20 ms·

Wikimedia enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity

95 points by elsewhen 6y ago

4cao 6y ago
Wikipedia already has too many policies and this is part of the problem. However noble the intentions, adding yet another policy-like document is not going to be part of the solution. Obviously harassment and toxic behavior are bad and should be discouraged but all this will accomplish is that politically-inclined editors will have even more weapons in their inventory to throw "harassment" and "toxic behavior" accusations at one another. The bar to start contributing to Wikipedia is already very high: the way it works in practice, one must familiarize themselves with hundreds of pages from the WP: namespace, and learn how to use them strategically to defend their contributions. No wonder few people have the time and inclination to do that. To encourage more inclusivity this burden should first of all be lowered, not raised. So, if more inclusivity was really the objective here, a better experiment would be to remove all the current policies except a dozen of the most important ones decided by popular vote among editors, and then edit them even further so that they fit on a single page, leaving these as the only rules in force. From then on, not more than a single policy change could be made per month, and all of it should still fit on the same single page. This would give new users an equal footing with the entrenched ones, with rules straightforward enough for everybody to understand and follow, which in turn should empower people to use their own judgement instead of being micromanaged. Disagreements would have to be solved by discussing the matter at hand, as opposed to flinging projectiles from the safety of the WP: namespace. Wikipedia could learn something from how remarkably simple the HN rules are in comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html OK, maybe the above is not the greatest idea but it'd at least rattle things a bit in the right direction if done as an experiment. On the other hand, much of what Wikimedia Foundation has been doing recently is tangential to the development of a free encyclopedia, and this press release is no different: it reads like an exercise in corporate bullshit that checks all the right boxes but will change exactly nothing. The response to the failures of bureaucracy is more bureaucracy: "What we were doing so far has failed, so we urgently need to do even more of the same. This time it'll work."
CommieDetector 6y ago
Translation : Only radical leftists allowed.
Mizza 6y ago
Ah good, a new way for the deletionists and power hungry busybodys to cudgel the people who actually make positive contributions.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Citation needed
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    Its common knowledge at this point. English wikipedia is guarded by an army of moderators who try their best to prevent new articles from being created.
    - random_dork 6y ago
      Citation needed
    - unishark 6y ago
      I think that was little joke.
      - wccrawford 6y ago
        You know what I think is really telling? I think you're correct that it was a joke/meta-commentary, but I didn't even process it as such until you called it out. And that's exactly why Wikipedia has such a problem with its editors. They're so good at getting their way while appearing to just have logical arguments, as has been stated elsewhere in these comments. So that either makes it an incredibly on-point joke, or actually a statement that anecdotes aren't facts, and I can't even tell which for sure.
  - forgingahead 6y ago
    No, common sense is usually quite adequate.
etrabroline 6y ago
Saw these under the article. >Lisa Lewin, Managing Partner at Ethical Ventures, a New York City based management consulting firm, will be the newest member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees >Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new member and leadership appointments to its Board of Trustees. Shani Evenstein Sigalov, currently an EdTech Innovation Strategist and lecturer at the School of Medicine in Tel Aviv University I wonder if these new board members were involved in the new CoC and inclusivity rules.
- IAmEveryone 6y ago
  These articles are from August and January 2019, respectively. And, yes, it is likely that these board members were among the board members that voted on this proposal, considering they are members of the board, and the board voted on it. Is there any specific problem you see with these two as opposed to other board members, or why do you feel the need to point them out?
  - mcbits 6y ago
    > why do you feel the need to point them out? The web page points them out as "RELATED" (emphasis in original) at the end of the press release. It's not clear if that was done manually or algorithmically. If algorithmically, perhaps it's one of those unintentionally bigoted algorithms?
stormdennis 6y ago
All the buzzwords are there, toxicity, harassment, safe spaces, sanction, ban, inclusivity. All to promote/cement the viewpoints that we now understand to be ,self evidently, the correct ones.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  The most tolerant societies end up tolerating the intolerable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
  - stormdennis 6y ago
    The rule of law, combined with the broadest possible free speech, is the best defence as had been shown in Western democracies for quite some time now. Democracy in Germany in the thirties was in a very weak condition for a variety of reasons which allowed the Nazis to undermine it fatally.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      And it's probably worth considering that democracy after the forties in Germany includes Strafgesetzbuch §86a.
      - zozbot234 6y ago
        Notably this law perpetuates on a daily basis the Nazis' coercive and violent appropriation of a number of traditional religious and cultural symbols, and with it their unnatural exploitation as emblems of the most evil and despicable ideas ever contrived in modern history. All things considered, a very fitting example of parent poster's point.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        > unnatural There's nothing natural or unnatural about human interpretation of abstract symbols.
JungleGymSam 6y ago
Good old catch-all: `toxic behavior`
ReptileMan 6y ago
Anyone willing to take a bet that it will be mostly used to kick away "the wrong" side in the culture war?
- random_dork 6y ago
  That is war. It is hell. It forces people to choose a side when it happens on their territory. Are you not happy with the side they chose?
  - creddit 6y ago
    What an absurd cementing of the false dichotomy of the culture war.
    - etrabroline 6y ago
      What do you think the nature of it is?
Animats 6y ago
I can see worrying about harassment. "Inclusivity", though? (From the tone of the press release, they mean race and gender, not article subjects.) Wikipedia editors are anonymous unless they don't want to be. How can anyone tell?
- thomasqm 6y ago
  I do not read anything relating inclusivity to demographics. I think they are just discouraging ignorance of other editors.
- IAmEveryone 6y ago
  Inclusivity of editors is a major factor for inclusivity of content. Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content. With less than 10% of editors being women, for example, content is guaranteed to be somewhat skewed, even assuming absolutely no ill will by anybody. Among the famous examples are a scientist's entry being deleted as "not notable" just weeks before she won the Nobel Prize. Or, if you prefer quantitative data, that articles about women tend to emphasise their relationships and children (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06307v2.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06307v2.pdf).
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    I think you’re right here though. For example, the staggering amount of Japanese-centric pages on enwiki shows how the interest of a monoculture can have an outsized impact on the community. But at the same time, why not the free content?
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content. Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopedia though, not a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Wikimedia needs to make some serious changes if it wants more editors to join. They need to do a lot of UI work to make the process for creating a new article or discussing new changes. When I tried it I found the process very confusing. Why is all communication done in a wiki page editor?
- speedgoose 6y ago
  For sure, the learning curve is too steep. It's improved with the visual editor but wikipedia is too difficult if you want to participate actively.
- nicbou 6y ago
  They have! I contribute very sporadically, and both Commons and Wikipedia became a lot easier to work with thanks to improved tools.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    How recent was this? I tried to add an article a year ago and found the process to be pretty crap
    - nicbou 6y ago
      They added a lot of WYSIWYG tools which are much better than the plain text ones. Wikimedia lets you specify licences for the files you upload, and find categories for them.
- nullc 6y ago
  > Why is all communication done in a wiki page editor? Dogfooding, essentially. This guarantees that all participants eventually become broadly competent at using it. There are newer tools to streamline common interactions, though personally I think they make the learning curve steeper in exchange for making it start off a little easier. Plus, wiki is often an exceptionally good way to hold discussions. The fact that other contributors can, e.g. fix broken links and that freeform layout can be used... that multiple contributors can seamlessly collaborate on a single comment. It's very powerful. Wiki for discussion also builds community and trust, because people could screw up your comments but they don't. (and if they do, it'll get fixed promptly and they'll have helpfully identified themselves as someone either totally clueless or having difficulty with self control)
