I agree absolutely with this. All Wikipedians are political and we
pontificate to the world quite happily while following a complex set of
agreed rules. To believe that Wikipedia has a neutral point of view is like
believing there is no systemic bias in the academic world. The gateway that
anyone must pass in order to keep their edits live on Wikipedia is
navigating the extremely complex web known in our jargon as "reliable
sources". I believe Wikipedia has done a better job overall than academia
in general of expanding this magic list by opening up our "set of rules" to
a worldwide playing field, but this magic list is uneven and a
work-in-progress. Face-to-face meetups have only cemented rankings on our
magic list, not erased them. Where does this magic list stand in the
post-truth world? If we believe in our magic list, we believe in the people
who made it and add to it every day and thus we believe in free passage for
those people to any meetup anywhere in the world. Any threat to that safe
passage is a direct threat to our community, no matter how good your irc,
google hangout, skype call, or facebook group might be.
And meanwhile, we will deal with political issues as they affect us in the
way we deal with all the other random stuff of humanity that pops up
regularly in our projects, whether it is based on "reliable sources",
religious belief, superstition, politics, fear, humor, or all of these:
On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 8:06 PM, Robert Fernandez <wikigamaliel(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
That is an obvious false equivalence. The issue
isn't people rooting
for the WMF to take political stances that mirror their own. The
issue is whether or not that the WMF should recognize that its mission
can intersect with or conflict with political stances and then act
appropriately. The free dissemination of factual, neutral information
and the ability of editors to participate in that dissemination is in
many contexts a political act and the WMF should recognize this. To
contend that Wikimedia activity is, can be, or should be always
politically neutral is naive and comes from a place of privilege where
your personal engagement will likely never be threatened by political
interference.
On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 1:59 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 7:26 PM, Natacha Rault
<n.rault(a)me.com> wrote:
> ...After all there is a notion called "freedom of speech".... Katherine
> Maher did a statement and so what? That does not prevent wikipedians
from
> editing, and confronting opinions to approach
NPOV (actually there is no
> achieved NPOV on Wikipedia in what concerns the gender biases as far as
I
see it).
I imagine that your response would be different if Katherine's position
didn't match your own. What if she posted that she agreed that "extreme
vetting" was an appropriate response to the risk of terrorist attacks,
that
nations with liberal refugee policies had
experienced multiple attacks in
recent years, and that radicalism is an existential threat to free
societies? These are views shared by hundreds of millions of people
(although not you, Katherine, or me). This hopefully illustrates why
taking
political positions beyond the mission is fraught
with risk, and why the
frequent demands that the WMF (or the community) do so are misplaced.
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