Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Archive 9

message: I expect this story is false. Quote:
:There are other projects in the pipeline, says Sir Richard. A few weeks ago he held a meeting in California to plan an African version of the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia. "We're getting Wikipedia to create an education site for Africa - we want to create free education on the internet. An African living in South Africa might know nothing about Ethiopia or Nigeria."
It sounds like the sort of thing Jimbo would vaguely talk about when it's fund-raising time, but not get around to doing.
- Xed 10:44, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ditto --Jay(Reply) 15:47, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Richard Branson "getting Wikipedia to create an education site for Africa" 

message: This suggestion from the article is way off the mark:
Change the demographic of Wikipedia.  Encourage friends and acquaintances that you know have interests that are not well-represented on Wikipedia to edit.  If you are at a university, contact a professor in minority or women's studies, explain the problem, and ask if they would be willing to encourage students to write for Wikipedia.  Contact minority or immigrant groups in your area to see if they would be interested in encouraging their members to contribute.  The worst they could say is, "No". But keep in mind that immigrant groups often have a vastly different point of view than the majority of people in the countries they immigrated from, which introduces its own systemic bias.
It seems to me that one systemic bias problem is too many people from academia editing, and too few ordinary folks.  We don't need more professors in minority or women's studies or their students, because the systemic bias on Wikipedia is already heavy biased toward the obscure academic theories which came out of those so-called "studies" programs, theories which are mostly relevant only to guilty white middle-class academics, not to actual minorities.  What we need is more women and minorities themselves (which is not the same thing at all as students in "womens studies" and "minority studies" programs - who tend to be intellectual, middle-class, and white).  We also need a lot more blue collar people, and people with no obvious axes to grind - often they're the same thing.  We have very few auto mechanics, steelworkers, miners, electricians, plumbers, firefighters, loggers, truck drivers, linemen, or family farmers editing Wikipedia.  Too many academics, too many techies, too many students, and too many political and religious true believers. 70.108.84.22 00:35, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This needs to be substantiated of course, but I disagree that the systemic bias is due to academics per sé. To raise above the level of a giant trivia database, Wikipedia needs the people who know how to write and how to cite sources. I do not disagree that we do need the other groups you're mentioning too. You're absolutely right in that. — mark ✎ 07:06, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

text: To be clear, I'm specifically taking issue with your contention that academics here only (or mostly) contribute 'obscure academic theories'. There is a lot of real world knowledge to be found in academic sources, and academics, as the people reading this stuff and writing up articles on the basis of it, are people Wikipedia can use. I'm not talking theories here, I'm just talking about those sources which make articles like Defaka, Qala'un Mosque, Bono Manso, Yaaku, Dorobo, Nobiin language, Nafaanra language, etc., etc., possible and verifiable in the first place. I think you agree that these articles counter systemic bias in their own way. Again, that is not to say that we don't need the people you are mentioning. We absolutely do. So how would you suggest we get them editing here? — mark ✎ 08:25, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair enough.  You are all correct that there are many areas such as some languages where those in academia help counter systemic bias.  I'll also restore the language.  However, my point was, I'm looking around Wikipedia and I see a lot of long and heavily edited articles on very silly subjects like meme, chaos theory, whiteness studies, neurodiversity, producerism, and at the absurdist extreme, anti-racist mathematics.  That these are even getting a lot of interest and coverage here is a sign of systemic bias resulting from some intellectuals who take their obscure theories a bit too seriously, and worse, other editors who let them stand as sources because they're academic in origin and "peer-reviewed".  It's a function of who self-selects to edit a project like this.  As for why more common folks (non-intellectuals) don't edit, many don't have the same writing skills as your average intellectual.  It's a sad commentary on our society that children who do show talent at writing are shunted by the educational establishment into "college prep" classes and the humanities, resulting in working class folks who are also talented writers being a rarity.  Well, there was Eric Hoffer, and Jack London, and some obscure ones I can think of.  But that's a subject for a blog and not here.  70.108.69.40 22:02, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Its also sad that at least in the United Kingdom, kids with an "intellectual" bent are often victimised at school for it, causing them to be more detached and more susceptable to being "shunted" into fluffy subjects. Anti-intellectualism, if there isn't an article for that I'd be surprised ;) is part of the problem. - FrancisTyers 23:26, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Well put, though I think there can be such a thing as overrepresentation of a topic. Ruakh 00:17, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Who do we really need more of on Wikipedia?

message: This should be called "Countering systemic balance". Least that's what I think he said... http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-edemocracy/wikipedia_bias_3621.jsp  --  Zanimum 13:25, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure about this - there may be some different connotations in professional editing circles but I think in the context of this project systemic bias refers to bias in topic selection rather than having non-NPOV articles, which is a valid use of the term. Balanced is possibly a better term, but still preserves the same ambiguity - reference to imbalance could mean that an article is one-sided or that one area has too little coverage.--Cherry blossom tree 22:44, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

text: He makes some good points. "Imbalance" is perhaps a better word than bias. And the CSB project is just a gnat compared to the huge dumb "group mind" of the rest of Wikipedia. With it's vision-less and largely witless politburo, Wikipedia is unlikely to ever be a serious encyclopedia, since membership of the politburo is dependent on believing in the "hive mind" dogma. I suppose one solution would be to block editing on all articles except CSB ones for a week, to get people to concentrate on them. And repeat the exercise once a year or so, or as often as necessary. - Xed 11:54, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thats quite a nice idea actually, like a week of countering systematic bias, I'm not sure how well it would work enforced, but it would be nice for a concerted group of editors to get together, co-ordinate via irc, a mailinglist, IM, whatever and consistently work on CSB related articles for a week — with a specific end goal, e.g. 1000 articles created, or 1 FA, 10 good articles and 100 good stubs. This wouldn't work as a WikiProject or anything like that, it would need to have set goals and frequent communication. - FrancisTyers · 12:11, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Robert McHenry sezs 

message: Just wanted to add my own comments about this:
*The real bias in Wikipedia: a response to David Shariatmadari, by Robert McHenry, Open Democracy, June 7, 2006. 
The blurb reads: Wikipedia's visionless, self-selected, value-light online encyclopedia is a deformed shadow of what the global public deserves, says former editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, Robert McHenry. 
 
