Jump to content

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2015-08-19

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Signpost
Single-page Edition
WP:POST/1
19 August 2015

 

2015-08-19

WP:THREATENING2MEN: The English Wikipedia's misogynist infopolitics and the hegemony of the asshole consensus

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Bryce Peake

This op-ed is excerpted from an "open peer-reviewed" article that originally appeared in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. Academic references and footnotes can be found at that link.


The incident

Spring 2014 was a long semester, marked by a campus-wide anti-rape movement that took off at the University of Oregon (UO). In the wake of a high-profile case, administrators callously and robotically rehearsed the "one time is too many" – a catchphrase that through its rhetorical singularity renders campus sexual violence an "isolated issue". Arguments that UO was somehow unique or unusual in its unsafe environment and unethical public-relations approach to public safety became rampant in public forums and the comment sections of online articles.

The idea of writing campus sexual violence into Wikipedia was born of these circumstances, growing out of a conversation with campus activists around the US about universities' efforts to keep campus sexual violence invisible. By increasing the amount of freely available information on the long history of campus sexual violence around the country, we could provide information for people looking to learn about the ways UO was not isolated or unique, but part of a network – and a structure – of gendered violence in US colleges and universities.

I spent some five hours creating the Wikipedia category Schools under investigation for Title IX violations, which included a short introduction and links to all 72 colleges and universities that the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced were "under investigation" for Title IX and Clery Act violations. Alongside this category, I devoted the better part of a week to researching and writing up specific circumstances about campus sexual violence into the English Wikipedia's college and university articles, drawing on sources ranging from national newspapers to student publications documenting campus sexual violence on the 72 campuses.

Within 12 hours of finishing, my many hours of labor were completely undone: information about campus sexual violence was removed from college and university pages because it was not "defining" of the institution (WP:UNDUE), was from an "unreliable" source (WP:RELIABLE), because the events were too recent to be understood as historically relevant to institutions (WP:RECENTISM), or because they were written in a "biased" tone (WP:POV). The category I created – an index of schools announced under investigation by the federal Department of Education as part of a precedent-setting move towards transparency – was nominated for deletion (consensus driven) and speedy deletion (administratively executed in cases of defamatory content). Citing the range of editorial reverts on content referencing campus sexual violence, a group of Wikipedians successfully deleted content about campus sexual violence through what I'll refer to as WP:THREATENING2MEN, drawing on what I refer to later as the hegemony of the asshole consensus.

Here, I want to use my experience of writing campus sexual violence into Wikipedia to shine a light on misogynist information politics (infopolitics hereafter) on the so-called "encyclopedia anyone can edit". By misogynist infopolitics, I mean the ways in which "factual information" is defined and consequently produced through struggles concentrated around defining, preserving, and protecting a form of masculinity based on male privilege and misogyny that is always already defined in relation to femininity-as-inferior. On Wikipedia, a misogynist infopolitics dictates that "factual information" pertains to but does not threaten a sense of masculinity situated in a social world beyond the confines of Wikipedia. This sense of masculinity can be enacted and protected by both men and women. Thus, rather than "ontologizing" gender in criticizing Wikipedia's gendered hostilities, or focusing on the positivistic "how many women equals equality" question that defines Wikipedia's "gender gap" civilizing mission, I focus on how misogynist infopolitics define Wikipedians' interactive habits, shaping the social environment in ways that make Wikipedians of many genders and sexualities hostile to information that challenges forms of male privilege understood to be endangered by institutional diversity initiatives.

WikiLawyering, expertise, and domination

Broadly speaking, consensus (defined through a majoritarian politics) and WP:<POLICY> reign supreme in Wikipedia spaces. This notion of consensus has led quantitative scholars to argue that, when dealing with contentious debates, Wikipedians calmly and practically "rule with reason" through Wikipedia's various policies on what constitutes appropriate content for an encyclopedia. Against the grain of this belief in consensus, this essay examines the hostile environment that becomes normalized through seemingly reasonable "Wiki Policies", an environment that has resulted in assertions that Wikipedia must be protected from "a gender war" that introduces "biased ideology" about campus sexual violence into the otherwise "factual information" about US colleges and universities. This ethnography is not without its quantitative supporters: Kriplean and Beschastnikh for instance, have argued that WP:<POLICIES> are most prevalent in sites of heavy ideological conflict, while a joint University of Washington and HP Labs project has examined the hierarchy of policies mobilized in rhetorical "power plays" to remove or advocate for information inclusion. Through an ethnographic approach, however, I am able to go one step further than these quantitative studies to demonstrate how Wikipedians' "power plays," and the scientism mobilized to rationalize them as upholding "truth," are bound up in misogynist defenses of male privilege on Wikipedia.

I'm particularly interested in the ways that "ruling with reason" via WP:<POLICY> facilitates Wikipedians' misogynist attempts to maintain male privilege in the face of various Wikimedia Foundation initiatives to increase Wikipedia's diversity both in terms of content and users. For simplicity's sake, I codify "ruling with reason" as expertise, drawing on a long history of science and technology scholarship. Debates on talk pages and administrator boards, alongside those in edit summaries, are often not about the validity of information itself, but the metapragmatic dimensions of its inclusion as determined by Wikipedians with expertise. In the case of campus sexual violence, facts came under question not through debates about statistics and occurrences of sexual violence, but rather through debates about the value of including this "type" of content on Wikipedia as per WP:<POLICY>. In many instances, I was accused of bringing a "feminist bias" into an "otherwise neutral" or "objective" encyclopedic project—a process I outline below. This bias, according to many Wikipedians, compromised the supposed expertise of Wikipedians, and the value of the encyclopedia, in the eyes of an undefined evaluator with a god's eye perspective.

The expertise of Wikipedians on all things Wikipedia trumped any other form of expertise in knowledge production—such that knowledge about (and research on) campus sexual violence and its effects was never the real subject of debate. Instead, where Wikipedians are unable to compete on the terrain of facts and content expertise, they turn to hermeneutic arguments through a near infinite, always self referencing, system of WP:<POLICY>. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, these lawyeristic maneuvers are the most effective weapons for individuals who do not know very much about facts, as they allow Wikipedia editors to replace expertise about subject matter with expertise about Wikipedia's rules. The image of Wikipedia I describe in my article, through empirical grounding in my work writing campus sexual violence into Wikipedia, is a space where the primary focus is on the mastery of policy as a tool for domination – and not on the production of, or debates about, verifiable facts and actually existing knowledge.

Here, I want to note an important distinction between male privilege and misogyny. Where male privilege might be understood as a form of power granted to individuals based on assertions or assumptions about their gender, misogyny is the use of that power in acts of domination. While my ethnography of scientism and misogynist infopolitics analyzed the normalization of hostility in online "cultures" like Wikipedia, it also explores the boundaries and limitations of male privilege as seen by feminists and their allies. As a cis-gendered white man writing content into Wikipedia to raise awareness about the violent sexual practices of men at American universities, I naively assumed that I could assert my male privilege through "wikilawyering" and wiki-policies to even the playing field of what would be counted as "information". Through social interactions with other Wikipedians invested in the use of misogynist tactics to protect their sense of male privilege, I quickly learned that the translation of male privilege into a weapon against misogyny was (and continues to be) a failed strategy at best, an ineffective one at worst. Nonetheless, the experience of doing so is fruitful for understanding the gendered social environment left otherwise illegible to Wikipedians and outsiders.

Gender and Wikipedia expertise

As the comments to this revision of my essay may demonstrate, nothing makes Wikipedians more angry than a discussion of gender and feminism on Wikipedia. According to a BBC News report on sexism and the Wikimedia Foundation demographics survey, "The proportion of editors identifying as female hovers between 8% and 15%". Various stakeholders in Wikipedia fear that this gap has resulted in an online encyclopedia skewed toward a masculine bias, which has gradually become the basis (or zero-degree) from which all "legitimate" knowledge must be produced. As Adrianne Wadewitz wrote in 2013: "A lack of diversity amongst editors means that, for example, topics typically associated with femininity are typically underrepresented and often actively deleted." A recent international study of the gender demographics of Wikipedia articles about artists demonstrates this point, with women artists making up only 24% of all artists represented globally (see image at right).

In response to persistent problems around gender, the Foundation has attempted to address what they describe as a gender gap through both research and policy. This included establishing the Gender Gap Task Force, Gendergap-L, a mailing list for women and feminist Wikipedians, and a manifesto for change, each of which was overseen by Sue Gardner, the previous executive director. Her motivation, she wrote in the manifesto, was that Wikipedia needed to "help men understand the obstacles women face [as editors] and help them become better feminists." Filling the gender gap and making Wikipedian men feminists, she argued, would improve the overall quality of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia and a community.

Predictable outrage followed Gardner's statement. Critics argued that Sue Gardner was trying to "force content" into Wikipedia that "has a bias" by virtue of being "politically, not knowledge motivated." They posted statements like "Is Sue Gardner an Idiot" on Wikipedia Review. "Accusing Wikipedia culture of being 'trollish and misogynistic' is nothing less than a way to silence people who challenge mainstream feminism," one anonymous commenter wrote in response to another anonymous post declaring that "sexism = anything that challenges the misandry inherent in feminist discourse." "Closing the gender gap on Wikipedia" gave form to a wider crisis of masculinity taking shape across sites of knowledge production, one predicated on the decline of white male privilege through "diversity initiatives."

Where internet and forum comments respond to Gardner's assertions with emotional forms of outrage, protesting imbalanced forms of political power allotted to women and "political correctness," Wikipedians responded "rationally" through the Byzantine system of Wikipedia policies targeted at the alleged emotionalism and bias of Gardner's "gender war." This maneuver is important: while one commenter suggested that addressing the gender gap on Wikipedia was "politically, not knowledge motivated," the debate that ensued among Wikipedians was also not motivated by knowledge in terms of information. Instead, the debate focused on adherence to Wikipedia's various rules about what counts as knowledge according to those who control the rules' use and circulation. Wikipedians' focus, in other words, was on control via "ruling with reason", not the validity of the information itself.

