Hi Ryan,

sorry for the long post. I did not have time to shorten it.

On Wednesday 30 Mar 2011 05:36:28 Ryan Kaldari wrote:

It also looks like Rice University is doing a Wikipedia class project for the class "Poverty, Gender, and Human Development". We're totally inundated with enthusiastic newbie editors over at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Feminism. If anyone wants to help answer questions there, it would be greatly appreciated! Now that the floodgates have opened, I'm not sure we can keep up with them all!

Yes, my thoughts exactly. I clicked one of the students there at random and she already received many comments from other people on her talk page. Maybe we should have a list of wikipedia editors that are willing to assist and mentor somewhere so beginning editors can approach (or get one allocated in a round-robin fashion) regarding getting help. A round robin allocator should be a few lines of Perl or PHP code, and I volunteer to write. (It may already exist, naturally).

Anyway, my user page is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shlomif , and I'll add some information about getting mentored and also about how to report abuse against stuff I may have been doing and I'll see what I can do.

On a different note, and please don't ban me, because while this may be trollbait, I have good intentions, and my opinion to be heard:

I'd like to say that someone told me that many of her "feminist" (to use her words) female friends left this list after a few hours after they saw many male wikipedia admins talking and those female afraid of speaking their minds. I think it's a bigger underlying problem that many people (but especially many females) are afraid to take huge chances in order to risk their reputation. This is also part of the problem with big corporations, who are afraid to risk too much at once, and to reduce the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variance of failure.

Here's an extreme form of that: my cousin was an Israeli Kibutznik with high school education (and not terribly good English or Hebrew) who went on the traditional Israeli post-Military-service world-wide tour. He ended up in Japan, and told me he spoke there with a government official (IIRC) who had an M.A. in English, spoke English perfectly, and he claims likely knew English better than him or almost all English native speakers. But despite that, she kept consulting a dictionary she had on the table for words to tell him, and he also placed words in her mouth based on the context. Someone who lives (or had lived) in Japan whom I talked with about it said it is the norm there, but that he wouldn't expect it to be used with a relatively ignorant person like my cousin.

What I'm trying to say is that people should learn that sometimes one should take risks and do things that might cause you damage. I've got into my share of problems, and got temporarily banned from various online forums, and made some refuse to interact with me, but on the other hand, I also achieved a lot, and can impress many people. I'm not saying people should be as careless as I am, but they should take risks.

What is the worst thing that a wikipedia admin or person-in-power can do to someone who posts in this list? Ban him/her from this list? Comment on their wikipedia page? There's a limit to how much they can morally, ethically or regulation-wise do. Like my father says "Always think what is the worst case scenario?". Also see:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Failure

There were times where I introduced some mis-information or dis-information to wikipedia or on IRC conversations and was eventually corrected, because I know that the worst thing is that I'll misinform some people or get corrected.

I know I'll get flamed for that, but there's a limit to how much we can move the mountain in the direction of Muhammad (see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pragmatism ). I'm not saying the Wikipedia community cannot improve in many respects, but we must also acknowledge that prospective female editors should have enough will not to give up when trying to contribute to various open-source/free-culture projects. See what I quoted Larry Lessig as saying in:

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/How_to_start_contributing_to_or_usin...

Lessig says there that he cannot go to sleep after reading a particularly bad comment on one of his blog posts, and he says he does that because he learned from a judge that bad criticism was more important than good one, and that he doesn't need more "fan-boys" (my term for what he said are "sycophants"). Now, I describe here: http://unarmed.shlomifish.org/909.html is a technique called "Verbal Judo" from David D. Burns' self-help cognitive therapy book "Feeling Good", that says that among a lot of other good advice for handling states of being down or even being clinically depressed (and I felt that reading it and implementing the suggestions there helped me a lot). Lessig and others should probably read that book and integrate it in their online and offline lives.

There is a reason why there is only one woman in the Linux kernel core team, and that's because it's a very hostile environment - not to women in particular - to everyone. See here for an E-mail I'm planning to write about reverting a repetitive ban from there:

http://www.shlomifish.org/lkml-letter-f6y9/some-requests-from-kernel.org.xht...

The exact opposite of LKML are the Subversion ( http://subversion.apache.org/ ) online mailing list: whenever someone sends them a patch, they quote the patch and say what needs to be corrected (and ask to search for the other places where this problem existed instead of blindly referring to the style document and to find out where my problems are, like I was told to do on LKML.), and was thanked for my patches and clearly informed and thanked for when they got applied. Eventually I also received this:

http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2003-08/0476.shtml

I realise Subversion is not the fashion of the month among the cool kids who prefer DVCS (= distributed version control system), and the Subversion people admit that if you're a capable hacker you should probably not use Subversion but rather a DVCS, but Subversion has been and still is very successful, either among the 80% of programming shops, or alternatively as a low-cost alternative to Perforce and similar version control systems for developing games, which have huge binary data files in version control (even the kdegames package, which are a far cry from most popular commercial games, have been debating the best way to transition to git, because the repository size will be huge with all their history).

Sorry that this email was so long, and hope I did not bore you too much.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish