5 ms·

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

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.

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.