Earlier today, I posted a thread on Reddit's AskTransgender group asking for feedback on how Wikipedia handles transgender issues, specifically BLP and pronoun issues.
http://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/tejwl/is_wikipedia_handling_...
Feel free to respond here or there.
This followed discussions relating to the widely-reported announcement by Tom Gabel, the lead vocalist and guitarist for the punk band Against Me!, of their intention to transition, and also previous discussions I've had by email with a UK-based transgender non-profit.
It almost feels like how we handle gender identity and transgender issues on-wiki is a nice little litmus test for the community's wider attitudes to inclusion (as well as handling of sensitive BLPs).
I've found that Wikipedia handles transgender issues fairly well. A good example is the Chaz Bono article. This article is an example of what should be the most problematic case on Wikipedia: A BLP of a transgender person mostly known for being the child of a celebrity. You would expect the article to be a horrible embarrassment, but it's actually well done and uses the correct pronoun throughout. The article has been frequently attacked over the years as you can see from the talk page, but it's always been dealt with promptly and thoughtfully. In general, I find that Wikipedia does a good job of covering gay and transgender issues and seems to have a healthy community of editors in those demographics. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of such editors on Wikipedia is higher than in the population in general, but this is just a guess based on anecdotal evidence. I would love to hear other people's impressions.
Ryan Kaldari
On 5/9/12 12:57 PM, Tom Morris wrote:
Earlier today, I posted a thread on Reddit's AskTransgender group asking for feedback on how Wikipedia handles transgender issues, specifically BLP and pronoun issues.
http://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/tejwl/is_wikipedia_handling_...
Feel free to respond here or there.
This followed discussions relating to the widely-reported announcement by Tom Gabel, the lead vocalist and guitarist for the punk band Against Me!, of their intention to transition, and also previous discussions I've had by email with a UK-based transgender non-profit.
It almost feels like how we handle gender identity and transgender issues on-wiki is a nice little litmus test for the community's wider attitudes to inclusion (as well as handling of sensitive BLPs).
Generally, we do okay. Several of these articles are battlefields, however. You can see the fallout of a current one here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Inciden...
and the history of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning and its talk page.
While my impression here is entirely empiric, I suspect that the various WMF projects do a fairly good job in the LGBT topic area because so many of our volunteers bring personal experience to the table (either being LGBT or LGBT-friendly). Or to put it more prosaically, most of us don't care who sleeps with whom.
Risker/Anne
On 9 May 2012 16:57, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
I've found that Wikipedia handles transgender issues fairly well. A good example is the Chaz Bono article. This article is an example of what should be the most problematic case on Wikipedia: A BLP of a transgender person mostly known for being the child of a celebrity. You would expect the article to be a horrible embarrassment, but it's actually well done and uses the correct pronoun throughout. The article has been frequently attacked over the years as you can see from the talk page, but it's always been dealt with promptly and thoughtfully. In general, I find that Wikipedia does a good job of covering gay and transgender issues and seems to have a healthy community of editors in those demographics. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of such editors on Wikipedia is higher than in the population in general, but this is just a guess based on anecdotal evidence. I would love to hear other people's impressions.
Ryan Kaldari
On 5/9/12 12:57 PM, Tom Morris wrote:
Earlier today, I posted a thread on Reddit's AskTransgender group asking for feedback on how Wikipedia handles transgender issues, specifically BLP and pronoun issues.
http://www.reddit.com/r/**asktransgender/comments/tejwl/** is_wikipedia_handling_**transgender_identity_well/http://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/tejwl/is_wikipedia_handling_transgender_identity_well/
Feel free to respond here or there.
This followed discussions relating to the widely-reported announcement by Tom Gabel, the lead vocalist and guitarist for the punk band Against Me!, of their intention to transition, and also previous discussions I've had by email with a UK-based transgender non-profit.
It almost feels like how we handle gender identity and transgender issues on-wiki is a nice little litmus test for the community's wider attitudes to inclusion (as well as handling of sensitive BLPs).
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