dannyw 6y ago
These ideas can come from good intentions, but what it often means is that a certain opinion is the _right one_ and another opinion isn't. As an example, some parts of the internet ostracised Brendan Eich for a personal donation he made to support a Californian ballet proposition on same sex marriage; forcing his resignation. There were no complaints about any of his behaviour or actions at Mozilla whatsoever. That's not a good thing to be doing. As another example, the recent Stack Overflow changes where a controversial, over-empathsised policy change on respecting pronouns (also pretty much a non-issue, I have never seen pronoun complaints come up on Stack Overflow) has forced multiple community moderator resignations and a widespread community revolt. These changes are often negatives for the projects involved.
- thrwaway69 6y ago
  > also pretty much a non-issue, I have never seen pronoun complaints come up on Stack Overflow Eh, there are. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean there aren't any reports.
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
    Most users on Stack Overflow use nongendered pseudonyms, and as a Q&A site, they go out of their way to explicitly discourage conversation. If you do need to a reply to a user in the comments, the convention is @username, no pronouns needed.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The Stack Overflow fiasco was more about virtue signalling because nowadays you need to be (or rather show) “diversity and inclusion” as a business if you want to appear as a “better” company (useful for soliciting VC investment when you don’t have a profitable business), regardless of whether diversity & inclusion has ever been a problem at the company.
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    > nowadays you need to be (or rather show) “diversity and inclusion” as a business if you want to appear as a “better” company (useful for soliciting VC investment when you don’t have a profitable business), regardless of whether diversity & inclusion has ever been a problem at the company. Could you expand on this? My naive impression is that VCs do their best to make hard-nosed expected-value-in-USD estimates, perhaps specifically estimating the likelihood the company will be worth >$100M/$1B or whatever; and that acting like that is probably in their job description because they're investing other people's money who expect a return. How does the phenomenon you describe fit in? Is there some group of VCs that believe that championing "diversity and inclusion" is likely to lead to 10x growth? Does the company making the pitch make that claim—or, as one reading of your words suggests, claim that not having achieved 10x growth in the past is due to the lack of such championing? Or do VCs face social pressure (from, I dunno, other VCs, journalists who write about them, whoever else they talk with) to make it look like they're funding virtuous causes (er, companies)? Seems like the last is most plausible.
drukenemo 6y ago
We’re are entering a new wave of censorship, all in the name of “the greater good”.
- groby_b 6y ago
  Codes of conduct aren't censorship. In the physical world, they're known as "house rules". You want to join the community, here's how you behave. It is essentially a list of "how not to be an asshole". Nothing is stopping you from expressing yourself however you want - just elsewhere, if you can't follow the rules. fwiw, this very website has its own code of conduct: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It focuses on different things than the Wikimedia one, but it's fundamentally the same thing. For both of them, I'd suggest that if there are things that you feel are detrimental, you specifically address them. Making an empty comment like "new wave of censorship" achieves nothing except saying "I don't like the rules". In which case, fine, there are plenty of other places on the Internet.
  - cthor 6y ago
    If the rules were decided by the English Wikipedia community following their process for making such decisions then this would be a meaningful criticism. But this is an edict from the WMF ivory tower. To say it's representative of the Wikipedia editors is a gross mischaracterisation. From my perspective it's naked entryism, striking at the centralised weakness in an otherwise robust, decentralised system.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      The English Wikipedia can be part of the problem in some cases. It's not a democracy but a "tight-knit" community where insiders have a lot of influence, and even harassing, uncivil behavior can go on for a long time if it's perceived as "defending" the community's precious "work" from new editors. Part of the problem is also that harassment concerns must often be disclosed in private for obvious reasons, so a community-wide dispute resolution process might just not work very well for those. And then there's Wikipedias in other languages and other Wikimedia projects, which come with additional cans of worms.
drukenemo 6y ago
Once again, we fall prey to a monopoly. Britannica exists and it’s quite decent, but it’s edited only by a few and has a tiny fraction of the reach as Wikipedia.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It's ironic that, in fear that Wikipedia is an information monopoly, someone would turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, given how many supporters of Wikipedia have historically been seeking an alternative to the centralized print encyclopedia model. https://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/anencyc.txt https://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/anencyc.txt
sergiotapia 6y ago
Just more bullshit for them to quiet down opinions and things that don't align with their political beliefs. Not surprising. We can all see through it really easily.
Jonnax 6y ago
Hacker news is a really good site for tech discussion. But when it comes to anything about diversity / harassment in the workplace, it seems like a group of people crop up needing to tell everyone that they're the real victims There's a signicant subset of people that cry the loudest of censorship only when it comes to communities having a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia. In any other discussion about Wikipedia, there would be a significant concensus that Wikipedia has a unwelcoming to new editors community.
- ZeroGravitas 6y ago
  When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
  - textgel 6y ago
    Ironically applicable to those demanding this due to their claims of being oppressed.
- dang 6y ago
  The community reflects the larger society, which is divided on social issues. Remember also that users come from many countries and regions. That's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby. The biggest factor, though, is that HN is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=silo%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding. (Edit: in what follows, when I talk about the internet I mean internet communities of HN's size and scope, or larger. The problems are different at smaller size or narrower scope, but those aren't the problems we have.) People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts with opponents, it's usually in a context where conflict is expected, e.g. a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends has already responded to. The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of other users, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—often something more important. This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by enemies, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places in their life. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was? Different internet communities grow out of different initial conditions. Each is a fractal that replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial-condition set includes that it's a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions trapped in one bottle. This non-siloed nature of HN causes a deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is a monster, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this shock experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article (and it's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience really is that bad). This is a misunderstanding because it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though certainly they do. It's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place went into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1]. It's easy to miss because of these conflicts, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, at least partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about. Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the orange site sucks. I think it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: what's happening is a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that opportunity because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode. HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is extremely uncomfortable. It is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different. I know it sounds strange and is grandiose to say, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to step further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself. [1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, please point me to it so I can learn.