Expertise and power

Wikipedians' mastery of policy as a responsive tool is what constitutes what I call "Wikipedian expertise", since it marks out a space of specialization for Wikipedians and, importantly, a space that transcends "subject matter" expertise. Expertise, as I use it here, does not diverge from the Oxford English Dictionary definition: "an authority by reason of special skill, training or knowledge." Where I do diverge is in my cultural evaluation of the concept of expertise and its deployment. Anthropologists of science and technology have described how "the enactment of expertise not only determines the value of cultural objects… it also confers value on those who interact with these objects". For Wikipedians, the authority granted by agreement based on Wikipedian expertise is constituted by an aggressive dismissal of expert knowledge as biased using WP:<POLICIES>, and a replacement of expert knowledge with mastery over Wikipedia's various policies for designating "legitimate" information. Wikipedian expertise, in other words, functions in contrast to subject matter expertise in other domains. It is metapragmatic: focused on speech about speech, form rather than content. According to science and technology scholars, once formalized through practices, the political constitution of (Wikipedians') expertise becomes "placeless, without histories or corruptible archives to confound its designs on power" – a particularly gendered form of power, no less.

Discourse

Wikipedia's automated archiving provides an extensive on-site history that makes Wikipedians' maneuvers for (if not designs on) power highly legible as tactics for the preservation of male privilege. In multiple instances, for example, scientistic logic comes to trump the scientific evaluations of researchers examining the gender gap. "It is important to gather any such evidence," one Wikipedian wrote on the Gender Gap Task Force talkpage. "Because in general we don't know the gender of our fellow editors, it is not clear to me how we can establish a record of the facts." "The big objection to working to end the gender gap," another Wikipedian wrote on the gender gap mailing list, "has been that 'there's no proof it exists/is important/we can change it/etc'" – an objection that occurs in the face of extensive research on and coverage of the gender gap. In response to those citing this scholarship come accusations of WP:NPOV. "The scientists were biased." "The methods are erroneous." "There is no real research on the topic, just feminist bluster."

At the same time as questioning "scientific" findings for their underlying logic, Wikipedians defer to scientistic arguments in their justifications for including offensive content. Here, I borrow the concept of "scientistic" from Pierre Bourdieu to refer to the ways in which the language and rhetoric of science is mobilized in lawyeristic maneuvers to grant epistemic authority to acts of domination. Writing of one instance when some users claimed that the recurring photographs of failed breast augmentation in the mastectomy article were offensive, one Wikipedian argued "That's basic science: experiment and control." Pulling scientistic maneuver and the bias of science together, yet another user argued that "I really don't understand the reluctance evident throughout this project to deal in verifiable facts rather than feminist bluster." The result of these disruptions-of-scientific debate:

Wikipedians argued that research on Wikipedia's gender bias – like those sources that document domestic violence and misogyny in other Wikipedia articles – are themselves "biased" and "invalid" because they don't include information about men. To demonstrate this bias, Wikipedians either engage in shallow methodological critiques or cite a litany of WP:<POLICY>. Notably, they don't add the so-called missing men to these articles. Nor do they engage with falsifiable research that demonstrates all of this is just "feminist bluster". It becomes clear that the intention is not to improve content (e.g. add the missing men or "proper" research), but to prevent the publication of content.

Like Latour's dissenter, who distinguishes himself from the critic by doubting everything that comes into question, Wikipedians call into question the addition of "gendered" – meaning feminized, or anti-masculinizing – information, because they have a stake in the metapragmatic universe affected by the pragmatic effects of such information, regardless of the authoritativeness of the knowledge and/or knowledge producer. Take, for example, the debate around the gender gap itself, reported in major national sources and supported by research funded by agencies like the US National Science Foundation. "Among the men and women with whom I am familiar," a disruptive editor on the Gender Gap Task Force wrote, "there is no gender-related difference with respect to their comfort with markup text. If there was no identified empirical basis for this conclusion, it appears to be a prima facie example of gender bias. (WP:NPOV)" WP:NPOV, here, signifies that the articles lack the proper grounding in a masculine disposition that can go without saying because it is assumed without saying in the public sphere of knowledge production. Hence, "research" on Wikipedia's gender gap is not a valid argument for an article or section existing because WP:NPOV, it is not our (men's) POV and violates our sense of WP:RECENTISM and WP:UNDUE, and WP:CONSENSUS Wikipedia is about consensus and not truth, so please respect WP:BRD. Despite (or perhaps because of) assertions that WP: are politically neutral and exist outside of the sociohistorical interactions, they end up absorbing, translating, and re-circulating epistemic forms of masculine domination on Wikipedia.

While "filling the gender gap" is a problematic approach to rectifying Wikipedia's misogynist infopolitics, as I discuss in the conclusion to this article, it does reveal the ways in which gender elicits widespread fights that no other category of difference – race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, or class – does. For example, within six hours of TMZ's release of the Donald Sterling tapes, in which the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers demanded that his girlfriend "not bring black people to my games," Wikipedians had included information and transcripts from the story – all before network news had a chance to report on the incident. Throughout the transcript of Wikipedia edits during this controversy, there were no debates as to whether the information belonged in the article. As one Wikipedian pre-emptively wrote,

The rapidity with which Wikipedians wrote Sterling's racism into Wikipedia offers a stark contrast to the response to additions regarding gender violence. Take for example, the Ray Rice domestic violence controversy. Although reliable sources existed regarding Rice's behavior, sections referencing it were repeatedly deleted and a debate ensued on the talk page and history regarding what constituted assault and/or domestic violence. Further debate ensued about the reliability of the surveillance video released of Rice punching his partner: "The video is not clear and it is not discernible whether he is trying to push her away or hitting her," – reasoning that prompted administrators to semi-protect the page from editing in "false accusations." Not once was the authenticity or reliability of the Sterling audio tapes questioned, despite the ease with which audio can be more easily manipulated than video. The articles and talk pages of contentious figures like Bill Cosby and O.J. Simpson bear a striking resemblance to this strange lawyerism.

Similarly, the history of the Elliot Rodger article (merged with the 2014 Isla Vista killings) reveals debates over whether he should be included in the category "violence against men" instead of "misogyny," whether the word "misogyny" should be used since he killed more men than women, and if there should even be a section entitled "misogyny" given the "bias" of the term. One editor wrote "it ["misogyny" appearing as a motive] smelled like someone waiting until everyone else has lost interest, and then trying to sneak in a POV change." Prior to that, the section referencing misogyny was anonymously deleted, sources typically accepted as reliable questioned, and an argument about whether misogyny constituted a motive occurred – an argument that was based on Wikipedia's definitions of neutrality, and not on reliable criminology sources detailing what a motive "is." In the interests of so-called "neutrality" and "objectivity," Wikipedians sought to deny Rodger's own assertions of misogynistic intent because they revealed the ways in which something else – male privilege – is at stake on Wikipedia. As with Wikipedia itself, it is by concealing the legible forms of misogyny that male privilege can thrive undeterred and – at least ideologically – undetected.

Campus sexual violence

My work adding information about campus sexual violence was met with similar forms of interaction, where the only substantial replies – substantial in the sense that they are humored by other Wikipedians, or met with more policy citations – are those that contain further policy citations. Otherwise, a Wikipedian adding information opposed by policies is met with "Please follow Wikipedia policies." Alongside these arguments were constant references to scientistic discourses of "objectivity" and "verifiability," often without understandings of these terms outside WP:. Thus, while a scientistic discourse underlies the logical system of Wikipedian policies, it is an actuarial and lawyeristic episteme structured by a history of encyclopedic male privilege that confers expertise on Wikipedians as gatekeepers of legitimate knowledge. In the context of Wikipedia's gender gap, the use of policies to "rule with reason," is in essence a façade for maintaining a misogynist infopolitics fundamentally opposed to information threatening to male privilege both on and beyond Wikipedia – regardless of how well-sourced. In this sense, as I describe in the next section, the whole of WP: used to exclude and censor "gendered" and thus "biased" information is reducible to one: WP:THREATENING2MEN.

WP:THREATENING2MEN

I now focus on the repetitive claims to neutrality made through the panoply of WP:THREATENING2MEN. Central to these, and indeed a policy that appears to be core in Wikipedians' resistance to "gendered" information in general, is WP:NPOV. The first time I encountered WP:NPOV while writing about campus sexual violence on Wikipedia was in relation to edits in the leads of articles. The lead, or the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article, "should define the topic, establish context ... and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies." In response to adding information about campus sexual violence at the University of Chicago, one user wrote on my talk page:

Following a lengthy debate about the appropriateness of this information for leads, I began adding "controversies" sections as per consensus at WikiProject Universities. These were modeled after the long-standing information at the article for Occidental College, which has been a leader in campus sexual violence activism. Where information about campus sexual violence wasn't necessarily available in the "defining" part of the article, it was prominently displayed in the table of contents for each article. Based on consensus, I also created a category entitled "Schools under investigation for Title IX violations." Within two weeks, a group of Wikipedians nominated the category for deletion. WP:NPOV was central in the discussion that was meant to lead to a consensus – which is actually processed as a majoritarian vote, rather than a form of compromise. This type of consensus becomes a way of shutting out dissenting or different perspectives, rather than creating a "comprehensive" encyclopedia.

