4 ms·

I don't think this is a social justice thing. I personally would be just as annoyed about any other cause. Wikipedia donations shouldn't be championing any caus

I don't think this is a social justice thing. I personally would be just as annoyed about any other cause. Wikipedia donations shouldn't be championing any cause that isn't open access to information, no matter what side of the political spectrum it's on. Especially if it's to the point that Wikipedia itself is being left to rot in favor of unrelated causes.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
The thing being complained about is literally them executing their stated mission: > This pilot initiative is rooted in our strategic direction, where Knowledge Equity emerged in 2017 as one of two key pillars of focus in order for us to achieve our vision for 2030. Knowledge equity acknowledges that we can’t achieve free knowledge if there are societal or economic barriers that prevent some people’s ability to share and contribute to knowledge. With this focused fund, we will invest in organizations working to address systems of racial bias and inequality around the world, with the goal of creating a more inclusive, representative future for free knowledge.
- endominus 5y ago
  This is a motte and bailey argument. The motte here is that people living in unjust situations will likely be unable or less able to contribute to the Wikipedia project, which is true. The bailey is that donation funds are being funneled into these initiatives rather than improving Wikipedia itself (see other comments about bug counts and features lacking in Wikipedia, which are not being addressed). The Knowledge Equity fund may or may not improve "racial justice," however they define that - but the strategic goal of improving free access to the world's knowledge is almost certainly better reached by direct improvements to the Wikipedia software and development, and support of open access and free speech causes rather than racially-focused ones (such as, for example, support for Alexandra Elbakyan's endeavors to keep Sci-Hub operational, or speech protection in more repressive governments).
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    My favourite irony with the WMF's love of funding racial justice [1] is that one thing that does not work well at all in MediaWiki is the mobile editing interface [2]. It's basically just plain text and you're expected to type in the syntax manually on a phone, and also all the links to the talk, history and other pages are hidden when editing. Guess which countries disproportionately use mobile devices and don't have as much access to actual computers. [1] Not my emphasis: the KEF seems very much racial rather then social. Social justice that cuts across "class" lines rather than race lines seems much inherently fairer to me, since the point is to offset disadvantages, and race is a proxy of disadvantage, while "class" is almost a direct statement of how disadvantaged you are. [2] The reading interface is quite good, though certainly could be better (hidden ToCs in articles?).
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > the mobile editing interface They used to have a formalized project aimed at improving this, but it seems that work on it stopped mid-2019. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_contributions https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_c... Their stated (as of 2019) workflow requires going to site settings and turning on a special "Advanced" interface in order to get something that's not broken. Awful.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  It's worth noting that the bias in Wikipedia editorship is very real, and persists even after controlling for obvious causal factors such as Internet access. This is why "knowledge equity" was identified as a key part of Wikimedia projects' future strategy. Of course, trying to single-handedly solve "systems of racial bias and inequality around the world" is a pointless, Sisyphean task: what they ought to do in the first place is identify what factors make it harder for minorities and the socially marginalized to contribute to Wiki projects, specifically, and address these things. But Wikimedia is not a very evidence-driven organization, so they'd rather content themselves with these pointless and self-defeating platitudes.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    > At the same time, we recognize this is work that we as a movement cannot do alone. Our projects can only do so much when, for example, academic and mass media representation of marginalized communities remains insufficient, which in turn limits citations and primary sources for us to build from. The document linked above has some very pragmatic and boring goals like: * Supporting media and journalism efforts focused on people of color around the world, in order to expand reliable media sources covering these communities * Addressing unequal internet access * Improving digital literacy skills that impede access to knowledge * Investing in non-traditional records of knowledge (i.e. oral histories) What do you think they're doing that's so wooly and vague and useless?
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      These "goals" are far from narrowly targeted towards fixing the critical issue of biased minority editorship. We don't even know what exactly might deter marginalized people from contributing. Perhaps they're turned away by all the pointless wikilawyering, in which case the most effective solution would look very different from what the WMF is proposing here. Supporting minority media is a job for minorities, who will be far more keenly aware of what media are worth supporting and what are not. Writing down oral history is great, but is properly a job for academia, not for WMF projects (with the singular and notable exception of Wikijournal, which is a primary source of publishable research). Other listed things are similarly beside the point, e.g. as argued above wrt. Internet access.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