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
People, and I'd argue especially on HN (for an internet community), generally aren't out to promote harassment or exclusivity so it's telling how Orwellian things have become when such a statement - which on the face of it sounds good and worthy - is rightly recognized as Newspeak. Wikimedia can do as they please, and if it results in a shitshow as many such efforts have before, then on their head may it be. I've been pretty generous with recurring yearly donations up until now but I'll honestly put things on pause until we see how some of this plays out. If anyone is genuinely concerned about the impact this may have, I would suggest archiving a recent dump of wikipedia at the least. It's only ~25GB.
brmgb 6y ago
Standards and a "universal" code of conduct to adress harassment and promote inclusivity, that all sound extremely American both in the approach taken and in its wording. I impatiently await to see how it's going to be received by the international Wikipedia community. If I had to guess, I would say with a large dose of scepticism but who knows, that might work.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Well, Wikipedia is a US-originated project. The CC license applies worldwide though, so anyone is welcome to fork it if that becomes an issue.
  - brmgb 6y ago
    I am not sure I understand your post. There is no need to fork. Wikipedia is a US originated project but it's also very much an international project already with a presence in 300 languages and 39 local chapters which are independant but affiliated with the foundation. There is a reason the press release talk of a _universal_ code of conduct.
nicbou 6y ago
We have not seen the code of conduct. We can't imagine what it will be like based on two or three adjectives from this article. I moderate a small community. When we introduced new moderators, we had to formalise the unspoken rules that governed our moderation habits. Now, we follow guidelines instead of intuition. Writing things down forced us to think about our behaviour, and to discuss the flaws in our unspoken rules. It makes our behaviour more consistent, especially towards content we personally don't like. A code of conduct can be just that. A formal, consistent rulebook for a community.
- sradman 6y ago
  A code of conduct that flexibly promotes civil interactions between community members is commendable. Framing civility in terms of the language of social justice activism is worrying. Attempts at inclusivity should not hand-out veto power. Safe spaces should not be exclusive platforms for the grievances of anyone who self-identifies as marginalized. A code of conduct promoting civility should be sufficient.
Hokusai 6y ago
> enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity across projects Well done. I like how Wikimedia works with many languages and helps to share human knowledge. It is a great institution and a good example on how humans can collaborate to create something great. Inclusivity is at the roots of humanity at its best. It is sad to see the unconstructive cynical comments in this post. We need more people to build a better world. Cynicism is a good tool agains tyranny, used agains a foundation that has done so much good is just a cheap shot. Be civilized, be constructive.
- disposekinetics 6y ago
  This kind of language is a tool of would-be tyrants. Mocking it is a defense of the good the organization has done.
dntbnmpls 6y ago
Ah the dystopian newspeak - inclusivity. We are so inclusive that we only how people who think, act and talk alike are allowed. The tech world is rotting top down from the inside. China has "harmony". We have "inclusivity". But ultimately, it's all about control and manipulation.
thinkingemote 6y ago
This will be very interesting to observe because it might apply western concepts of good behaviour to a global audience. Previously it let different chapters, different parts of the world behave differently. In effect Wikimedia should want to allow users who are actual signed up Fascists in their countries to contribute to their project, whilst also ensuring they behave themselves. To me, (most probably because the language of this has been shaped by progressive politics in the west and the article is written in English and Wikimedia is primarily English speaking) this might well be an experiment with applying the western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well on monocultural programming and tech communities to a really globally diverse and actual multi cultural project. There really is no other global project like this which spans and crosses actual cultures and languages. None. This will be fascinating to watch, I hope they get it right, or at least publish their failings if they don't.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well Says who? Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic folks, of course. Don't get me wrong, there is an underlying reality behind the oft-repeated claims of 'Whig history' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history . In particular, democratic and classical liberal values seem to do an unusually good job of de-escalating unwanted social conflict: NPOV (as known on Wikipedia) is at its root a "liberal" idea, not an authoritarian or intolerant one! But these overbroad claims should always be treated with plenty of caution.
tumetab1 6y ago
Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve? I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency. Also if this just formalizes existing practices why creating a "retroactive review process"?
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  > Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve? Know the phrase "follow the money"? In this case, follow the power. To be caught up arguing about codes of conduct in general is a distraction. >I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency. Remember that time the Wikimedia office banned a user for unclear reasons, without engaging community governance that would typically handle the banning, and the row it caused because that wasn't the normal way of doing business? If you doubt how huge the separation of responsibility between the people who work FOR wikpmedia and work ON wikpedia is, see: https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/wikipedia-fram-banning-editor-controversy.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/wikipedia-fram-banning-... This release from wikimedia says that they're going to be taking top down control, but unless you're already versed in the structure of the system you just hear names of groups without understanding the boundaries they represent. > Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve? Either, the wikimedia board is again trying to "fix" wikipedia engagement with all the insight, art and tact of people that wouldn't be caught dead participating as editors within wikipedia's self governance system. Or, a wedge issue has emerged that will allow the foundation to take more direct control while minimizing the appearance of ramping down wikiepedia's self governance.
travisoneill1 6y ago
The irony in this is that this type of language about "inclusivity" only really appeals to a narrow subset of upper middle class white people.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The irony in this is that this type of language about "inclusivity" only really appeals to a narrow subset of upper middle class white people. IME, bourgeois identity politics is mostly popular in members of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletarian intelligentsia (which maps loosely to the dominant American use of the term “upper middle class”, which is really tied to any coherent model of economic class), but seemingly slightly more (Proportionately) in the groups it on its own term seeks to extend inclusion to than Whites.
- iron0013 6y ago
  You will be quickly disabused of this notion if you talk to poor and/or brown people. While I’m sure that you can find occasional individuals who do not care about inclusivity, the large majority do care. The attitude that your comment reflects crops up a lot in relation to, for example, the Washington Redskins naming controversy. Folks who like the current name are always bringing up a couple of examples of Native Americans who say they “don’t care” about the name, and claiming that it’s really only white liberals who are offended; meanwhile, in my experience, the large majority of Natives actually do care very much, and are upset that a racial slur used for their ethnicity is being used as the name of a sports team.
  - DuskStar 6y ago
    > The attitude that your comment reflects crops up a lot in relation to, for example, the Washington Redskins naming controversy. Folks who like the current name are always bringing up a couple of examples of Native Americans who say they “don’t care” about the name, and claiming that it’s really only white liberals who are offended; meanwhile, in my experience, the large majority of Natives actually do care very much, and are upset that a racial slur used for their ethnicity is being used as the name of a sports team. I found this comment rather funny, because if CGP Grey is correct [0] the preferred term by American Indians is "American Indian", NOT "Native American". So you're claiming knowledge of the general opinion of a group, while not using the group's preferred name for themselves. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ
8bitsrule 6y ago
