, but they more so speak fiscally, rather than socially about these matters.
“left” vs “right” in U.S.A. parlance seem to mostly refer to whose cause one arbitrarily champions in social identity politics, both having a rather similar, hignly right wing capitalist fiscal platform.
English-language Wikipedia is of course also heavily biased towards Anglo-Saxon sources as one expects, but it does not report it as such. Very often in reviews of media it says that something was “critically acclaimed” when it only was among Anglo-Saxon criticism.
And finally, when the entire world be considered, rather than merely the developed world, the situation becomes even more complicated. — English-language Wikipedia definitely does not repræsent neutrality with respect to the entire world, and does not attempt to do so, nor wishes to do so.
Yes it does. Here's the definition of "reliable source":
What it does do is list some properties that do not immediately disqualify a source from being reliable, and what makes a source automatically unreliable, but that's it.
All other definitions are circular, in the vein of Academic research is reliable, if it be published in a reliable, reputable journal..