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_usi…
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.xh…
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
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Shlomi Fish
http://www.shlomifish.org/
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