Just searched on 'wikipedia editing for beginners' The top item links to article 'Help:Editing'. This page is -not- for beginners. The article: 'Help:Wikipedia' does not mention editing. It does lead to 'Help:Menu'. It offers general help. Anyway, I had to wander around a while to find this article: 'Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Editing for the first time'. This page also tries to do too much. It seems clear that a site this size, trying to attract new and diversified editors, could afford to invest in a 'tutor-text' approach to taking on different kinds of editing tasks. Beginners could jump in at 'adding a link' or 'changing a spelling' or 'rewriting a sentence'. Each would offer them a sandbox to try out something they want to learn to do. After couple of dozen of these, they'd feel more at-home in the editing environment.
- baud147258 6y ago
  It doesn't help that the editor is not very user-friendly. Though I remember seeing a visual editor, what happened?
nindalf 6y ago
I remember when the Go community adopted similar code of conduct. There was similar push back based around concerns that the rules would be abused and the community would end up becoming less welcome. This hasn't actually happened in the last 4 years, but correct me if I'm wrong. Most other open source software projects have adopted similar guidelines and they're thriving as well. Taking Rust as an example, they manage to put out high quality releases every six weeks. Thousands of developers of all backgrounds have contributed, which makes me think that the Code of Conduct has encouraged more participation rather than less. There are dire warnings in this thread about how Wikipedia is going to burn to the ground because of this change. Based on experience of Go and Rust, I'm somewhat skeptical.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  These developments are indeed reassuring, but we're still not sure what Wiki's "universal" code of conduct will look like. It should go without saying that CoC's and related initiatives have also led to quite a bit of tension in other software projects, even recently (including w/ devs resigning as a result), and I don't think anyone clearly understands why it is that Go and Rust have fared so well wrt. these issues.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  The worries probably aren't because of the rules themselves but how they might be interpreted by the people who enforce them. A CoC can make complete sense for everyone and still be abused or misinterpreted to fit a bias. The reverse is also true.
- brmgb 6y ago
  I have always feel a mix of amusement and scepticism regarding codes of conduct. I don't actually mind them. They pretty much can all be boiled down to please act as a reasonably well adjusted and decent human being to a point I don't really see what they actually aim to achieve. I fail to see how writing a set of vague rules are supposed to solve deep cultural issues in a community but I guess that at least signal a willingness to tackle the subject which might in itself be enough. Anyway, if it gives some people a warm fuzzy feeling, I'm all for it. What I find really amusing however is what they say about the culture of the people writing them. For exemple, I have always found it very amusing that the Rust code of conduct feels the need to explicitely address avoiding overtly sexual aliases as its second point, a long time before condemning harassment.
swebs 6y ago
Does anyone know why this is happening? I just assumed Reddit, Youtube, Stackoverflow, etc were doing it because they were being paid by the DNC or various political action groups. But Wikipedia is a non-profit with a good chunk of money in reserve.
- DanBC 6y ago
  Lots of people try to eidt Wikipedia and are driven away by arseholes, and this is a problem that Wikipedia has been trying to fix for years. Things came to a head last year when a prominent editor was harassing users for years and the English wikipedia failed to address it. It came to the attention of Wikimedia foundation who took action against the editor, and that caused a storm. Personally I think they need to do a lot more than a CoC, especially if it's going to be applied by Wikipedia.
  - swebs 6y ago
    Can I get a link to this specific incident?
    - DanBC 6y ago
      The blocking of Fram. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317921
  - finnthehuman 6y ago
    So wikipeda is moving out of the age of "how will we get anyone to show up?" into "to get even more people to show up, how do we force better customer service skills?" I don't get why projects think a top-down straighten-up-and-fly-right edict is how you retain driveby contributors (I get why they do it, I don't get why they make that the primary/only change). That's a highly visible but overall small part of the barrier to entry. Online volunteer collaboration projects often assume anyone motivated to participate will self-train. Making the surface level language nicer only keeps people reading long enough to find out that they've walked into a busy office full of people working with tasks, process and goals they don't understand. Lots of the day-to-day in an office puts efficiency above approachability, and I don't think that's always wrong. Surely WMF would have better results if they actually worked on the barrier to entry by explicitly adding to staffing(/recruiting volunteers) to onboard new editors. e.g. shepherd their work through onboarding-focused helpers until the newbie is ready to drop into the office proper. Use the failures of conversion to identify where there was a lack of handholding (and build a system for that), vs a lack of interest.
generalpass 6y ago
> Specifically, the Board has tasked the Foundation with: > Developing and introducing, in close consultation with volunteer contributor communities, a universal code of conduct that will be a binding minimum set of standards across all Wikimedia projects; > Taking actions to ban, sanction, or otherwise limit the access of Wikimedia movement participants who do not comply with these policies and the Terms of Use; > Working with community functionaries to create and refine a retroactive review process for cases brought by involved parties, excluding those cases which pose legal or other severe risks; and > Significantly increasing support for and collaboration with community functionaries primarily enforcing such compliance in a way that prioritizes the personal safety of these functionaries. The first thing they state is creating a universal code established by some hand-picked team. The second thing discussed is how this code will be enforced. The third thing discussed is rewriting everything published to be sure it conforms to the new code. The fourth thing discussed is building a wall around the functionaries. It seems notable they have chosen a word which describes an obtuse rule enforcer. These activities do not describe the way to create anything "inclusive" of anything that is not in service to some very specific set of viewpoints.
blondin 6y ago
hey, this is totally tangential to the topic being discussed but i am hoping wikipedia people are here, reading these comments... why not make the mobile theme the default theme? it has better readability. works on both desktop and mobile. i find myself always adding "m" in the wikipedia urls to get to the mobile version. also started updating all my bookmarks.
freen 6y ago
Seems like a refresher in the paradox of tolerance is needed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance “ The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.”
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  Lesser known is Popper's meta-paradox which is that Popper's paradox is often quoted by people attempting to justify their own intolerance, the same sort of people that Popper's paradox tells us cannot be safely tolerated by a society.
luord 6y ago
In this thread I saw how a petition to show an example of bogus claims of discrimination, followed by a clear cut answer to which not even the asker could argue against, devolved into nebulous musings on what certain organizations should or should not consider unfair advantages. This is probably the main reason why I hate these discussions whenever they appear in HN. It's not because of whether I consider that initiatives for "inclusivity" are "baseless, performative and counterproductive at worst" or "the right step into promoting a more dynamic exchange of ideas", but because one side of the discussion never stops moving the goalposts. The conversation only stops when one side has successfully shouted out dissenters, and not out of any actual solid argument made in their favor.
- textgel 6y ago
  This is something that really strikes me as interesting. When one side of the debate is clearly completely operating in bad faith what do you do? I think by now anyone who's joined these debates is familiar with the tactics seen. - The attempt to exhaust the opposition by wasting debate asking for clarification/examples of things that are common knowledge and to try and drown out core arguments with word salads and getting side tracked in arguments over semantics. - The tendency for every argument to effectively follow the narcissists prayer. - The tactic of spamming the same illogical arguments over and over despite the fact these have been refuted before; seemingly in the hope that if enough of their own side pile on with enough logical fallacies it will get too exhausting for the opposition to repeatedly tear down the same arguments over and over again while having to remain civil. Ironically it's the one thing I can think of that even comes close to aligning with the tolerance of intolerance argument.
nca-peripherals 6y ago
I maybe wrong but this sounds like a good recipe for groupthink bias, low-level fascism, newspeak, and weaponizing a CoC for cyber-crybully attacks and de-platforming while purporting to promote contrary ideals. Orwellian and Kafkaesque, eh? So much for classical liberalism, free association, and tolerating (not necessarily condoning or endorsing) a diversity of viewpoints. Identity politics and unspoken "correct/acceptable" beliefs come next. Sigh

