[Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

[M. Williamson]

Wow, you pat yourself on the back more times in that e-mail than I ever
thought possible in a single message. So you think Wikinews is the greatest
thing, and that us outsiders know not what we are talking about and don't
have a right to an opinion since we're not full-time Wikinewsies? Great,
that doesn't solve any problems or get anybody anywhere, though.


2011/9/7 pi zero <wn.pi.zero at gmail.com>

> Having only a few hours ago been alerted to the existence of this thread,
> I'm afraid I'm rather overwhelmed by it.  Way too long to read.  I've
> glimpsed a number of false/misleading statements about en.wn in passing,
> but
> would probably spent all night properly locating them all, let alone
> attempting to answer them.  (Hm, there was something about Wikinews being a
> bureaucracy, and of course the post that started this thread...)  I'm also
> rather puzzled by the nature of this thread, which seems to be largely
> non-Wikinewsies discussing what they think about how the inner workings
> ought to be changed of a sister project whose *current* inner workings are
> probably more unfamiliar to ---for a non-random example--- Wikipedians than
> those of any other sister.  (I've spent three years studying it and am
> hopefully just about up to speed now.)
>
> However, in a general collegial spirit toward Wikimedians having a
> discussion (whyever they're doing that), I'll offer a few general remarks
> about en.wn.
>
> en.wn is a wiki at, roughly, the extreme opposite end of several spectra
> from en.wp.  To oversimplify (the only way I'll get anywhere in this),
> en.wn
> is just about as different a wiki from en.wp as it is possible for a wiki
> to
> be.  Note, there is nothing un-wiki about en.wn.  It's very wiki.  What it
> *isn't* is Wikipedian.  Some Wikipedians, I think, are actually kind of
> afraid of en.wn, because all wmf wikis are drive by idealism, and part of
> the idealism of Wikipedia is a belief in various rules of wiki dynamics
> that
> aren't the way en.wn works.  Volunteers driven by idealism naturally have a
> massive emotional investment in those ideals ---that's what makes idealism
> great for sister projects!--- and in this case it means these Wikipedians
> have a massive emotional investment in disbelieving in the way en.wn works.
>
> The thing is, Wikinews confronts boldly, every day for several years now,
> challenges of quality control that Wikipedia is glacially slowly being
> forced to sidle up to if it is to thrive on into the future.  These are
> *really difficult challenges*, and I'm kind of amazed by how well we're
> dealing with this stuff that Wikipedia isn't ready for yet.  Obviously
> Wikipedia will never be Wikinews, but... Wikinews is the vanguard, and
> Wikipedia will eventually benefit from things we're figuring out (very,
> very
> slowly, but that's hardly surprising).
>
> A note on a slightly different tack.  A comment I made in a private
> discussion a few days ago (among experienced Wikinewsies, about the inner
> workings of the project) ran something like this:
> > I'm proud of Wikinews.  We're so damn good at teaching how to write, a
> university journalism professor is assigning us to his students as
> homework.
> Besides the somewhat incidental fact I'm proud of the project, there are
> two
> points of interest here.
>
> First, we do have a class of, I think, about thirty university journalism
> students currently submitting articles for review.  Yes, that can produce a
> glut on the review queue, which we're learning how to keep up with and not
> allow it to keep us from reviewing the best articles in reasonable time.
>  Of
> course we *also* want to spend a significant amount of time reviewing the
> *worse* articles, because how can those authors improve without feedback?
> Tricky.  This also means an especially high number of failing article
> reviews.  Some of these students honestly don't get at first the concept of
> neutrality, or perhaps how to not plagiarize, or some other basic
> principle.  Last semester we were surprised by how many final-year
> journalism students had trouble with this stuff, and we didn't let up our
> standards for them, and from what we hear, the professor was *delighted*.
> That's apparently just what he wanted, and he's sent another class this
> semester to get some hard knocks from us.
>
> The second thing about this, I only figured out myself when I realized
> reviewing these student's work reminded me forcefully of my time as a
> teaching assistant.  That, plus the recent nomination of the Old English
> Wikipedia for closure.  Wmf is about education, and an argument in that
> nomination was that the purpose of a Wikipedia is to educate readers by
> providing them with information in their native language.  Well, I saw two
> fails in that: first, reading it is surely educational *about Old English*,
> and second, *contributing* to it is surely massively educational about Old
> English.  The idea that contributing is educational applies in spades to
> en.wn, obviously, or why would a professor be telling his students to go do
> it?
>
> Anyway, there are a few thoughts.
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