Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects should reflect the scientific
consensus, whether that be on climate, vaccines, or the concept of
biological "races".
The latter concept is deeply tied to 19th-century pseudoscience, and is
very different from modern genetic science. Genetic traits have various
distributions by geography, but these are not grouped by "races", which is
largely an arbitrary social distinction.
I agree that this is not a particularly fruitful topic for discussion on
this mailing list.
Thanks,
Richard
(User:Pharos)
On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 9:42 AM Dennis During <dcduring(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I don't feel safe presenting truths in an
environment where one can be
bullied for presenting truths that are unfashionable or can be so painted.
Does the Code of Conduct cover that?
On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 8:57 AM Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It is remarkably easy to find various language
Wikipedia articles that
actively promote scientific racism. The forthcoming WMF universal code
of conduct is unlikely to directly address this type of damaging
anti-educational content, or require projects to take action.
This may surprise some, but here are two examples, and if you follow
the multiple language links in each, you will find many other language
examples:
[1] Wikipedia article in Russian about "Negroid race" (Негроидная
раса) and associates Negroid as being defined by genetics. Nowhere in
the article is it explained that these are debunked racist theories.
[2] Wikipedia article in Italian about "Mongoloid" (Mongoloide),
defines being Mongoloid by physical characteristics and presents it as
a scientific term with a section explaining how the Mogoloid race is
geographically spread.
Unfortunately, as these outdated racist theories are Wikipedia
articles, Wikimedia Commons still hosts multiple *user created*
"racial maps" of the human race as if this were a current scientific
race taxonomy for humans. These maps are not even required to have
warnings that their content is scientific racism or why that's a bad
thing.[3]
At the current time, nobody is solving this problem with systemic
racism and I am unaware of the WMF funding a project that will take
action to fix it, nor even tracking this repugnant material. The idea
that we might still be vaguely talking about how bad it is that
Wikipedia is being used to promote "Negroid race" as science in
several years time, without any systematic action to get rid of it or
at least correctly reformat the article to describe it as debunked,
should alarm everyone concerned that donor's money is supporting this
content.
Links
1.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0…
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Average_E…
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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