The thing being complained about is literally them executing their stated mission: > This pilot initiative is rooted in our strategic direction, where Knowledge Equity emerged in 2017 as one of two key pillars of focus in order for us to achieve our vision for 2030. Knowledge equity acknowledges that we can’t achieve free knowledge if there are societal or economic barriers that prevent some people’s ability to share and contribute to knowledge. With this focused fund, we will invest in organizations working to address systems of racial bias and inequality around the world, with the goal of creating a more inclusive, representative future for free knowledge.

endominus 5y ago
This is a motte and bailey argument. The motte here is that people living in unjust situations will likely be unable or less able to contribute to the Wikipedia project, which is true. The bailey is that donation funds are being funneled into these initiatives rather than improving Wikipedia itself (see other comments about bug counts and features lacking in Wikipedia, which are not being addressed). The Knowledge Equity fund may or may not improve "racial justice," however they define that - but the strategic goal of improving free access to the world's knowledge is almost certainly better reached by direct improvements to the Wikipedia software and development, and support of open access and free speech causes rather than racially-focused ones (such as, for example, support for Alexandra Elbakyan's endeavors to keep Sci-Hub operational, or speech protection in more repressive governments).
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  My favourite irony with the WMF's love of funding racial justice [1] is that one thing that does not work well at all in MediaWiki is the mobile editing interface [2]. It's basically just plain text and you're expected to type in the syntax manually on a phone, and also all the links to the talk, history and other pages are hidden when editing. Guess which countries disproportionately use mobile devices and don't have as much access to actual computers. [1] Not my emphasis: the KEF seems very much racial rather then social. Social justice that cuts across "class" lines rather than race lines seems much inherently fairer to me, since the point is to offset disadvantages, and race is a proxy of disadvantage, while "class" is almost a direct statement of how disadvantaged you are. [2] The reading interface is quite good, though certainly could be better (hidden ToCs in articles?).
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > the mobile editing interface They used to have a formalized project aimed at improving this, but it seems that work on it stopped mid-2019. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_contributions https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_c... Their stated (as of 2019) workflow requires going to site settings and turning on a special "Advanced" interface in order to get something that's not broken. Awful.
zozbot234 5y ago
It's worth noting that the bias in Wikipedia editorship is very real, and persists even after controlling for obvious causal factors such as Internet access. This is why "knowledge equity" was identified as a key part of Wikimedia projects' future strategy. Of course, trying to single-handedly solve "systems of racial bias and inequality around the world" is a pointless, Sisyphean task: what they ought to do in the first place is identify what factors make it harder for minorities and the socially marginalized to contribute to Wiki projects, specifically, and address these things. But Wikimedia is not a very evidence-driven organization, so they'd rather content themselves with these pointless and self-defeating platitudes.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  > At the same time, we recognize this is work that we as a movement cannot do alone. Our projects can only do so much when, for example, academic and mass media representation of marginalized communities remains insufficient, which in turn limits citations and primary sources for us to build from. The document linked above has some very pragmatic and boring goals like: * Supporting media and journalism efforts focused on people of color around the world, in order to expand reliable media sources covering these communities * Addressing unequal internet access * Improving digital literacy skills that impede access to knowledge * Investing in non-traditional records of knowledge (i.e. oral histories) What do you think they're doing that's so wooly and vague and useless?
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    These "goals" are far from narrowly targeted towards fixing the critical issue of biased minority editorship. We don't even know what exactly might deter marginalized people from contributing. Perhaps they're turned away by all the pointless wikilawyering, in which case the most effective solution would look very different from what the WMF is proposing here. Supporting minority media is a job for minorities, who will be far more keenly aware of what media are worth supporting and what are not. Writing down oral history is great, but is properly a job for academia, not for WMF projects (with the singular and notable exception of Wikijournal, which is a primary source of publishable research). Other listed things are similarly beside the point, e.g. as argued above wrt. Internet access.