95 points by elsewhen 6y ago

4cao 6y ago

Wikipedia already has too many policies and this is part of the problem. However noble the intentions, adding yet another policy-like document is not going to be part of the solution. Obviously harassment and toxic behavior are bad and should be discouraged but all this will accomplish is that politically-inclined editors will have even more weapons in their inventory to throw "harassment" and "toxic behavior" accusations at one another. The bar to start contributing to Wikipedia is already very high: the way it works in practice, one must familiarize themselves with hundreds of pages from the WP: namespace, and learn how to use them strategically to defend their contributions. No wonder few people have the time and inclination to do that. To encourage more inclusivity this burden should first of all be lowered, not raised. So, if more inclusivity was really the objective here, a better experiment would be to remove all the current policies except a dozen of the most important ones decided by popular vote among editors, and then edit them even further so that they fit on a single page, leaving these as the only rules in force. From then on, not more than a single policy change could be made per month, and all of it should still fit on the same single page. This would give new users an equal footing with the entrenched ones, with rules straightforward enough for everybody to understand and follow, which in turn should empower people to use their own judgement instead of being micromanaged. Disagreements would have to be solved by discussing the matter at hand, as opposed to flinging projectiles from the safety of the WP: namespace. Wikipedia could learn something from how remarkably simple the HN rules are in comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html OK, maybe the above is not the greatest idea but it'd at least rattle things a bit in the right direction if done as an experiment. On the other hand, much of what Wikimedia Foundation has been doing recently is tangential to the development of a free encyclopedia, and this press release is no different: it reads like an exercise in corporate bullshit that checks all the right boxes but will change exactly nothing. The response to the failures of bureaucracy is more bureaucracy: "What we were doing so far has failed, so we urgently need to do even more of the same. This time it'll work."

CommieDetector 6y ago

Translation : Only radical leftists allowed.

Mizza 6y ago

Ah good, a new way for the deletionists and power hungry busybodys to cudgel the people who actually make positive contributions.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Citation needed
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  Its common knowledge at this point. English wikipedia is guarded by an army of moderators who try their best to prevent new articles from being created.
  - random_dork 6y ago
    Citation needed
  - unishark 6y ago
    I think that was little joke.
    - wccrawford 6y ago
      You know what I think is really telling? I think you're correct that it was a joke/meta-commentary, but I didn't even process it as such until you called it out. And that's exactly why Wikipedia has such a problem with its editors. They're so good at getting their way while appearing to just have logical arguments, as has been stated elsewhere in these comments. So that either makes it an incredibly on-point joke, or actually a statement that anecdotes aren't facts, and I can't even tell which for sure.
- forgingahead 6y ago
  No, common sense is usually quite adequate.

etrabroline 6y ago

Saw these under the article. >Lisa Lewin, Managing Partner at Ethical Ventures, a New York City based management consulting firm, will be the newest member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees >Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new member and leadership appointments to its Board of Trustees. Shani Evenstein Sigalov, currently an EdTech Innovation Strategist and lecturer at the School of Medicine in Tel Aviv University I wonder if these new board members were involved in the new CoC and inclusivity rules.

IAmEveryone 6y ago
These articles are from August and January 2019, respectively. And, yes, it is likely that these board members were among the board members that voted on this proposal, considering they are members of the board, and the board voted on it. Is there any specific problem you see with these two as opposed to other board members, or why do you feel the need to point them out?
- mcbits 6y ago
  > why do you feel the need to point them out? The web page points them out as "RELATED" (emphasis in original) at the end of the press release. It's not clear if that was done manually or algorithmically. If algorithmically, perhaps it's one of those unintentionally bigoted algorithms?

stormdennis 6y ago

All the buzzwords are there, toxicity, harassment, safe spaces, sanction, ban, inclusivity. All to promote/cement the viewpoints that we now understand to be ,self evidently, the correct ones.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
The most tolerant societies end up tolerating the intolerable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- stormdennis 6y ago
  The rule of law, combined with the broadest possible free speech, is the best defence as had been shown in Western democracies for quite some time now. Democracy in Germany in the thirties was in a very weak condition for a variety of reasons which allowed the Nazis to undermine it fatally.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    And it's probably worth considering that democracy after the forties in Germany includes Strafgesetzbuch §86a.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      Notably this law perpetuates on a daily basis the Nazis' coercive and violent appropriation of a number of traditional religious and cultural symbols, and with it their unnatural exploitation as emblems of the most evil and despicable ideas ever contrived in modern history. All things considered, a very fitting example of parent poster's point.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        > unnatural There's nothing natural or unnatural about human interpretation of abstract symbols.

JungleGymSam 6y ago

Good old catch-all: `toxic behavior`

ReptileMan 6y ago

Anyone willing to take a bet that it will be mostly used to kick away "the wrong" side in the culture war?

random_dork 6y ago
That is war. It is hell. It forces people to choose a side when it happens on their territory. Are you not happy with the side they chose?
- creddit 6y ago
  What an absurd cementing of the false dichotomy of the culture war.
  - etrabroline 6y ago
    What do you think the nature of it is?

Animats 6y ago

I can see worrying about harassment. "Inclusivity", though? (From the tone of the press release, they mean race and gender, not article subjects.) Wikipedia editors are anonymous unless they don't want to be. How can anyone tell?

thomasqm 6y ago
I do not read anything relating inclusivity to demographics. I think they are just discouraging ignorance of other editors.
IAmEveryone 6y ago
Inclusivity of editors is a major factor for inclusivity of content. Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content. With less than 10% of editors being women, for example, content is guaranteed to be somewhat skewed, even assuming absolutely no ill will by anybody. Among the famous examples are a scientist's entry being deleted as "not notable" just weeks before she won the Nobel Prize. Or, if you prefer quantitative data, that articles about women tend to emphasise their relationships and children (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06307v2.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06307v2.pdf).
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  I think you’re right here though. For example, the staggering amount of Japanese-centric pages on enwiki shows how the interest of a monoculture can have an outsized impact on the community. But at the same time, why not the free content?
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content. Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopedia though, not a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

Wikimedia needs to make some serious changes if it wants more editors to join. They need to do a lot of UI work to make the process for creating a new article or discussing new changes. When I tried it I found the process very confusing. Why is all communication done in a wiki page editor?