Soundbites like that go a long way to explain why Wikipedians love to hate McHenry :-/  But don't rush to dismiss his comments: I think he makes some good points.  McHenry has extensive experience producing both on-line and print encyclopedias, and IMO, the Wikipedia community ought to listen carefully to his advice, since many of the issues he mentions are fixable (although given the glacial pace of change at WP, I despair that I will ever see this happen).
Clearly WP cannot adopt Brittanica's model of a "centrally planned" and professionally written encyclopedia, but that doesn't mean that WP can or should ignore the issues of balance and bias (not the same thing!).  In particular, I think the Wikimedia Board urgently needs to refine and clarify the mission statement of this project, and to streamline processes to assist Wikipedians who wish to implement some kind of "decentralized planning" in an attempt to achieve local balance in their own areas of interest.  (Since WP depends on volunteer labor, I doubt that WP can hope to achieve global balance, although I gather that the goal of your WikiProject is to ameliorate a real or perceived global imbalance tilted toward "Western culture" in the English language literature!)
Amen.  I keep saying this, but here goes again: in my view, Wikipedia should be
#a free on-line general encyclopedia which aims to offer timely, accurate, and unbiased information on all topics of knowledge,
#a website where editors come to help implement this goal by volunteer labor, providing
#*the technical structure embodied in the wikicode used to prepare and serve up content,
#*a political and social structure (Jimbo recently mentioned a loving environment) which evolves to further this goal,
#a utopian social experiment in providing something of universal utility at a comparatively modest cost, founded on the core "open source" premise: large numbers of individuals will be willing and even eager to do good work for something other than money.
But in the view I have sadly come to after just over a year of active participation, Wikipedia is
#an anarchic forum where amateur pseudo-journalists can post more or less anonymous essays (or all too often, semicoherent rants) about controversial topical political and social issues, biased toward the populist political philosophy of leading members of the community,
#a playground for vandals, hoaxers, guerilla marketeers, and disgruntled fanatics pushing some idiosyncratic (sometimes hateful) point of view and eager to serve up slanted information, misinformation, and disinformation,
#a social club for anons (if that isn't a contradiction in terms).
Don't get me wrong: I have enjoyed the social aspects of WP and I think this is an essential part of attracting and retaining volunteer labor.  The core condraction, as I see it, is that WP cannot be both a project to build an unbiased and accurate encyclopedia, and a forum encouraging free and anonymous expression of minority viewpoints which would be given little if any space in a traditional encyclopedia. 
If Wikipedians really believe that the goal of WP is to build an encyclopedia, then I think that editing Wikipedia is a privilege, not a right, and the quality of any users edits must ultimately be evaluated in terms of the question: how well do these edits serve our readers?  If so, we must acknowledge that encouraging murky authorship (by allowing IP anon edits and multiple user accounts registered by a given individual) is incompatible with any serious expectation of responsible behavior, since it seems to me that taking responsiblity for what you write is an essential part of any good writing.
If on the other hand, perhaps following the tradition of anonymous printed essays established by the English fathers of civil liberty, Wikipedians conclude that what the world really needs is not another encyclopedia, but rather a global anonymous free speech forum, then Jimbo might be correct in refusing to ban anonymous edits.  Here I note that Wikipedia offers many advantages over UseNet, such as being able to serve up figures, images, and generally to present a more pleasant user interface than many newsreaders.
In other words, I think that Wikipedians are confronted with a choice:
#build a viable alternative to enormously expensive (and bulky!) print encyclopedias,
#build a viable alternative to anonymous UseNet forums.
I am not saying that the second might not be a laudable goal, I am just saying that these competing goals are mutually exclusive, and the Wikipedia commnity needs to decide which goal to pursue (and how to guide dissenters toward another forum better suited to their purpose). 
I came here to work (hard) toward the first goal, and have been left feeling rather undercut by recent comments by Jimbo which I read as an admission that given this choice, he chooses the second of these two alternatives.  Whether I have gotten this right or wrong, the same conclusion follows: the Wikimedia Board urgently needs to prepare an unambiguous and self-consistent mission statement enunciating the "official" goal of the Wikipedia.
Oh, yeah, here is what McHenry says about your project:
Ouch.  Well, you probably can't change the name, but you can--- and should--- rewrite your mission statement to take account of the distinction between balance and bias, since McHenry is quite correct in asserting that these are not the same things.
OK, don't shoot the messenger, please.---CH 22:52, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Robert McHenry's comments on this Wikiproject

message: The project page makes some definitive statements regarding age/ethnicity/culture of Wikipedia contributors. As a committee member who is constantly being asked for statistics regarding the make up of the community, I would really love to know what these statements are based on so I may direct journalists and researchers to the statistics which show this. - Amgine 00:41, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Demographics 

message: The run-on sentence that ate Clevelan---er Kyoto:
 WikiProject Ethnic Groups, which is moribund as of October 2004, but does have good ideas on how
 to give comparable treatment to groups that are liable to be actively represented by editors who
 are members of those groups and groups that are liable to be written about mainly by outsiders.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by ScarletSpiderDave (talk • contribs) .
:The project doesn't look moribund anymore, so I simply removed that explanation. Ruakh 16:27, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs Rewording?