From these examples, it appears that WP:NPOV is an amorphous category, in which Wikipedians experience an affront to a poorly defined notion of objectivity. This amorphousness of neutrality and objectivity is not restricted to edits regarding campus sexual violence. As information about current Title IX investigations and previous Title IX/Clery violations at colleges and universities was deleted, Wikipedians protested a violation of a metaphysical neutrality that was not defined by benchmarks, but rather "feelings" that "political" information was not information at all. Because campus sexual violence disproportionately affects women, who are located within institutions traditionally gendered male, and because the experience of campuses as sexually violent social spheres exists outside of the predominantly masculine standpoint epistemology of Wikipedians, to these men, adding information about campus sexual violence "felt like" a front for "inserting politics" into otherwise neutral (not social) spheres of information. To "rule with reason" by feeling – and not by "objective" (i.e., external) benchmarks – seems to be an internal contradiction lost on these Wikipedians.

Categorization

Perhaps the most demonstrative case of feeling defining neutrality was in regard to the category that I created to organize schools that were under investigation by the Department of Education. Categories function as an indexing tool, showing relationships among discrete articles. In a debate about the "value" of the category, one editor wrote that:

The Wikipedian's assumption here is that the creation of the category was not driven by the verifiable, factual nature of the listing of schools under investigation for Title IX violations as a historical precedent, but a deeper feminist conspiracy against some undefined neutrality on Wikipedia and against universities more generally. Throughout the comment, this Wikipedian makes both metapragmatic gestures to forms of expertise – "Speaking as a practicing lawyer, ... It flies in the face of WP:NPOV, the presumption of innocence, and common sense." The Wikipedian further appeals to a situated form of universal knowledge called common sense, which requires no supportive citations. How, for instance, could this Wikipedian speak from a neutral point of view, if, "speaking as a practicing lawyer, I find this category offensive"? And how does one's editing agenda – taken neutrally as things people like to edit, pedantically as an accusation of being "political" – preclude the facticity of information?

The situatedness of knowledge being pointed out here is then turned on its head by another commenter advocating for deletion. "Temporary cat[egory] at best, non-defining [i.e. does not carry an essence of the topic] at worst, subjective because "by whom" is wholly omitted. Category:Foos being investigated for XXX by YYY." In this terse and telegraphic phrase, this user demands that the encyclopedic subject be clearly grounded in its "gendered" social position to prove it is subjective, not objective like the knowledge of the Wikipedian himself.

But, just as my male privilege as a Wikipedian ends at the point in which I endanger male privilege (and become mistaken as a "female" editor), so too does the power of the lawyeristic "relation of ruling" end when it confronts misogyny. Responding to the first "lawyer," another Wikipedian wrote that the editor "is not the only attorney on wikipedia ... Title IX is not a criminal statute, it's a civil rights statute." The initial lawyer's response was to state that other lawyers had advocated for deletion as well, making this Wikipedian's legal appeal moot in the face of consensus. To be a lawyer, then, is to be authoritative in arguing against threats to male privilege and misogyny, yet irrelevant if not biased when threatening male privilege. Such is the nature of what Dorothy Smith has called "relations of ruling", wherein positions that legitimate "the set of categories, the development of methods of filling categories, and of articulation descriptive categories ... to constitute 'what actually happened'" are granted authority only insofar as they "arise in and as part of an operation of the state and professional extensions of state interest." One need only replace "state" with Wikipedia to make sense of the status of the lawyeristic standpoint.

NPOV, recentism, and undue policies

Where WP:NPOV and accusations of "biased" standpoints often appear as an umbrella responses to "bias" – responses based on Wikipedians' metaphysical position that render particular social relationships as objects – they lack a temporal dimension. Thus, these responses are vulnerable to historical arguments and information, such as the long history of campus sexual violence in the United States. Wikipedians therefore attempt to use an "objectified" longue durée to justify the exclusion of campus sexual violence from Wikipedia pages. They do so through two arguments, WP:UNDUE and WP:RECENTISM. To add an important detail from the contemporary moment, that colleges and universities have been "put on notice" fails to take into account the long history of universities (see above quote regarding University of Chicago), and is clearly being asserted because of a minority viewpoint that believes it is important. "This was removed due to WP:RECENTISM and WP:UNDUE. If something comes from the investigation, then perhaps it makes sense to include it," a Wikipedian wrote in an edit summary for The Catholic University of America. Another Wikipedian argued at WikiProject Universities that "This controversy is not major in the scope of these universities' history." In short, the meaning of WP:RECENTISM and WP:UNDUE is supported by a history that Wikipedians write themselves, yet presume to exist as an object outside of their own creation. One Wikipedian sums this up in his explanation of why campus sexual violence did not belong on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill article, writing that:

Indeed, this future-oriented argument has a name and associated Wikipedia policy: WP:10YEARS. "In ten years will this addition still appear relevant?" the policy reads. As one Wikipedian wrote, nominating the article on the Title IX investigation announcement made by the Office of Civil Rights in 2014 for deletion:

Transformed into a thing without creator, an object of history with no history itself, the exclusion of campus sexual violence from college and university Wikipedia articles itself becomes the reason for its exclusion from Wikipedia articles – regardless of the objective facts about campus sexual violence, or its long history. In instances when such a history is provided, it is deleted for "WP:UNDUE," because it is not recorded for other universities. When articles are provided to create such a history, as was the case in one instance, it was renamed by another Wikipedian, and then a third argued that based on the name it was not an appropriate article. When a Wikipedian claimed that the removal of information about campus sexual violence was disruptive, pointing to the existing article on "Higher Education Institutions Announced in Title IX and Clery Investigation," the Wikipedian erasing the content nominated the article on the investigations for deletion in order to justify future deletions of information about campus sexual violence from university and college pages.

The surface assertion here, of course, is that American colleges and universities do not have a long history of sexual violence because it is not present on Wikipedia pages. One Wikipedian suggests as much on the talk page for the Universities project, arguing that adding information about campus sexual violence creates an imbalance in information. "First, an investigation is just an investigation… I'm sure there have been many investigations over the years, but these would be highlighted just because they're currently in progress." With few exceptions (e.g., Occidental College), none of the Wikipedia pages for colleges and universities included on the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights list of investigations have information regarding campus sexual violence – despite some universities being found in non-compliance on multiple instances. That this information is missing reflects not simply an oversight but a missed sight: the lack of a point of view in which sexual violence is important to the histories of American colleges and universities. This is the very point of view occluded by WP:THREATENING2MEN.

Citing a veritable panoply of WP: is the primary tactic for "wearing down" political opposition to the status quo, and WP:THREATENING2MEN is forged in a battle that goes relatively unseen as men and women alike abandon the collaborative work of writing Wikipedia out of sheer exhaustion. Through wikilawyering, as it is referred to on Wikipedia, facts external to the social sphere in which WP:THREATENING2MEN is crafted are clearly in violation of WP:THREATENING2MEN. For many potential Wikipedians invested in adding "controversial" content about gender – again, for Wikipedians, meaning women – the uneven amount of time spent debating whether or not the New York Times or Department of Education are reliable sources via an obscure, self-referential and seemingly infinite set of policies is hardly worth the work of contributing – in part because there is no real contribution made by these debates, in which consensus is reached through one-sided decisions to erase "biased" information. That consensus process is a crucial piece of the hegemony of the asshole consensus.

The hegemony of the asshole consensus

Hegemony, as Antonio Gramsci describes it in the Prison Notebooks, is a concept that involves a wearing down of the opposition to the point of political resignation.

Where the endless citation of policies constitute the erosive dimension of hegemony, the consensus process promotes and facilitates resignation to the hegemony of the asshole consensus on the part of many users - both those intentially oppositional and those who "go with the flow." Asshole, here, is a theoretical concept and not (simply) a pejorative: assholes, Aaron James argues in his book Assholes: A Theory, are driven by a sense of self-entitlement that is justified by pragmatic reasoning in the face of moral or epistemic debates. In order for the hermeneutic circle that constitutes WP:THREATENING2MEN to remain tightly sealed, and thus the self-entitlement of Wikipedians fully realized, there is a strong need for social forms of enforcement, or what Antonio Gramsci has called relations of force: symbolically violent forms of interaction that seek to demonstrate the necessary and sufficient conditions for public participation in Wikipedia.

The social benefits and/or costs of Wikipedia's reliance on consensus for producing authoritative qua factually accurate information has been widely debated in terms of reliability. What is often missing from this debate, however, are the terms on which and through which consensus is produced. Where the exhausting circularity of WP:THREATENING2MEN chases off a majority of potential Wikipedia editors, my experience of writing campus sexual violence into Wikipedia revealed the extent to which those that remain are anything but free to contribute in ways they see fit – and are often subjected to implicit threats or explicit acts of harassment. Rather than concentrate on the disjunction between ideal consensus and its failed practice, this section examines Wikipedians' practice of consensus making, particularly as it revolves around forms of coercion via anticipation, paranoia, and experiences of harassment that were intended to fortify the masculine subject position that forms the conventional zero-degree of knowledge production on Wikipedia. Yet, the binary between harasser/harassed does not reflect the complex reality of Wikipedia's environment. What makes Wikipedia unique, or what makes Wikipedians a unique type of asshole, to re-summon Aaron James, is their combined ability to force everyone around them to resign to being an asshole too as a strange survival strategy.

In the consensus process, Wikipedians do not vote or jury, but rather engage in a "rational" and "civil" conversation about the value of information based on adherence to Wikipedia's policies. The success or failure of consensus has different results depending on the level of conversation. For deletion, for instance, positive consensus results in the deletion of the content under debate. In the instance of the category of "2014 Announcement of Schools Under Investigation for Mishandling Campus Sexual Violence," consensus was defined through a majoritarian process where people "voted" for removal because of violations of WP:THREATENING2MEN, with one person – me, the creator – "voting" to keep the category. Like other previous contradictions, the fact that consensus was reached by voting was lost on these Wikipedians.