speedgoose 6y ago
For sure, the learning curve is too steep. It's improved with the visual editor but wikipedia is too difficult if you want to participate actively.
nicbou 6y ago
They have! I contribute very sporadically, and both Commons and Wikipedia became a lot easier to work with thanks to improved tools.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  How recent was this? I tried to add an article a year ago and found the process to be pretty crap
  - nicbou 6y ago
    They added a lot of WYSIWYG tools which are much better than the plain text ones. Wikimedia lets you specify licences for the files you upload, and find categories for them.
nullc 6y ago
> Why is all communication done in a wiki page editor? Dogfooding, essentially. This guarantees that all participants eventually become broadly competent at using it. There are newer tools to streamline common interactions, though personally I think they make the learning curve steeper in exchange for making it start off a little easier. Plus, wiki is often an exceptionally good way to hold discussions. The fact that other contributors can, e.g. fix broken links and that freeform layout can be used... that multiple contributors can seamlessly collaborate on a single comment. It's very powerful. Wiki for discussion also builds community and trust, because people could screw up your comments but they don't. (and if they do, it'll get fixed promptly and they'll have helpfully identified themselves as someone either totally clueless or having difficulty with self control)

dannyw 6y ago

These ideas can come from good intentions, but what it often means is that a certain opinion is the _right one_ and another opinion isn't. As an example, some parts of the internet ostracised Brendan Eich for a personal donation he made to support a Californian ballet proposition on same sex marriage; forcing his resignation. There were no complaints about any of his behaviour or actions at Mozilla whatsoever. That's not a good thing to be doing. As another example, the recent Stack Overflow changes where a controversial, over-empathsised policy change on respecting pronouns (also pretty much a non-issue, I have never seen pronoun complaints come up on Stack Overflow) has forced multiple community moderator resignations and a widespread community revolt. These changes are often negatives for the projects involved.

thrwaway69 6y ago
> also pretty much a non-issue, I have never seen pronoun complaints come up on Stack Overflow Eh, there are. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean there aren't any reports.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  Most users on Stack Overflow use nongendered pseudonyms, and as a Q&A site, they go out of their way to explicitly discourage conversation. If you do need to a reply to a user in the comments, the convention is @username, no pronouns needed.
Nextgrid 6y ago
The Stack Overflow fiasco was more about virtue signalling because nowadays you need to be (or rather show) “diversity and inclusion” as a business if you want to appear as a “better” company (useful for soliciting VC investment when you don’t have a profitable business), regardless of whether diversity & inclusion has ever been a problem at the company.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  > nowadays you need to be (or rather show) “diversity and inclusion” as a business if you want to appear as a “better” company (useful for soliciting VC investment when you don’t have a profitable business), regardless of whether diversity & inclusion has ever been a problem at the company. Could you expand on this? My naive impression is that VCs do their best to make hard-nosed expected-value-in-USD estimates, perhaps specifically estimating the likelihood the company will be worth >$100M/$1B or whatever; and that acting like that is probably in their job description because they're investing other people's money who expect a return. How does the phenomenon you describe fit in? Is there some group of VCs that believe that championing "diversity and inclusion" is likely to lead to 10x growth? Does the company making the pitch make that claim—or, as one reading of your words suggests, claim that not having achieved 10x growth in the past is due to the lack of such championing? Or do VCs face social pressure (from, I dunno, other VCs, journalists who write about them, whoever else they talk with) to make it look like they're funding virtuous causes (er, companies)? Seems like the last is most plausible.

drukenemo 6y ago

We’re are entering a new wave of censorship, all in the name of “the greater good”.

groby_b 6y ago
Codes of conduct aren't censorship. In the physical world, they're known as "house rules". You want to join the community, here's how you behave. It is essentially a list of "how not to be an asshole". Nothing is stopping you from expressing yourself however you want - just elsewhere, if you can't follow the rules. fwiw, this very website has its own code of conduct: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It focuses on different things than the Wikimedia one, but it's fundamentally the same thing. For both of them, I'd suggest that if there are things that you feel are detrimental, you specifically address them. Making an empty comment like "new wave of censorship" achieves nothing except saying "I don't like the rules". In which case, fine, there are plenty of other places on the Internet.
- cthor 6y ago
  If the rules were decided by the English Wikipedia community following their process for making such decisions then this would be a meaningful criticism. But this is an edict from the WMF ivory tower. To say it's representative of the Wikipedia editors is a gross mischaracterisation. From my perspective it's naked entryism, striking at the centralised weakness in an otherwise robust, decentralised system.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    The English Wikipedia can be part of the problem in some cases. It's not a democracy but a "tight-knit" community where insiders have a lot of influence, and even harassing, uncivil behavior can go on for a long time if it's perceived as "defending" the community's precious "work" from new editors. Part of the problem is also that harassment concerns must often be disclosed in private for obvious reasons, so a community-wide dispute resolution process might just not work very well for those. And then there's Wikipedias in other languages and other Wikimedia projects, which come with additional cans of worms.

drukenemo 6y ago

Once again, we fall prey to a monopoly. Britannica exists and it’s quite decent, but it’s edited only by a few and has a tiny fraction of the reach as Wikipedia.

shadowgovt 6y ago
It's ironic that, in fear that Wikipedia is an information monopoly, someone would turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, given how many supporters of Wikipedia have historically been seeking an alternative to the centralized print encyclopedia model. https://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/anencyc.txt https://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/anencyc.txt

sergiotapia 6y ago

Just more bullshit for them to quiet down opinions and things that don't align with their political beliefs. Not surprising. We can all see through it really easily.

Jonnax 6y ago

Hacker news is a really good site for tech discussion. But when it comes to anything about diversity / harassment in the workplace, it seems like a group of people crop up needing to tell everyone that they're the real victims There's a signicant subset of people that cry the loudest of censorship only when it comes to communities having a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia. In any other discussion about Wikipedia, there would be a significant concensus that Wikipedia has a unwelcoming to new editors community.

ZeroGravitas 6y ago
When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
- textgel 6y ago
  Ironically applicable to those demanding this due to their claims of being oppressed.
dang 6y ago
The community reflects the larger society, which is divided on social issues. Remember also that users come from many countries and regions. That's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby. The biggest factor, though, is that HN is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=silo%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding. (Edit: in what follows, when I talk about the internet I mean internet communities of HN's size and scope, or larger. The problems are different at smaller size or narrower scope, but those aren't the problems we have.) People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts with opponents, it's usually in a context where conflict is expected, e.g. a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends has already responded to. The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of other users, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—often something more important. This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by enemies, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places in their life. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was? Different internet communities grow out of different initial conditions. Each is a fractal that replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial-condition set includes that it's a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions trapped in one bottle. This non-siloed nature of HN causes a deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is a monster, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this shock experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article (and it's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience really is that bad). This is a misunderstanding because it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though certainly they do. It's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place went into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1]. It's easy to miss because of these conflicts, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, at least partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about. Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the orange site sucks. I think it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: what's happening is a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that opportunity because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode. HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is extremely uncomfortable. It is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different. I know it sounds strange and is grandiose to say, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to step further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself. [1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, please point me to it so I can learn.

cmdshiftf4 6y ago

People, and I'd argue especially on HN (for an internet community), generally aren't out to promote harassment or exclusivity so it's telling how Orwellian things have become when such a statement - which on the face of it sounds good and worthy - is rightly recognized as Newspeak. Wikimedia can do as they please, and if it results in a shitshow as many such efforts have before, then on their head may it be. I've been pretty generous with recurring yearly donations up until now but I'll honestly put things on pause until we see how some of this plays out. If anyone is genuinely concerned about the impact this may have, I would suggest archiving a recent dump of wikipedia at the least. It's only ~25GB.

