Hello all, I first saw this on the mailing list and not through email, so the links did not come through and I had to search around the edit histories for a while. What I saw was a lot of errors--errors in pronunciation markings, in wiki text markup, and in not knowing where the first attributed usage comes from ( the OED). If you are writing a dictionary, this is very basic stuff. And I saw the regulars being very patient in reverting the incorrect edits and in explaining why they were incorrect.  When I saw that one of noted linguist Mark Lieberman's trademarked "breakfast experiments" had been edited as well, I thought I had seen the fourth out of four errors.  But checking the source, Lieberman did not use any examples, those were added by someone else, so I don't see any problem with changing them as long as it is not attributed to Lieberman.

Yes, the examples were biased, and thank you for to Heather for providing the link that explains it.  I was thinking of "male gaze".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_gaze

That said, what was done with the examples was just to reverse the bias, which IMO is not good dictionary practice. It would be better to pick examples that accurately demonstrate the usage of the word, without introducing additional cultural biases or negative stereotypes.  But I am not part of that community, and have not taken the time to understand how they do things, so I doubt they care what I think.

If you look further, some of the exchanges on the talk pages are not very productive.  Something like this, with a user whose first language is Portuguese, is likely to go nowhere. https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Ungoliant_MMDCCLXIV&oldid=45671284

If someone with J Hayes' history with the movement is recommending that someone move on to a different project, I don't think this should be dismissed out of hand. His comments may sometimes come off as pessimistic, but they are born from long experience.

On Sat, May 27, 2017 at 9:16 PM, Heather Walls <hwalls@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Inline replies to 3 people...

On Sat, May 27, 2017 at 1:57 PM, J Hayes <slowking4@gmail.com> wrote:
the smaller wikis have ownership issues , the arguments are so vehement because the stakes are so small.

i would advise trying out lots of other wikis like commons or wikisource or wikidata. friendlier at source, and lots more metadata cleanup to do at commons / wikidata.

Hello J. When someone comes to an issue-specific list to discuss that issue, why would you recommend that they just edit somewhere else and not speak to their question? Isn't it the point of this list to discuss gendergap issues?

 
On Sat, May 27, 2017 at 3:13 AM, Peter Southwood <peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:

At the risk of being labelled biased, I do not see that that was a legitimate fix to address systemic bias. It looked rather pointy to me.  Perhaps you could explain just how it addressed systemic bias in a useful way.

Cheers, Peter


Peter, what I see in that first edit was the removal of a sentence that spoke about the appearance of a woman for no reason at all. There is more information here http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Beauty_duty

 

 From: Gendergap [mailto:gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jessy D. King

Sent: Wednesday, 26 April 2017 7:27 PM
To: Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: [Gendergap] Wiktionary *desperately* needs more gender-aware editors

 

Hi,

I'm new to this list, this is my first post. 

 

If Wikipedia is a boy's club, Wiktionary is an uber boy's club. It *so* desperately needs people interested in addressing systemic bias.

 

Every time I try to make completely legitimate fixes to address systemic bias of the male privilege variety (for example, 

it is reverted very quickly (in the just-referenced case, within 10 minutes). Then a fight must ensue in which I'm accused of being things like "dishonest", "disrespectful" and 'railing'. The person in this case has demonstrated his double standards in his edit summary and in his comments to me on his talk page, and that is absolutely (unfortunately) the norm amongst long-term Wiktionary editors. 

 

It is incredibly demoralising. My contributions to Wiktionary include adding etymologies, adding quotations, all with absolutely no gender issues involved, yet none of that work is ever recognised in any way, and I'm treated like a resented interloper. The majority of long-term Wiktionary editors seem to bitterly resent the very suggestion of addressing systemic bias. It is a really, really nasty little uber boy's club in there. Which I realise may not encourage anyone to join, I'm just being honest. 


Hello Jessy, I appreciate your efforts to remove gender issues from Wiktionary. I am disappointed that you found a similar reaction in this list.

Warmly,
Heather


 

 

 


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