Thanks for the sources Charles.
Having previously chatted with Jess during an LGBT+ event about the Wikipedia "experience", it is entirely fair and factual to say that the environment is hostile. When running and planning newbie events, we have to be honest about how deeply unpleasant things are promoted on Wikipedia under the guise of "free speech" and how the effective protection of trolls drives away minority viewpoints. Though one can play the system and work around many of these issues, you are still treated as a biased lobbyist or extremist if you are seen as undermining the dominant view which keeps male and heteronormative as the central tone and default "normal" of Wikipedia.
The situation is worse in most non-English Wikipedias.
That the press has picked up on this story, could be seen as an opportunity to embrace the criticism and to do more to make the environment less hostile for committed contributors like Jess. Regardless of the trivial of this incident, the underpinning issues are real and measurable and are the real reason for this long-running perception of Wikipedia culture.
Fae
On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 10:32, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
A notability tagging incident on English Wikipedia some ten days ago is receiving ongoing media attention. It would be a good idea to get the facts straight.
The rather curt onwiki discussion is at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incide...
The articles targeted were some of those authored by User:jesswade88, who is known for her work on STEM and the gender gap.
That ANI report makes it clear enough that this was a spree resolved by blocking an IP address. Nothing is said there about any actual deletions. It would be helpful if it could be confirmed that nothing was actually deleted on grounds of lack of notability.
Jess Wade was on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4 speaking about this incident. She began with comments about WP demographics that made me wince a bit. She made clear her positive feelings about WP, editing and Wikimedia, but that of course is less sensational than the narrative of a "hostile environment". There was quite a lot of Twitter comment, with some people swearing off editing WP: which is pretty much what the spree was designed to achieve, surely. Others indicated they were inspired to edit.
There have been articles in the Daily Telegraph:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/07/physicist-embroiled-sexism-row-w...
And in the Daily Mail:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7769415/Physicist-accuses-white-men...
These are pretty bad journalism, in terms of respect for the facts. It appears to me that the enWP admin response was perfectly adequate, rather than there being a systemic problem there.
The Woman's Hour interview was reasonable, the press reports unreliable. I think the point here is that good intentions aren't enough to curb the latter: the Mail's article of 2 January about Jess's project
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6544657/London-scientist-creates-...
is of course very upbeat, but that hardly entitles the Mail to a hatchet job in December.
Charles
We will be releasing a short film before Christmas which looks at what the Wikimedia community in the UK has been doing in the past few years to address the Gender Gap, and I hope that this will go some way to communicating what we have achieved as a community and a local chapter.
John Lubbock
Communications Coordinator
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 203 372 0767
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On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 11:48, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for the sources Charles.
Having previously chatted with Jess during an LGBT+ event about the Wikipedia "experience", it is entirely fair and factual to say that the environment is hostile. When running and planning newbie events, we have to be honest about how deeply unpleasant things are promoted on Wikipedia under the guise of "free speech" and how the effective protection of trolls drives away minority viewpoints. Though one can play the system and work around many of these issues, you are still treated as a biased lobbyist or extremist if you are seen as undermining the dominant view which keeps male and heteronormative as the central tone and default "normal" of Wikipedia.
The situation is worse in most non-English Wikipedias.
That the press has picked up on this story, could be seen as an opportunity to embrace the criticism and to do more to make the environment less hostile for committed contributors like Jess. Regardless of the trivial of this incident, the underpinning issues are real and measurable and are the real reason for this long-running perception of Wikipedia culture.
Fae
On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 10:32, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
A notability tagging incident on English Wikipedia some ten days ago is
receiving ongoing media attention. It would be a good idea to get the facts straight.
The rather curt onwiki discussion is at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incide...
The articles targeted were some of those authored by User:jesswade88,
who is known for her work on STEM and the gender gap.
That ANI report makes it clear enough that this was a spree resolved by
blocking an IP address. Nothing is said there about any actual deletions. It would be helpful if it could be confirmed that nothing was actually deleted on grounds of lack of notability.
Jess Wade was on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4 speaking about this
incident. She began with comments about WP demographics that made me wince a bit. She made clear her positive feelings about WP, editing and Wikimedia, but that of course is less sensational than the narrative of a "hostile environment". There was quite a lot of Twitter comment, with some people swearing off editing WP: which is pretty much what the spree was designed to achieve, surely. Others indicated they were inspired to edit.
There have been articles in the Daily Telegraph:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/07/physicist-embroiled-sexism-row-w...
And in the Daily Mail:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7769415/Physicist-accuses-white-men...
These are pretty bad journalism, in terms of respect for the facts. It
appears to me that the enWP admin response was perfectly adequate, rather than there being a systemic problem there.