This, then, constitutes the asshole consensus: consensus about the exclusion of information produced out of a collective, metapragmatic investment in WP:THREATENING2MEN, rather than meeting Wikipedia's goal of being the most comprehensive encyclopedia on Earth. Yet the asshole consensus is not totalitarian, nor necessarily a conspiracy, but, rather, a complex hegemonic structure that is produced out of erosion and resignation. On multiple occasions, I received messages of support via email and Wikipedia's messaging service. As one messenger wrote, "This work is really important to me, and I wish I could help. But if I do these guys will flip all of my revisions. I'm sorry." Another discussed how important this information could be. "We should definitely document all of this history and add it. But I can't. I get enough shit for writing about women mathematicians. I won't even weigh in on the debate because of how toxic it is." As Joseph McGlynn and Brian Richardson write about the experiences of whistleblowers at colleges and universities, individuals use forms of moral support in private, exacerbating – if not participating in – the public alienation of dissenting voices.

In some cases, the coercive nature of consent was such that individuals who had previously sent me messages of support then publicly supported the deletion of information. This was most typically the case when individuals expected to weigh in (either because of their status as editors working on college and university pages, or because of the particular place or article being written) at first resisted doing so because of their support for the inclusion of this information. When they did register opposition, they focused on the failure or challenge to Wikipedia policies, and not the content per se, for removing content or voicing support for removal. Their deference, to return to James, disregards the importance of information. Framed both by a moral argument for equal representations of experiences at universities and a moral argument for writing "comprehensive histories" of colleges and universities, these editors defer to pragmatic guidelines that are made to appear external to, and not implicated in, the social relations of force deployed in debates about including information about campus sexual violence.

In short, the hegemony of the asshole consensus has the power to transform everyone into an asshole. But the blame does not lie with every user. I discuss the conflicted motives of some Wikipedians in order to remind us that Wikipedians' motivations are complex webs of practice that are not reducible to a misogynist intention in all cases. Still, we should not discount the impacts of these complex behaviors – however ideological, however resignatory – in producing and maintaining a hostile environment on Wikipedia.

What is to be done?

The rhetoric of the gender gap fails to do the very real and actual cultural work necessary for transforming Wikipedia into an equitable space. Indeed, it may actually do more harm than good: colleges and universities, for example, have approached diversity initiatives, increasing a phenotypical diversity (ontological solution) to counter forms of discrimination (epistemological/cultural issue) that institutions of higher education were in part responsible for producing. The result for American colleges and universities is the very campus sexual violence epidemic I attempted to write into Wikipedia. And, while the consequences for dumping women into the violent space of Wikipedia may not be as dire, there is an ethical dimension to subjecting people historically marginalized by symbolic violence to that very same symbolic violence in order to further the enterprise of "making Wikipedia better." This is a very real challenge that has too often gone un-addressed in feminist organizations' collaborations with WMF.

Fixing Wikipedia, to bring these threads together, will fix the gender gap; throwing women into the gender gap will not fix Wikipedia. Making Wikipedia better requires not simply the addition of women, but the creation of a space of multiple points of view. Doing so will first require a major cultural shift amongst Wikipedians. Given the centrality of WP:THREATENING2MEN – that entirely self-referential system of pragmatic justifications that transforms everyone into an asshole – the best start may be to stop arguing about Wikipedia's policies for inclusivity, or at minimum, reduce the number of policies to a set of concretely defined criteria. In light of the fact that individuals abuse the WP:<POLICY> system as a means of policing and censorship, while ignoring the policies that encourage collaboration, if Wikipedia were to require that debates occur on the terrain of facts, rather than in the adversarial terrains of "law" and "lawyerism," that would go far in confronting the misogyny facilitated by WP:THREATENING2MEN and the hegemony of the asshole consensus.

Transforming policies would also serve as an epistemological rupture, through which Wikipedians would be forced to leave behind the various pretensions and habitus generated through its current toxic culture to reformulate what Wikipedia represents — a space where facts are grounded in multiple points of view rather than censored when they deviate from a single monolithic one. In order to establish healthier habits and traditions, the Wikimedia Foundation would have to actively cultivate a climate of respect. Culture, Raymond Williams would be quick to point out, is derived from cultivation.

To conclude, the broader significance of this article lies in making legible the recursive relationship, the "cultural" collusion, between misogynist technologies of seemingly neutral policies and the silence those policies are used to enforce in sites of knowledge production where men understand/perceive male privilege to be under attack. In this way, the online community of Wikipedia is homologous to many colleges' and universities' bureaucratic responses to campus sexual violence. Arguments for stricter sanctions on and control over rape-supportive subcultures, particularly athletics and Greek life, are met with responses regarding "limitation of resources" and "best interests of students." Faculty members who step out of line are frequently described as "difficult people" who are unable to "understand how the rules work" – an argument often made by discrediting empirical evidence or personal experience through lawyeristic, actuarial arguments about scientific validity, as is done on Wikipedia. These are events that sound all too familiar to those of us who edit articles and create content about gender, race, colonialism, sexuality, poverty, and oppression on Wikipedia. Wikipedia exists as a microcosm – perhaps an amplification – of a cultural moment when campus sexual assault is coming to the fore of societal consciousness in domains traditionally controlled by men. What is needed is an end to WP:THREATENING2MEN and the hegemony of the asshole consensus in all of its institutional manifestations.

Bryce Peake is an Assistant Professor of Media & Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; his research focuses on media praxis, ethnography, and the history(s) of science and technology.
The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should use our opinion desk.




Reader comments

2015-08-19

Politically controversial science; "Wikipedia hates women"

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Gamaliel

Paper on politically controversial science articles attracts attention

Articles examined in the study

Politically controversial articles

Non-controversial articles

A new article in the academic journal PLOS ONE about Wikipedia's science coverage has attracted media attention. In the article "Content Volatility of Scientific Topics in Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale", Professor Adam M. Wilson of the State University of New York at Buffalo and Professor Gene E. Likens of the University of Connecticut write:

The article prompted alarming media coverage. Gizmodo warned that "Anti-Science Trolls are Starting Edit Wars on Wikipedia", writing "especially dedicated trolls have been sabotaging entries on politically controversial science topics like evolution and global warming." At the Washington Post, science journalist Chris Mooney wrote "What Wikipedia edits can tell us about the politicization of science", noting that "on these contentious topics, science doubters are constantly trying to get their point of view through, even as other Wikipedia editors steadily push back."

The Wikimedia Foundation disputed the findings of the paper to both publications, each quoting a statement from Juliet Barbara, senior communications manager: "The authors of this study do not seem to have successfully correlated the frequency of edits to controversial articles with an increased likelihood of inaccuracy." Barbara and Katherine Maher, chief communications officer, wrote a post on the official Wikimedia blog, which noted:

Wikipedia editors also took issue with the paper. At ScienceBlogs, Dr. William Connolley (William M. Connolley), a Wikipedia editor with a long history of editing in politically-controversial scientific areas, dismissed the paper as "laughably thin" and "largely useless". The coverage prompted a lively discussion on User talk:Jimbo Wales, where Guy Macon wrote "I am shocked -- shocked I tell you -- to find out that Wikipedia articles that attract more readers also tend to have more edits."

In the Post, Mooney discusses the phenomenon of an article like acid rain, the science of which was once hotly contested politically but now receives little media attention. He writes:

(Aug. 14-18)

"Wikipedia hates women", writes long-time editor

Related articles
gender gap

Images on Wikipedia "amplify gender bias"
2 March 2024

Scribing, searching, soliciting, spying, and systemic bias
31 October 2022

Measuring gender diversity in Wikipedia articles
29 May 2022

Cherchez une femme
28 June 2020

Female scholars underrepresented; whitepaper on Wikidata and libraries; undo patterns reveal editor hierarchy
30 April 2019

More articles

The gaps in our knowledge of our gaps
30 April 2019

It's time we look past Women in Red to counter systemic bias
26 April 2018

Revenge of "I can’t believe we didn’t have an article on ..."
9 March 2016

Wikipedian is break-out star of International Women's Day; dinosaur art; Wikipedia's new iOS app and its fight for market share
9 March 2016

The new alchemy: turning online harassment into Wikipedia articles on women scientists
9 March 2016

Wikipedia and paid labour; Swedish gender gap; how verifiable is "verifiable"?
2 March 2016

Shit I cannot believe we had to fucking write this month
17 February 2016

Teaching Wikipedia, Does advertising the gender gap help or hurt Wikipedia?
6 January 2016

Women in Red—using teamwork and partnerships to elevate online and offline collaborations
16 December 2015

"Wikipedia's hostility to women"
21 October 2015

Women and Wikipedia: the world is watching
21 October 2015

No men beyond this point: the proposal to create a no-men space on Wikipedia
4 February 2015

Study tour controversy; class tackles the gender gap
31 December 2014

Gender gap and skills gap; academic citations on the rise; European food cultures
26 November 2014

Banning Policy, Gender Gap, and Waldorf education
24 September 2014

IEG funding for women's stories—a new approach to the gender gap
4 June 2014

Women's history, what we're missing, and why it matters
12 March 2012

Gender gap and conflict aversion; collaboration on breaking news; effects of leadership on participation; legacy of Public Policy Initiative
27 February 2012

Bell Pottinger investigation, Gardner on gender gap, and another plagiarist caught red-handed
12 December 2011

Article promotion by collaboration; deleted revisions; Wikipedia's use of open access; readers unimpressed by FAs; swine flu anxiety
29 August 2011

Wikipedia a "sausage fest", Chicago Wikipedians ("the people you've probably plagiarized"), and other silly season stories
15 August 2011

Israeli news focuses on Wikimania; worldwide coverage of contributor decline and gender gap; brief news
8 August 2011

Gender gap and sexual images; India consultant; brief news
21 February 2011

Foundation report; gender statistics; DMCA takedowns; brief news
14 February 2011

Widespread discussions about the low participation of women in Wikipedia
7 February 2011

Facebook hack; gender gap; What is the Wikipedia "community"?; brief news
31 January 2011

In Cracked, a humor publication which also discusses internet culture with varying degrees of seriousness, Wikipedia editor and administrator Abigail Brady (Morwen) (with Cracked editor J.F. Sargent) writes "Wikipedia Hates Women: 4 Dark Sides of The Site We All Use", discussing her experiences as a trans woman Wikipedia editor.