brmgb 6y ago

Standards and a "universal" code of conduct to adress harassment and promote inclusivity, that all sound extremely American both in the approach taken and in its wording. I impatiently await to see how it's going to be received by the international Wikipedia community. If I had to guess, I would say with a large dose of scepticism but who knows, that might work.

zozbot234 6y ago
Well, Wikipedia is a US-originated project. The CC license applies worldwide though, so anyone is welcome to fork it if that becomes an issue.
- brmgb 6y ago
  I am not sure I understand your post. There is no need to fork. Wikipedia is a US originated project but it's also very much an international project already with a presence in 300 languages and 39 local chapters which are independant but affiliated with the foundation. There is a reason the press release talk of a _universal_ code of conduct.

nicbou 6y ago

We have not seen the code of conduct. We can't imagine what it will be like based on two or three adjectives from this article. I moderate a small community. When we introduced new moderators, we had to formalise the unspoken rules that governed our moderation habits. Now, we follow guidelines instead of intuition. Writing things down forced us to think about our behaviour, and to discuss the flaws in our unspoken rules. It makes our behaviour more consistent, especially towards content we personally don't like. A code of conduct can be just that. A formal, consistent rulebook for a community.

sradman 6y ago
A code of conduct that flexibly promotes civil interactions between community members is commendable. Framing civility in terms of the language of social justice activism is worrying. Attempts at inclusivity should not hand-out veto power. Safe spaces should not be exclusive platforms for the grievances of anyone who self-identifies as marginalized. A code of conduct promoting civility should be sufficient.

Hokusai 6y ago

> enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity across projects Well done. I like how Wikimedia works with many languages and helps to share human knowledge. It is a great institution and a good example on how humans can collaborate to create something great. Inclusivity is at the roots of humanity at its best. It is sad to see the unconstructive cynical comments in this post. We need more people to build a better world. Cynicism is a good tool agains tyranny, used agains a foundation that has done so much good is just a cheap shot. Be civilized, be constructive.

disposekinetics 6y ago
This kind of language is a tool of would-be tyrants. Mocking it is a defense of the good the organization has done.

dntbnmpls 6y ago

Ah the dystopian newspeak - inclusivity. We are so inclusive that we only how people who think, act and talk alike are allowed. The tech world is rotting top down from the inside. China has "harmony". We have "inclusivity". But ultimately, it's all about control and manipulation.

thinkingemote 6y ago

This will be very interesting to observe because it might apply western concepts of good behaviour to a global audience. Previously it let different chapters, different parts of the world behave differently. In effect Wikimedia should want to allow users who are actual signed up Fascists in their countries to contribute to their project, whilst also ensuring they behave themselves. To me, (most probably because the language of this has been shaped by progressive politics in the west and the article is written in English and Wikimedia is primarily English speaking) this might well be an experiment with applying the western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well on monocultural programming and tech communities to a really globally diverse and actual multi cultural project. There really is no other global project like this which spans and crosses actual cultures and languages. None. This will be fascinating to watch, I hope they get it right, or at least publish their failings if they don't.

zozbot234 6y ago
> western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well Says who? Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic folks, of course. Don't get me wrong, there is an underlying reality behind the oft-repeated claims of 'Whig history' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history . In particular, democratic and classical liberal values seem to do an unusually good job of de-escalating unwanted social conflict: NPOV (as known on Wikipedia) is at its root a "liberal" idea, not an authoritarian or intolerant one! But these overbroad claims should always be treated with plenty of caution.

tumetab1 6y ago

Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve? I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency. Also if this just formalizes existing practices why creating a "retroactive review process"?

finnthehuman 6y ago
> Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve? Know the phrase "follow the money"? In this case, follow the power. To be caught up arguing about codes of conduct in general is a distraction. >I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency. Remember that time the Wikimedia office banned a user for unclear reasons, without engaging community governance that would typically handle the banning, and the row it caused because that wasn't the normal way of doing business? If you doubt how huge the separation of responsibility between the people who work FOR wikpmedia and work ON wikpedia is, see: https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/wikipedia-fram-banning-editor-controversy.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/wikipedia-fram-banning-... This release from wikimedia says that they're going to be taking top down control, but unless you're already versed in the structure of the system you just hear names of groups without understanding the boundaries they represent. > Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve? Either, the wikimedia board is again trying to "fix" wikipedia engagement with all the insight, art and tact of people that wouldn't be caught dead participating as editors within wikipedia's self governance system. Or, a wedge issue has emerged that will allow the foundation to take more direct control while minimizing the appearance of ramping down wikiepedia's self governance.

travisoneill1 6y ago

The irony in this is that this type of language about "inclusivity" only really appeals to a narrow subset of upper middle class white people.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> The irony in this is that this type of language about "inclusivity" only really appeals to a narrow subset of upper middle class white people. IME, bourgeois identity politics is mostly popular in members of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletarian intelligentsia (which maps loosely to the dominant American use of the term “upper middle class”, which is really tied to any coherent model of economic class), but seemingly slightly more (Proportionately) in the groups it on its own term seeks to extend inclusion to than Whites.
iron0013 6y ago
You will be quickly disabused of this notion if you talk to poor and/or brown people. While I’m sure that you can find occasional individuals who do not care about inclusivity, the large majority do care. The attitude that your comment reflects crops up a lot in relation to, for example, the Washington Redskins naming controversy. Folks who like the current name are always bringing up a couple of examples of Native Americans who say they “don’t care” about the name, and claiming that it’s really only white liberals who are offended; meanwhile, in my experience, the large majority of Natives actually do care very much, and are upset that a racial slur used for their ethnicity is being used as the name of a sports team.
- DuskStar 6y ago
  > The attitude that your comment reflects crops up a lot in relation to, for example, the Washington Redskins naming controversy. Folks who like the current name are always bringing up a couple of examples of Native Americans who say they “don’t care” about the name, and claiming that it’s really only white liberals who are offended; meanwhile, in my experience, the large majority of Natives actually do care very much, and are upset that a racial slur used for their ethnicity is being used as the name of a sports team. I found this comment rather funny, because if CGP Grey is correct [0] the preferred term by American Indians is "American Indian", NOT "Native American". So you're claiming knowledge of the general opinion of a group, while not using the group's preferred name for themselves. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ

8bitsrule 6y ago

Just searched on 'wikipedia editing for beginners' The top item links to article 'Help:Editing'. This page is -not- for beginners. The article: 'Help:Wikipedia' does not mention editing. It does lead to 'Help:Menu'. It offers general help. Anyway, I had to wander around a while to find this article: 'Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Editing for the first time'. This page also tries to do too much. It seems clear that a site this size, trying to attract new and diversified editors, could afford to invest in a 'tutor-text' approach to taking on different kinds of editing tasks. Beginners could jump in at 'adding a link' or 'changing a spelling' or 'rewriting a sentence'. Each would offer them a sandbox to try out something they want to learn to do. After couple of dozen of these, they'd feel more at-home in the editing environment.

baud147258 6y ago
It doesn't help that the editor is not very user-friendly. Though I remember seeing a visual editor, what happened?