The Woman's Hour interview was reasonable, the press reports unreliable.
I think the point here is that good intentions aren't enough to curb the latter: the Mail's article of 2 January about Jess's project
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6544657/London-scientist-creates-...
is of course very upbeat, but that hardly entitles the Mail to a hatchet
job in December.
Charles
-- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
On 09 December 2019 at 11:47 Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
That the press has picked up on this story, could be seen as an opportunity to embrace the criticism and to do more to make the environment less hostile for committed contributors like Jess.
From Jess:
https://twitter.com/jesswade/status/1203583885369630721
Jess does not subscribe to the narrative found in the Telegraph and Mail, for sure.
That narrative has been around for ten years, during which time much progress has been made on English Wikipedia. I think in fact around 2011 the community realised there needed to be a more positive effort with newbies; and as recently as 2016 some kinds of knee-jerk deletionism started to receive serious deprecation.
I don't doubt that more work needs to be done. As far as I know, the editor retention issue is much less pressing than it used to be. In 2009 the Murdoch press was pushing the line that the 2007 decline in editors, which had just come to light in terms of stats rather than anecdote, was an existential threat. No longer.
Regardless of the trivial of this incident, the underpinning issues are real and measurable and are the real reason for this long-running perception of Wikipedia culture.
So, informed and accurate coverage of Wikipedia stories is also to be wished for. If a single idiot adding templates can cause a media furore, it is either trivial or non-trivial. If it isn't trivial ... well, the link to ANI I gave has to be interpreted. In a past furore I helped a Guardian journalist to understand exactly what had happened, via a page history. We see shoddy journalism based on the vaguest ideas of fact-checking. We should call that out.
Charles
Hi all
This is a nuanced issue and as ever, the press has failed to capture that nuance. I received a call from the Sunday Telegraph on Saturday evening and had less than an hour to draft, agree and send a quote on behalf of Wikimedia UK. However within a short statement it's impossible to convey the sort of detail that we're discussing here. As John says, he has been working on a video about the UK community's work to address the gender gap - which includes an interview with Jess among others - and we will be planning communications around the release of the video where we can hopefully paint a more subtle picture of the current situation. It seems highly unlikely that the Mail would cover that but at the very least I am now in contact with the Telegraph reporter who wrote yesterday's story, and will send it to her (amongst others).
All best Lucy
On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 12:40, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 09 December 2019 at 11:47 Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
That the press has picked up on this story, could be seen as an opportunity to embrace the criticism and to do more to make the environment less hostile for committed contributors like Jess.
From Jess:
https://twitter.com/jesswade/status/1203583885369630721
Jess does not subscribe to the narrative found in the Telegraph and Mail, for sure.
That narrative has been around for ten years, during which time much progress has been made on English Wikipedia. I think in fact around 2011 the community realised there needed to be a more positive effort with newbies; and as recently as 2016 some kinds of knee-jerk deletionism started to receive serious deprecation.
I don't doubt that more work needs to be done. As far as I know, the editor retention issue is much less pressing than it used to be. In 2009 the Murdoch press was pushing the line that the 2007 decline in editors, which had just come to light in terms of stats rather than anecdote, was an existential threat. No longer.
Regardless of the trivial of this incident, the underpinning issues are real and measurable and are the real reason for this long-running perception of Wikipedia culture.
So, informed and accurate coverage of Wikipedia stories is also to be wished for. If a single idiot adding templates can cause a media furore, it is either trivial or non-trivial. If it isn't trivial ... well, the link to ANI I gave has to be interpreted. In a past furore I helped a Guardian journalist to understand exactly what had happened, via a page history. We see shoddy journalism based on the vaguest ideas of fact-checking. We should call that out.
Charles
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 10:32, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
That ANI report makes it clear enough that this was a spree resolved by blocking an IP address. Nothing is said there about any actual deletions. It would be helpful if it could be confirmed that nothing was actually deleted on grounds of lack of notability.
Not on this occasion no. The IP has no deleted edits and in any case they were throwing up notability tags not prods or AFDs. Previously some of Jess Wade's articles have been deleted.
On 10 December 2019 at 03:06 geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 10:32, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
That ANI report makes it clear enough that this was a spree resolved by blocking an IP address. Nothing is said there about any actual deletions. It would be helpful if it could be confirmed that nothing was actually deleted on grounds of lack of notability.
Not on this occasion no. The IP has no deleted edits and in any case they were throwing up notability tags not prods or AFDs. Previously some of Jess Wade's articles have been deleted.
Thanks. So the tagging was contained and dealt with, and while it was harassment, clearly enough, that was what it amounted to.
Charles
wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org