Hi Chris,

Philosophically, your question re who is to decide what's worthwhile and factual is a fair point.  But un practice it's decided by editors, authors, and on Wikipedia, by Wikipedia content reviewers and editors.  I've sometimes had my additions, even minor edits, reverted by a Wikipedia reviewer for whatever unstated reason, even if the change was a mere grammatical correction.

If Wikipedia allowed edits to go unreviewed or unreversible, it'd be completely trashed inside a day.  So while in an ideal world we'd need no police, fire protection, etc., we're not in an ideal world.  Likewise publicly-editable site like Wikipedia must have "content police", and these content police do make such decisions thousands of times daily.

As for your reference to "white North American and European men with Master's degrees", my position is as originally stated: ethnicity, gender, and now place of origin, are irrelevant to whether what the contributor writes is valuable.  For if I am told, and rightly so, that I shouldn't dismiss or poo-poo Grace Hopper's contributions to computer science because she was female, not Alan Turing's because he was gay.  Finally, making such references is patently insulting.  If you'd said the same about how, for example, a particular Wikipedia site shouldn't have quite so many east Asian female contributors with advanced degrees, how would that go over?  But, you might say, there are no such Wikipedia sites.  Well, there are Wikipedia sites written in languages spoken primarily in east Asia, like Chinese.  And more than a few regions of the world are enrolling many more women into advanced degree programs than men by rate of increase (see thr 2010 UNESCO Global Education Digest at http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/GED_2010_EN.pdf page 13).  With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa and only barely, women are surpassing (and in Asia and the Arab region, by huge margins) men in these increasing rates of enrollment.  In addition, looking at page 15, you can see far more women in eastern and central Europe have or are getting advanced degrees.  So it's not a matter of education nor a matter of educational anti-female discrimination -- on the contrary, if one is to judge purely by numbers, he or she must conclude it's men being systematically excluded from higher ed opportunities, not women.  But if one is looking through rose-colored lenses, he or she sees everything only in shades of red.  So is there a move on to get more men from eastern and central European countries to get into higher ed, much less contribute more to Wikipedia?

Ad hominem criticisms/arguments, which include derisive references to a person's indelible characteristics or place of origin, or simple name-calling/labrling, are fallacious and act merely as distractions. To start talking about contributors' gender and ethnicity, esp. in derisive tones, is insulting, bad politics, and since others including yourself have taken to derisive labeling (in another response, I have been called an "insensitive clod" merely for having an opinion counter to hers), then fair's fair.

As an example: Why should I really value your opinion, Chris, when obviously you lack the brains to comprehend my argument? (Ad hominem attack, like "insensitive dolt") You're just plain insensitive, you clod.  (Again.) You have no valid input on this matter too because presumably, you're a white European male and really ought to stay quiet about it, as another replier implied when they said the debate was not too be taken too seriously since it seemed *once again* to be among _white males_.  So be quiet, Chris.  No one wants to hear more from a tiresome, privileged WHITE EUROPEAN MALE. (derisive labeling, non-sequitur reasoning, minimizing).

How does it feel, Chris?  Familiar?  It ought to, you hear it enough these days.

Matt

-------- Original message -------- From: wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org Date:01/08/2015 4:59 AM (GMT-05:00) To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Subject: Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 130, Issue 24

Message: 6 Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2015 09:59:10 +0000 From: Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why WMF should reconsider the 3-month gender gap project-related decision Message-ID: CAFche1ov04xpvpOsa89oZ8-E9+TfXingi1YbtXPK7o1cj0ES4Q@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Hi there,

That said, it doesn't matter who writes the content on Wikipedia so long as it's relevant and factual.

Who is to decide what is relevant and factual (or indeed, the other editorial judgements we make in writing aricles)? If the only people doing that are white North American and European men with (or working towards) masters' degrees*, then their judgements will inevitably reflect their own backgrounds and perspectives - and other backgrounds and perspectives will be missing from those judgements.

That does not and will not result in us fulfilling our mission to build and share the sum of human knowledge.

In my view our consensus-based decision-making model can only work well when there is enough diversity of contributions in the first place. It is easy for a small group of similar people to reach a consensus. However, they are likely to miss important things in doing so. Regards,

Chris

* This isn't (quite) a description of the status quo but is pretty close