Brady began editing Wikipedia in 2003, when Wikipedia coverage was extremely spotty. As the number of articles and editors exploded, the disputes became more contentious and personal:

As harassment increased in general on Wikipedia, Brady writes that "I decided to keep my head down and focus on articles about entertainment" out of fear of real-life consequences. Yet the harassment continued, including a series of hostile interactions with another administrator. She writes:

Due to her involvement in the 2013 Chelsea Manning naming dispute Arbitration case (see previous Signpost coverage, Brady writes that she was subject to transphobic harassment and as a result chose to leave Wikipedia.

She concludes:

A number of editors expressed a desire for the Wikimedia Foundation to address the issues raised by Brady's article. EvergreenFir wrote "I'm thinking the only way things will change is through WMF intervention. Too much entrenchment, entitlement, and outright disbelief that anything is wrong." Jimmy Wales declared that "I will fight all the way to the top (and can guarantee success at that level, if there is community backing) at the Foundation to enforce strong community demand for positive change." Other editors dismissed the article. With the edit summary "Gender schmender", GoodDay wrote: "This female/male editors issue should be treated as irrelevant, by English Wikipedia. We're all Wikipedians, leave it at that." On Facebook, Tim Davenport (Carrite), a 2015 candidate for the WMF Board of Trustees, mocked the article: "...alas, there are mean people on the internet! And there aren't enough female editors and stuff." (Aug. 15)

"Bogus Wikipedia page" alleged to support domain name application

The domain name system

Domain Incite, a blog run by domain name industry analyst Kevin Murphy, has accused DotMusic Limited of using a "bogus Wikipedia page" to support its application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for .music, a proposed new generic top-level domain (gTLD).

Murphy claimed that the Wikipedia article music community, created in October 2014 by Dr. Blofeld, took text from the 2012 application of DotMusic Limited, highlighting three examples in particular. While the Wikipedia article created by Dr. Blofeld cited eleven sources, the particular sentences highlighted by Murphy were not individually cited.

2012 DotMusic application 2014 Wikipedia article
The Community is a strictly delineated and organized community of individuals, organizations and business, a “logical alliance of communities of a similar nature (“COMMUNITY”)”, that relate to music... Music community is defined as a logical alliance of interdependent communities that are related to music...
The Community and the .MUSIC string share a core value system of artistic expression with diverse, niche subcultures and socio-economic interactions between music creators, their value chain, distribution channel, and ultimately engaging fans as well as other music constituents subscribing to common ideals. The music industry shares a cohesive and interconnected structure of artistic expression, with diverse subcultures and socio-economic interactions between music creators, their value chain, distribution channel and fans subscribing to common ideals.
Under such structured context music consumption becomes possible regardless whether the transaction is commercial and non-commercial (M. Talbot, Business of Music, 2002). Under such structured context music consumption becomes possible regardless whether the transaction is commercial and non-commercial.

Murphy points out that DotMusic's website declares that its definition of "music community" is "confirmed by Wikipedia" and noted that the phrase "logical alliance" employed by both DotMusic and Wikipedia "originates in the ICANN Applicant Guidebook".

In the comments of the blog post, DotMusic founder Constantine Roussos wrote "I did not create the Wikipedia page. No-one from my team did either." On Wikipedia, Dr. Blofeld wrote "I have never heard of the name DotMusic Limited or a 'new gTLD application'...The fact is I've contributed to a massive range of subjects and I'm sure once in a while somebody is going to complain about something or think something's suspicious. It's laughable that they would think I'd be in a such a position to have carried that off!" Murphy responded "Yet he used two sentences from the application without attribution in his article. If there’s an innocent explanation for that, I’d love to hear it and will be happy to correct anything I’ve got wrong."

The music community article is currently under discussion at Articles for deletion. (Aug. 10)



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.



Reader comments

2015-08-19

Dead parrots, live frogs, a symbolic kiss and what do we get? Enrique Iglesias!

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Xanthomelanoussprog, Hafspajen and Resident Mario
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 2 to 8 August.
Parrot hunting on Mauritius

Five featured articles were promoted this week.

  • Annunciation (Memling) (nominated by Victoriaearle and Ceoil) Victoria's and Ceoil's new featured art piece. Painted in 1489 by the Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling, this artwork depicts the Virgin Mary in a domestic bedchamber receiving the richly dressed Archangel Gabriel and two attendant angels. It is the Annunciation, the moment in time when the Virgin receives the news that she will bear the Son of God. The 15th-century viewers would have understood the hidden language of the objects and the lighting: the white lilies in the painting symbolize the purity of the Virgin, as does the light shining on the sideboard and passing through the glass of the water flask, the candle-holder, the dove above her head in a halo is the symbol of the Holy Spirit, while the irises are symbols of suffering. The light was associated with Mary and the incarnation, and it has a special significance in the painting, symbolizing the divine light.
  • Chetro Ketl (nominated by Rationalobserver) Chetro Ketl is a structure of a type known as a great house, which was built by the Ancestral Puebloans staring in 990 CE and nearing completion circa 1075 CE. It's situated in Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwest New Mexico, USA.
  • History of Liverpool F.C. (1892–1959) (nominated by NapHit) Liverpool Football Club were founded when local brewer John Houlding found himself the owner of a football ground without a football team. The ground at Anfield had been rented to Everton Football Club; Houlding put pressure on the club to buy the ground, which would have given him a substantial profit. They decamped, and Houghton decided to form a new club, also called Everton. The Football League forced him to adopt another name, thus depriving generations of footy fans of the chance of seeing Everton playing with themselves. He chose "Liverpool", and dispatched his manager John McKenna on a recruiting trip in Scotland. The entirely Scottish team played their first match on 1 September 1892 , a friendly against Rotherham Town which Liverpool won 7–1. By the 1950s the club had gone into a slow decline. In 1959 (the endpoint of this article) Bill Shankly was appointed manager. He stayed in the job until his retirement in 1974.
  • Mascarene grey parakeet (nominated by FunkMonk) The Mascarene grey parakeet was endemic to Mauritius and Réunion, but has been extinct since the 1760s. The parakeets were hunted for food although they were regarded as lean and tough meat. When caught a bird would cry out- the cry attracted hundreds of parakeets who would wheel around the trapped individual. Hunters would then bat the parakeets out of the sky with sticks. Being a forest dweller, the deforestation of the islands by slash-and-burn contributed to their decline.
  • Ursa Minor (nominated by Casliber) Ursa Minor or the Little Bear is a star constellation in the northern sky. The brightest star in the constellation is Polaris, otherwise known as the North Star, whose apparent position is close to the north celestial pole. Mariners have used this star for navigation since time immemorial. There is also a constellation called Ursa Major, also known as the Great Bear .
A very Bulgar amphibian: Kiss me!!
The Bulgarian Toad with the Twisted Lip: don't kiss that one, it might turn into Othello, no good.

Eight featured lists were promoted this week.

Golden doubloons from the Duchy of Parma
Pachygrapsus marmoratus
Tom Roberts: Shearing the rams
Atelopus limosus
Borgund Stave Church in Norway

Sixteen Featured pictures were promoted this week.