nindalf 6y ago

I remember when the Go community adopted similar code of conduct. There was similar push back based around concerns that the rules would be abused and the community would end up becoming less welcome. This hasn't actually happened in the last 4 years, but correct me if I'm wrong. Most other open source software projects have adopted similar guidelines and they're thriving as well. Taking Rust as an example, they manage to put out high quality releases every six weeks. Thousands of developers of all backgrounds have contributed, which makes me think that the Code of Conduct has encouraged more participation rather than less. There are dire warnings in this thread about how Wikipedia is going to burn to the ground because of this change. Based on experience of Go and Rust, I'm somewhat skeptical.

zozbot234 6y ago
These developments are indeed reassuring, but we're still not sure what Wiki's "universal" code of conduct will look like. It should go without saying that CoC's and related initiatives have also led to quite a bit of tension in other software projects, even recently (including w/ devs resigning as a result), and I don't think anyone clearly understands why it is that Go and Rust have fared so well wrt. these issues.
alpaca128 6y ago
The worries probably aren't because of the rules themselves but how they might be interpreted by the people who enforce them. A CoC can make complete sense for everyone and still be abused or misinterpreted to fit a bias. The reverse is also true.
brmgb 6y ago
I have always feel a mix of amusement and scepticism regarding codes of conduct. I don't actually mind them. They pretty much can all be boiled down to please act as a reasonably well adjusted and decent human being to a point I don't really see what they actually aim to achieve. I fail to see how writing a set of vague rules are supposed to solve deep cultural issues in a community but I guess that at least signal a willingness to tackle the subject which might in itself be enough. Anyway, if it gives some people a warm fuzzy feeling, I'm all for it. What I find really amusing however is what they say about the culture of the people writing them. For exemple, I have always found it very amusing that the Rust code of conduct feels the need to explicitely address avoiding overtly sexual aliases as its second point, a long time before condemning harassment.

swebs 6y ago

Does anyone know why this is happening? I just assumed Reddit, Youtube, Stackoverflow, etc were doing it because they were being paid by the DNC or various political action groups. But Wikipedia is a non-profit with a good chunk of money in reserve.

DanBC 6y ago
Lots of people try to eidt Wikipedia and are driven away by arseholes, and this is a problem that Wikipedia has been trying to fix for years. Things came to a head last year when a prominent editor was harassing users for years and the English wikipedia failed to address it. It came to the attention of Wikimedia foundation who took action against the editor, and that caused a storm. Personally I think they need to do a lot more than a CoC, especially if it's going to be applied by Wikipedia.
- swebs 6y ago
  Can I get a link to this specific incident?
  - DanBC 6y ago
    The blocking of Fram. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317921
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  So wikipeda is moving out of the age of "how will we get anyone to show up?" into "to get even more people to show up, how do we force better customer service skills?" I don't get why projects think a top-down straighten-up-and-fly-right edict is how you retain driveby contributors (I get why they do it, I don't get why they make that the primary/only change). That's a highly visible but overall small part of the barrier to entry. Online volunteer collaboration projects often assume anyone motivated to participate will self-train. Making the surface level language nicer only keeps people reading long enough to find out that they've walked into a busy office full of people working with tasks, process and goals they don't understand. Lots of the day-to-day in an office puts efficiency above approachability, and I don't think that's always wrong. Surely WMF would have better results if they actually worked on the barrier to entry by explicitly adding to staffing(/recruiting volunteers) to onboard new editors. e.g. shepherd their work through onboarding-focused helpers until the newbie is ready to drop into the office proper. Use the failures of conversion to identify where there was a lack of handholding (and build a system for that), vs a lack of interest.

generalpass 6y ago

> Specifically, the Board has tasked the Foundation with: > Developing and introducing, in close consultation with volunteer contributor communities, a universal code of conduct that will be a binding minimum set of standards across all Wikimedia projects; > Taking actions to ban, sanction, or otherwise limit the access of Wikimedia movement participants who do not comply with these policies and the Terms of Use; > Working with community functionaries to create and refine a retroactive review process for cases brought by involved parties, excluding those cases which pose legal or other severe risks; and > Significantly increasing support for and collaboration with community functionaries primarily enforcing such compliance in a way that prioritizes the personal safety of these functionaries. The first thing they state is creating a universal code established by some hand-picked team. The second thing discussed is how this code will be enforced. The third thing discussed is rewriting everything published to be sure it conforms to the new code. The fourth thing discussed is building a wall around the functionaries. It seems notable they have chosen a word which describes an obtuse rule enforcer. These activities do not describe the way to create anything "inclusive" of anything that is not in service to some very specific set of viewpoints.

blondin 6y ago

hey, this is totally tangential to the topic being discussed but i am hoping wikipedia people are here, reading these comments... why not make the mobile theme the default theme? it has better readability. works on both desktop and mobile. i find myself always adding "m" in the wikipedia urls to get to the mobile version. also started updating all my bookmarks.

freen 6y ago

Seems like a refresher in the paradox of tolerance is needed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance “ The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.”

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
Lesser known is Popper's meta-paradox which is that Popper's paradox is often quoted by people attempting to justify their own intolerance, the same sort of people that Popper's paradox tells us cannot be safely tolerated by a society.

luord 6y ago

In this thread I saw how a petition to show an example of bogus claims of discrimination, followed by a clear cut answer to which not even the asker could argue against, devolved into nebulous musings on what certain organizations should or should not consider unfair advantages. This is probably the main reason why I hate these discussions whenever they appear in HN. It's not because of whether I consider that initiatives for "inclusivity" are "baseless, performative and counterproductive at worst" or "the right step into promoting a more dynamic exchange of ideas", but because one side of the discussion never stops moving the goalposts. The conversation only stops when one side has successfully shouted out dissenters, and not out of any actual solid argument made in their favor.

textgel 6y ago
This is something that really strikes me as interesting. When one side of the debate is clearly completely operating in bad faith what do you do? I think by now anyone who's joined these debates is familiar with the tactics seen. - The attempt to exhaust the opposition by wasting debate asking for clarification/examples of things that are common knowledge and to try and drown out core arguments with word salads and getting side tracked in arguments over semantics. - The tendency for every argument to effectively follow the narcissists prayer. - The tactic of spamming the same illogical arguments over and over despite the fact these have been refuted before; seemingly in the hope that if enough of their own side pile on with enough logical fallacies it will get too exhausting for the opposition to repeatedly tear down the same arguments over and over again while having to remain civil. Ironically it's the one thing I can think of that even comes close to aligning with the tolerance of intolerance argument.

nca-peripherals 6y ago

I maybe wrong but this sounds like a good recipe for groupthink bias, low-level fascism, newspeak, and weaponizing a CoC for cyber-crybully attacks and de-platforming while purporting to promote contrary ideals. Orwellian and Kafkaesque, eh? So much for classical liberalism, free association, and tolerating (not necessarily condoning or endorsing) a diversity of viewpoints. Identity politics and unspoken "correct/acceptable" beliefs come next. Sigh