  • Mound of Butter (created by Antoine Vollon; nominated by Crisco 1492 and Hafspajen) The Realist painter Antoine Vollon was noted for his still lifes, of which this is one, painted so realistically that the art critic Grace Gluek couldn't believe it's not butter. Vollon also painted singeries and figure paintings. An example of the latter, Femme du Pollet à Dieppe (a peasant woman carrying a large basket on her back), won first prize at the 1876 Salon, only to be stigmatised by Édouard Manet as "a basket that walks".
  • Abolhassan Banisadr (created by Christoph Braun; nominated by Alborzagros) Iranian politician and economist Abolhassan Banisadr was the first president of the Islamic Republic. He was involved in the student movement against the Shah, and fled to France in 1963. At his father's funeral in Iraq in 1972 he met Ayatollah Khomeini. Banisadr became one of Khomeini's advisors, and returned to Iran to become deputy minister of finance in February 1979. By year's end he had become foreign minister. In January 1980 Banisadr was elected president, receiving 78.9% of the vote. On 10 June 1981 he was appointed acting commander-in-chief of Iranian forces during the Iran–Iraq War by Khomeini. On 21 June he was impeached by the Majlis, a move which appears to have been instigated by Khomeini. Close friends of Banisadr were executed, but Banisadr himself was already in hiding, and was able to escape the country by plane. Granted asylum by the French he lives in a closely-guarded villa in Versailles.
  • Nicolas Lanier (created by Anthony van Dyck; nominated by Hafspajen) Nicholas Lanier was the first Master of the King's Musick, a composer, and also a painter and scenographer himself – he served both Charles I and Charles II, with a short break in the Netherlands during the Commonwealth. Of Huguenot origin, his major contribution to artistic culture was in persuading Charles I to bring the artist who painted him, Anthony van Dyck, to England. This portrait of Lanier by van Dyck depicts him in an attitude of sprezzatura or "studied carelessness"; the ability to convince other people that you can do what you do, standing on your head and whistling "Colonel Bogey".
  • Limosa harlequin frog (created by Brian Gratwicke; nominated by Bruce1ee) Atelopus limosus The limosa harlequin frog is actually an endangered species of toad, which is endemic to Panama. Fungus infections and habitat loss have caused populations to decline. The toad is found in two colour forms; a lowland type in brown with a yellow nose, and an upland version in green with black chevrons; males of both types have white bellies while females have red bellies.
  • Borgund Stave Chuch (created by Ximonic; nominated by Alborzagros) Borgund Stave Church is a stave church from Norway, almost a thousand years old. The church is built entirely from wood, made with tiered, scissor beam, overhanging roofs, while the walls are made with vertical wooden boards called staves. The church is owned by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments (SPANM). A a replica of the church can be seen in Rapid City, South Dakota in the United States.
  • Cepot (created and nominated by Crisco 1492) Cepot is a character from an Indonesian puppet theatre or wayang; this puppet is a wayang golek, a wooden doll controlled by rods. His character is that of an easy-going rural jokester.
  • Pachygrapsus marmoratus (created and nominated by PetarM) The marbled rock crab is small and fast-moving; it's coloured dark violet-brown with yellow marbling. The crab eats a balanced diet of meat and one veg (algae). The meat comes from mussels and other marbled rock crabs. If there's no mussels, barnacles will do. As the seas warm, the range of the crab has spread outwards- they've been spotted in Southampton, a major centre for cruising.
  • The Kiss (created by Edvard Munch; nominated by Crisco 1492 and Hafspajen) The Kiss is an oil painting by Edvard Munch. It depicts a couple embracing and kissing, their faces rendered as a single form resembling a pink map of Africa, with a single ear where Timbuktu should be. The form is regarded as symbolising the unity of their relationship; Munch was a symbolist, attempting to "represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly". The painting has a certain sinister atmosphere, thanks to the dark coloring and the anonymity of the couple, somewhat reminiscent of Munch's famous painting The Scream.
  • Scene of Don Carlo (created by Giuseppe Barberis and Carlo Cornaglia; restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden) A wood engraving by Carlo Cornaglia of a performance of Verdi's opera Don Carlos, the digital image expertly restored by the nominator with Adam's usual careful attention to authenticity. Note Cornaglia's signature lower right; the letters are formed by cutting away the outlines, leaving a raised area which prints black. Also he's done the "n" backwards. The opera? Five acts, four hours, tunes that can only be successfully whistled by a Guanche, long queue for the facilities.
  • Last scene of Attila (created by an unknown author; restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden) This wood engraving published in the world's first illustrated newspaper, The Illustrated London News shows the final scene from Verdi's opera Attila as performed in London in 1848. Once upon a time there was an evil king, Attila, King of the Huns and Zacharias Werner wrote a play on him. Verdi liked the ultra-Romantic play, so he made an opera of it. Summa summarum, it is always right to sing Veni Creator Spiritus in a precarious situation. The engraving has been restored by the nominator, who removed the red library inventory stamps and the text showing through from the other side of the paper.
  • Golden coin from the Duchy of Parma (created by the Duchy of Parma; nominated by Godot13) The golden doubloons from the Duchy of Parma depict Odoardo Farnese, Duke of Parma very well, (you don't want to know how Odoardo really looked like, so don't click on that link) who came to power after Ranuccio's natural son, his brother and rival, Ottavio, was relegated to a prison. He was the legitimate son of the attractive Ranuccio I Farnese who had to many lovers and sons.
  • Girl reading the July 21, 1969, edition of The Washington Post (created by Jack Weir; nominated by Pine) Recently shown in a Signpost Gallery celebrating the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, this photo uploaded by a Wikimedian of his mother was taken by his grandfather.
  • Set design model for Act I of Otello (created by Marcel Jambon; nominated by Adam Cuerden) The featured picture is a scene in Otello, a dramatic and wonderful four act opera, by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, widely considered as one of his best, played all over the world. The libretto was written by Arrigo Boito, while the stage setting was designed by Marcel Jambon (1848-1908). The story is based on Shakespeare's tragedy, Othello. The story of Othello is the story of a man who loved, but not wisely, and who listened to ill-willing advisors instead of using his own head and thinking a bit himself. Iago is the evil friend who is twisting and monitoring the plot, telling everybody he does not want to cause trouble, but this is exactly what he wants. Iago is considered the archetypal character of the villain and the quintessence of evil, who manipulates all the other characters at will, getting close to them, orchestrating his evil schemes, entangling them in a confusing net of lies, playing on their weaknesses and goodwill, all this without his victims, Othello and Desdemona, ever noticing it. This goes on until Othello, who loved and trusted Desdemona before, now is turning against her, judging her rashly and brutally, while Desdemona desperately denies. Othello in an overconfident act is strangling his own wife, only to find out later that his jealousy was pointless – she and Cassio were innocent. Othello takes his own life in remorse. The opera follows the Shakespearean plot and there is no happy ending to the work.
  • Portrait of Frederik Sødring (created by Christen Købke; nominated by Crisco 1492) This featured picture depicts the Danish landscape artist Frederik Sødring. The portrait was painted in 1832 by Christen Købke, an artist who was active during the Golden Age of Danish Painting, an art movement inspired by the Romantics from the neighboring country, Germany.
  • Shearing the Rams (created by Tom Roberts; nominated by Hafspajen) Shearing the Rams from 1890 by the Australian artist Tom Roberts (1856–1931) is one of the continent's "most well known and loved paintings". Roberts painted it in a shearing shed at Brocklesby sheep station in New South Wales, making sketches during the spring of 1888 and returning a year later to start the canvas. It is believed Roberts did most of the painting at the shed; in 2006 a piece of wood from the now-demolished building was found to have paint daubs precisely matching the palette of the picture. The smiling "tar boy" at the centre was a young girl, Susan Davis, who died in 1979, probably much over ninety years old. Sometimes it is healthy to be in a famous painting. Roberts was an influential member of the Australian art movement called the Heidelberg School, whose members painted many of Australia's early colonists, pioneer settlers, rural labour, shearers, swagmen, bogans, standover men and mountain horsemen, all fighting with the hardships of the rough environment. The sheep shearers in the painting are described as "the most characteristic and picturesque of the shearers and roustabouts".
  • Zeche Zollverein (created by Der Wolf im Wald; nominated by Alborzagros) Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Part of the European Route of Industrial Heritage, it is built in Bauhaus style. The site composed by Zollverein Coal Mine and Zollverein Coking Plant, is considered as the “most beautiful coal mine in the world”. Hey! Did you happen to see, the most beautiful coal mine in the world? And if you did was it mining?



Reader comments

2015-08-19

Seeing is believing

Contribute  —  
Share this
By TonyTheTiger

I have been an editor on Wikipedia since May 2006 when my first edit (made at Blackstone Library) resolved what seemed to me to be a glaring redlink by creating this version of National Recording Registry, which is now a Wikipedia:Featured lists. At last look, I am about 350,000 edits into my Wikipedia career and have now notched nearly 1000 redlink to bluelink creations. I try to keep track of them on one of my user subpages. Most of them have something to do with Chicago, which is where I live, or sports, which is how I relax. I recently was able to celebrate fifty years of seniority on June 24.

I decided to celebrate my Wikipedia contributions for my fiftieth birthday by taking a trip to visit some of them in New York City. This is a celebration of what I do when something that I enter in the search bar does not have an article. I often create the article. I am less apt to create an article for a redlink in an article. However, when the primary topic that I want to learn about on Wikipedia does not have an article, I feel that there is a hole in Wikipedia. I feel that something is wrong because others have probably also searched for the term and often start googling frantically to assess whether encyclopedic content is in the public domain. If I realize that the subject would easily pass the general notability guideline based on secondary sources, I feel compelled to create an article and develop it as fully as I am able.

I arrived in NYC on June 23 and visited Ground Zero for the first time since the development of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. I took a few pictures (7 World Trade and 1 World Trade and The North pool of the 9/11 Memorial). It was very humbling to see the silent majesty that has been constructed upon the hallowed grounds. I have not participated in the editing of these articles but felt compelled to visit these subjects to commence my return to New York City (where I lived during the summers of 1983 and 1985 as well as from 1992-97).

On Wednesday June 24th, I commenced my celebration by attending a 2pm matinee at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center which featured Misty Copeland (page creator: August 24, 2008, : August 31, 2008, : October 19, 2008). I first noticed Copeland in a Fall 2008 issue of Uptown when I was subscribed to it. The story may have been a cover story, but regardless I noticed Copeland and was immediately drawn toward the subject. Upon reading the story I knew she was someone that I wanted to know and that I felt others around the world would want to know. Within two months I had developed the article into a Did You Know? and Good Article that was chock full of high-profile references such as The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Fast forward to summer 2015, she was prominent in the media. Copeland was the subject of a 60 Minutes feature and a Time cover in the month before my birthday. It was incredible to see breadth of her influence, as her fan base includes all races, ages, and genders.

On the evening of my birthday, I attended The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (page creator: April 29, 2013, : May 15, 2013,), starring Alex Sharp (page creator: June 1, 2015, : July 31, 2015). On April 29, 2013, I noticed that no page existed for The Curious Incident even though the day before, it had won a record-tying seven Laurence Olivier Awards. It was inexplicable to me that such an important production did not yet have a dedicated article after achieving such a feat. The show eventually became a Broadway production and went on to win the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play, 2015 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, 2015 Outer Critics Circle Award Outstanding New Broadway Play, and the 2015 Drama League Award for Outstanding Production of a Broadway or Off-Broadway Play. During the 2015 awards season, it became clear that Sharp, the star of the Broadway run of the show, was making a name for himself. He won the Outer Critics Circle Award on May 11, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play on May 31. It was apparent that since he had won the Drama desk award for the best Off Broadway or Broadway Theatre acting performance, he was a serious contender for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play, which only considered Broadway performances. Thus, I felt compelled to create his article and he is now the youngest person to have won the Tony Award for Best Actor in Play. This play has been a tremendous success because of the way the performance resonates with so many people who related to challenged individuals. Seeing the play is a much more powerful experience than reading about it in secondary sources or here on Wikipedia.

The Thursday of my trip is a mysterious hole. However, it may be the most important part of my discussion about creating articles. I have never done quid pro quo paid editing. However, in the months before my birthday, I was approached about seeing that a page be created for a subject of marginal import/notability that was very much in keeping with my editorial activities. It is my belief that if I had created such a page, I would have been invited to attend a very high profile event in NYC on Thursday where multiple subjects that I have created, DYK-ed, and GA-ed were prominently involved. Once I began advising the interested parties on acquiring sources for the marginal subject, I was in fact invited to this event. However, as it became clear that I was not going to reconsider my own standards for WP:NPOV article creations, I was disinvited from the event by the powers that be. It is hard to say what I have learned from this experience. I do accept donations for my contributions to Wikipedia. E.g., I have been given pairs of tickets to the Chicago Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet (as it relates to my creation of Joffrey Tower) for prior Good Article work. I don't want to get into the paid advocacy debate, but I think my lesson here is that in the past, I have accepted tickets donated/granted in appreciation for work. The donor had no input into the article and no interaction with me until after I created/edited the content. I made no representation that I would advocate for any subject matter in the article. I continue to watch both Chicago Theatre and Joffrey Tower in the same way that I watch my other 350+ Good and Featured Articles and will continue to edit them without any more regard for the wishes of either institution than I have for the wishes of any other subjects. Over the years, I have made many ongoing edits to Chicago Theatre and not so many to Joffrey Tower. I think tickets promised in advance for an article still in user space may have even bordered on paid advocacy, because the article in user space had been created by the person who contacted me about the subject. I continue to assert that the suggestions made to bring the subject toward notability are the only way I know to get the article created conscionably. I digress. In short, tickets in exchange for advice/creation of article: bad. My ability to create good and featured articles is not for sale. I will continue to create articles for subjects I am interested in. However, hard work donated and completed followed by tickets donated: not so bad. I.e., I will not turn down ticket donations from such institutions any sooner than I will turn down a well-intended cash tip after giving a ride to an Uber customer.

On Friday June 26, I attended the Museum of Modern Art to visit Drowning Girl (page creator: May 12, 2012, : May 24, 2012, : June 21, 2012, : July 23, 2013) see here, Girl with Ball (page creator: May 9, 2012, : May 23, 2012, : June 21, 2012) and Campbell's Soup Cans (page creator: October 20, 2006, : December 25, 2006, : March 26, 2007) see here. The largest-ever Roy Lichtenstein retrospective was at the Art Institute of Chicago from May 16 to September 3, 2012. During that time period, I checked out many books from the Chicago Public Library and created dozens of articles about modern art paintings, especially those by Lichtenstein. I believe that the majority of the articles at Category:Paintings by Roy Lichtenstein were created by me during this time period. Campbell's Soup Cans was my first good article and my first featured article and has since become a vital article. During this period of frantic editing, I learned quite a bit about modern art. During my visit, on a Free Friday at the MoMA, I was amazed at the turnout. I don't remember art museums being so popular on Friday evenings. This visit reminds me how many people are touched by visual arts This editorial experience reminds me that there is still lots of room on Wikipedia to contribute to the wealth of knowledge on Wikipedia about works of art. Many important artists still only have Wikipedia articles for a fraction of their most important works.

On Saturday June 27, I attended Kinky Boots (page creator: October 5, 2012, : October 18, 2012, : December 1, 2013). I must apologize for my hazy recollection of my own Wikipedia career. Apparently, I think a lot more of my good work has been Promoted to Featured Article than the edit histories show. Nonetheless, this article development has an interesting history. In Chicago, Cindy Lauper was appearing on local talk shows and in the local press regarding the show when it premiered here in Chicago to rave reviews. It was already anticipating its Broadway run when I decided to create the page. It went on to win the 2013 Tony Award for Best Musical and several other awards. Again, until you see a performance, you can not understand how far secondary sources and our summary fall short in terms of delivering the experience of the show's message.

On Sunday June 28, I attended the inaugural exhibition at the newly relocated Whitney Museum of American Art, which houses Little Big Painting (: May 27, 2012). Due to a mistake in my own record keeping, I thought I was the page creator for this article, but it existed in this state before my involvement. However, I did take it to DYK. Obviously, it would have been more in keeping with the theme of this visit to NYC if I had gone over to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to see if Grrrrrrrrrrr!! (page creator: May 9, 2012, : May 24, 2012, ) was on display. Although Little Big Painting is an important enough work to be in the inaugural exhibition highlighting the collection, it is not a vital article on Wikipedia and not necessarily a cornerstone of the collection like I believe the aforementioned MOMA works are. Thus, the experience was a little bit less here in that respect. However, seeing something you have worked on included in the inaugural exhibition for one of the world's leading museums compensated for that effect. In addition, I did see subjects here that would be welcome additions to the wealth of knowledge on Wikipedia. However, they represented further branches of the tree of knowledge. The artist that I feel closer to understanding as a result of my visit is Chuck Close, who had a piece that impressed me. However, I don't think the art books are going to be as full of encyclopedic content on such work as they were for my Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein subjects.

In retrospect, maybe I should have dined at Argo Tea (PC, , ) or Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea (PC), which both have multiple locations in NYC although they are Chicago companies, or tried to find a Tim Hardaway, Jr. (PC, , ) autograph signing while he was still with the New York Knicks (he was traded to Atlanta on June 25), but the important takeaway is that there are lots of fun things to learn about by creating articles for redlinks. If you notice an article does not exist that you think should, do something about it. However, keep Wikipedia in perspective. Many topics on Wikipedia are real life things that can be experienced. We should not spend so much time on our electronic devices that we do not enjoy Wikipedia subjects in the real world.



Reader comments

2015-08-19

Straight Outta Connecticut

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Serendipodous

It's a long way from the leafy bowers of Greenwich, Connecticut to the concrete barrens of Compton, California, but the viewers of this week's top ten were drawn to both places, as the unexpected success of the film Straight Outta Compton brought minds back to the explosive era prior to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, while the quiet death of former football star Frank Gifford reminded us that we all suffer loss, however pleasant our surroundings.

For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of August 9 to 15, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Frank Gifford C-class 1,526,838
The death at the age of 84 of this onetime New York Giants running back, who in later life was arguably more famous for being married to TV presenter Kathie Lee Gifford, has hit America surprisingly hard. His topping of the list may be partly down to timing (his death was announced the day after last week's list was published), but it does show the affection in which Americans held him.
2 Sundar Pichai Start-class 1,330,770
Amid great fanfare, the product chief at Google Inc. was announced as the successor to Larry Page as the company's CEO, which of course was of great interest to en.wikipedia's Indian contingent. The Indian Express even ran an article about a resulting edit war on his Wiki page concerning exactly where he went to school. More broadly though, his ascension was seen by many in light of Google's recent company-wide rebrand as Alphabet Inc., and whether the company can ever truly move beyond its advertising-based business model.
3 Kathie Lee Gifford C-class 1,041,793
The popular US breakfast television host received an outpouring of sympathy from the public in the wake of the death of her husband of nearly two decades, Frank Gifford. She and her husband shared the same birthday, which, in a poignant touch, fell just a week after his death.
4 N.W.A Start-class 825,100
Straight Outta Compton, the biopic of the short-lived but electrifying hip-hop group, whose members included Easy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube (pictured), was released on August 14 to superb reviews and blockbuster business- its $56 million opening weekend gross was higher than those for Terminator Genisys and Pixels combined. It's interesting to note that African Americans make up just 12% of the US population, and films aimed specifically at that market, like those of Tyler Perry, are considered hits if they reach those numbers after their entire runs. That shows the breadth of this movie's appeal across racial lines. That the film's story chimed so well with recent events in America likely also played a role.
5 Straight Outta Compton (2015 film) C-class 812,153 See above.
6 Easy-E Good Article 794,115
The founding member of N.W.A., whose death from AIDS at the age of just 31 forms the emotional climax of the film Straight Outta Compton, was naturally the most searched member of the group following the film's release.
7 Fantastic Four (2015 film) C-class 785,279
So yeah. This movie happened. As I've said many times, movies get on this list for two reasons: box office and controversy. Straight Outta Compton was lucky enough to have both; this one? Well, it looks like I have my work cut out explaining the controversy because whatever's pushing this movie up the chart, it sure ain't the box office. But be warned: this is gonna get complicated.

By now you're probably aware that the latest attempt to make a film franchise out of Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four title is one of the biggest box office bombs in recent years. And if you're wondering why, it's because no one wanted to make it in the first place. The contract that Marvel signed with 20th Century Fox back in 1994 includes a sunset clause ensuring that if Fox does not make use of the property within a certain amount of time, Marvel can take the rights back. Yes, this movie is, in essence, a $120 million contractual obligation. When Marvel signed their contract they were close to bankruptcy; now they're a major competitor in the film industry and a subdivision of the gargantuan Disney corporation. Fox isn't keen to hand an advantage to its rival. And "rival" is putting it mildly. Marvel cancelled the Fantastic Four comic rather than give Fox the rights to any new characters, and has even banned the introduction of new characters into the X-Men series, which Fox also owns the rights to.

Since rising to prominence, Marvel Studios has managed to claw back the rights to most of its characters, as other companies have proven inept at adapting them to the screen. Even Sony, who owns the rights to Spider-Man, agreed to go Dutch on a Marvel-made reboot of the character after The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel both failed. Fox remains the only major hold-out, and expectations that the film's abysmal performance will lead the team back to the Marvel fold have been spiralling in recent days, up to and including a change.org petition. That's probably unlikely. Most pundits agree that Fox will burn before it gives up, and a sequel is still planned.

8 Donald Trump B-Class 601,785
Ah, what did Donald do this week? Finding out why the bombastic real estate developer, media personality and, until he gets bored, current Republican US Presidential frontrunner is on this list is always preceded by a mixture of queasy terror and Christmas-like anticipation. In fact, What Did Donald Do? would make a very good title for the reality show he's undoubtedly going to sign up for once he finally gets booted out the race. This week largely focused on his feud with Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly, whom he suggested had "blood coming out of her wherever" after she grilled him on women's issues during the Republican debate. He then went on to backtrack in the most condescending way possible, saying that he "cherishes" women, and sounding like Torvald from A Doll's House. Kelly has apparently taken time off to spend with the husband and kids, leading some to speculate that Trump got her fired. Another choice Trump quote this week? How about "I’m a whiner, and I keep whining and whining until I win," as spoken to CNN host Chris Cuomo, leading a writer for the Christian Science Monitor to ponder if that may be his superpower.
9 Dr. Dre Good Article 596,881
Far and away the most successful talent to emerge from N.W.A., Dr Dre would go on to shepherd talents such as Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Xzibit, 50 Cent, and Kendrick Lamar, and ultimately become the richest man in hip hop, after Apple Inc.'s purchase of his company Beats Electronics earned him $620 million. He has wondered in the past if people have forgotten him; well the release of Straight Outta Compton has put that fear to rest. The soundtrack for Straight Outta Compton is Dre's first album in 16 years, and opened at #2 at the US chart amid critical acclaim.
10 A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Good Article 551,440
The sustained surge of views this scientist and reluctant politician received upon his death on 25 July at the age of 83 is merely a reflection of the regard in which he was held by his fellow Indians. A Muslim in a predominantly Hindu country, he rose to the very top of the political ladder, first as a developer of India's missile and nuclear programs, and then as President. Despite adhering to Islam, he considered himself an Indian and drew much inspiration from his country's Hindu heritage. As a result, his one term as President was one of the most popular in his country's history. A lifelong advocate of technology, he believed that India could become a developed country through embracing and expanding its knowledge base.




Reader comments

2015-08-19

Tech news in brief

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Wikimedia tech ambassadors
The following content has been republished as-is from the Tech News weekly report.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • Many Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Before they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [1] [2] [3]
  • Some auto-saving problems and other issues in the Content Translation tool are now fixed. Please report to the Content Translation feedback page if you still have problems. [4]
  • Special:Random (used by the Random article link) now excludes disambiguation pages. [5]

Problems

  • Older gadgets that are not using ResourceLoader are not loading anymore. They need to be updated. [6] [7]
  • On August 12 the machine translation servers and the Content Translation tool didn't work. This was fixed on the same day. [8]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 20 (calendar).
  • You can soon watch when something is added to or removed from a category. [9]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 18 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.


Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.



Reader comments

2015-08-19

How Wikipedia responds to breaking news

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Joe Sutherland
The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. For more information on this partnership see our content guidelines.
Joe Sutherland is a Wikimedia Foundation communications intern.
Wikipedia is capable of covering news like any news agency.

For almost fifteen years, the scope of topics that Wikipedia covers has grown steadily. Now, the free online encyclopedia covers everything from music, film, and video games to geography, history, and the sciences. It also contains articles on topics trending in the news, updated by tens of thousands of volunteer editors as swiftly as the news breaks.

To investigate aspects of this phenomenon, such as the speed with which breaking news is covered on Wikipedia, the verifiability of information added over time, and the distribution of edits among Wikipedia’s editors, I selected an article for further analysis in the form of a dissertation.[1]

The article selected was "Shooting of Michael Brown", which covered the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by police officer Darren Wilson. The incident attracted much press attention fueled by local protest in the suburb of St. Louis. I observed the article's history until January 12, 2015.

Comparing page views and daily edit counts for the article, highlight key elements in the story’s development.

The resulting data was split into two "peaks" in the development of this story: the initial media scramble after protests began in mid-August, and the Ferguson grand jury's decision not to indict Wilson for the teenager's death in late November.[2] Each "peak" represented 500 individual revisions of the article in question. The use of peaks in this case allowed for cross-case analysis—that is, a direct comparison between two case studies.

Speed of editing

Graphing the speed of editing across both peaks of development.

Notably, pageviews and edit rates didn’t line up as one might expect. Instead, there was a great flurry of edits a few days after the article was created, presumably as the editing community learned of the article's existence or heard about the event. The speed of editing was incredibly fast during this initial period of rioting and press attention, though these speeds were highly inconsistent. The mean editing rate across this period was 18.57 edits per hour, more than eleven times the overall average for the article.

Media coverage, however, seems to have a much more acute impact on pageviews: upon Darren Wilson's indictment decision in November, almost half a million people visited the article in just one day. A somewhat surprising observation was that this second peak resulted in much slower rates of editing. The mean for this period was just 7.21 edits per hour, which was two and a half times slower than in the first. It is also very inconsistent, mirroring the first peak—editing speeds varied widely throughout both peaks and were largely unpredictable.

In terms of text added to the article, the first peak—which was observed over a much shorter period of time—saw an average of 501.02 bytes of text added per hour, some 3.6 times quicker than the rate of the second peak. By then, however, the article was much longer and the causation can likely be that there wasn’t much left to add by that point.

Use of sources

"Reference densities" over each peak.

To judge the article's accuracy is a very difficult task, which would by its very nature be subjective and require an in-depth knowledge of what happened in Ferguson that afternoon. To this end, I instead looked at the verifiability of the article—specifically, the volume of sources per kilobyte of text, referred to for this study as the article's "reference density".

Ten samples were taken systematically for this research from each peak, and their references tallied. This was used in conjunction wth the page's size in kilobytes to find the reference density.

In both peaks, the reference density steadily increased over time. It was significantly higher overall in the earlier peak, when the article was shorter and rapidly-changing information required more verification. This rise in reference density over time likely indicates Wikipedia editors’ desire to ensure information added is not removed as unverifiable.

Origins of sources used within the article per peak.

The majority of sources used in the article were from publications which focus on print media. This is more obvious in the second peak than the first, where local newspaper The St. Louis Post-Dispatch became much more common among the article’s sources.

Relatedly, it was discovered that a high volume of the sources were from media based in the state of Missouri, obviously local to the shooting location itself. The proportion falling into this category actually increased by the second peak, from just over 18 percent to just over a fifth of all sources. Other local sources which were regularly used in the article included the St. Louis American and broadcasters KTVI and KMOV.

It was the state of New York which provided the majority of sources, however; this seems to indicate that editors tend towards big-name, reputable sources such as the New York Times and USA Today, which both placed highly on ranking lists. Notably, the state of Georgia was almost exclusively represented by national broadcaster CNN, yet still made up around 10 percent of all sources used.

Range of contributors

Finally, the editing patterns of users were examined to judge the distribution of edits among a number of groups. To do this, users were placed into categories based on their rates of editing—which, for the purposes of this study, was defined as their mean edits per day. Categories were selected to divide editors as evenly as possible for the analysis, and six bots were excluded to prevent the skewing of results.

Edits/day Category Count % Count of which status % Status
40+ Power users 27 4.49% 20 74.07%
10–40 Highly active users 73 12.15% 38 52.05%
5–10 Very active users 67 11.15% 26 38.81%
1–5 Active users 105 17.47% 19 18.10%
0.1–1 Casual users 92 15.31% 4 4.35%
0.01–0.1 Infrequent users 62 10.32% 0 0%
<0.01 Very infrequent users 13 2.16% 0 0%
IPs Anonymous users 162 26.96% 0 0%
Total/average 601 100% 107 17.80%

Clearly, the majority of users in the highly active and power users brackets hold some kind of status, whether that be the "rollback" tool given out by administrators, or elected roles such as administrator or bureaucrat. This at least implies that more daily edits can translate roughly into experience or trust on the project.

Mean content added per edit, in bytes, per experience category.

Looking at data added per category, highly active users have been responsible for the vast majority of the total content added to the article—over half of the total. However, breaking it down into mean content added per edit for each category provided some intriguing results.

While the highly active users take this crown too, it is a much closer race. Perhaps unintuitively, "casual" editors—those with fewer than one edit per day, but more than 0.1—added an average of 95.81 bytes per edit, and the category directly below that added 93.70 bytes per edit. This suggests that article editing is not just done by the heavily-active users on Wikipedia, but by a wide range of users with vastly different editing styles and experience.

Edits to the article were most commonly made by a very small group of users. Indeed, 58 percent of edits made to the article were by the top ten contributors, while over half of contributors made just one edit. Text added to the article followed the same pattern, though more pronounced: the same top ten contributed more than two-thirds of the content article content. This lends weight to theories that Wikipedia articles tend to be worked on by a core "team", while other individual editors contribute with more minor edits and vandalism reversion.

Overall, the study shows that Wikipedia works on breaking news much like a traditional newsroom—verifiability is held in high regard, and a "core group" of editors tend to contribute a vast majority of the content. Editing rates, however, do not match up as obviously with peaks of media activity, which is worth investigating in future more qualitatively.

Notes

  1. ^ If you’re interested in reading the full thesis, it’s available from my website. Others have done research into this area; their work, methods and outcomes heavily influenced this study. In particular, Brian Keegan's work was instrumental in guiding the direction for this research. His 2013 study into breaking news, co-authored with Darren Gergle and Noshir Contractor, covers a far wider range than this thesis did.
  2. ^ The first peak depicted is the 500 edits made between 09:38 UTC on 16 August 2014 and 17:54 UTC on 18 August 2014 (a period of 2 days, 8 hours and 16 minutes); the second is between 00:57 UTC on 23 November 2014 and 22:36 UTC on 01 December 2014 (a period of 8 days, 21 hours and 39 minutes).




Reader comments

If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.
The Signpost is written by editors like you – join in!
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2015-08-19&oldid=1183873135"