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I used to donate, but no longer do, not for this, but because I'm tired about the Anglocentric, U.S.A.-centric style on Wikipedia with little efforts to fix it,
by Blikkentrekker 4y ago
I used to donate, but no longer do, not for this, but because I'm tired about the Anglocentric, U.S.A.-centric style on Wikipedia with little efforts to fix it, as well as other neutrality issues.
When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw.
I've seen some articles at least add “English-language criticism" by now instead of simply “criticism” when talking about the critical reception of work that wasn't even in the English language so that's a start, but too often still that doesn't happen. It's obviously unavoidable that English-language Wikipedia incurs some Anglocentric bias, but there is almost no effort to fix it and not even a template seemingly to warn that an article might carry an Anglocentric bias, even those that report on matters that mostly pertain outside of the Anglosphære.
- spookie 4y agoIt's kind of sad of anglo-centric their pages are for some countries and historical events. I'm European, and even I can see some bias in there.
- throwaway2037 4y agoI could believe it. Next you see it, can you share a link here? It might be nice for discussion.
- Blikkentrekker 4y agoIndeed, that's a common issue too with historical events. But even scientific things. I can't read Mandarin, but I've been told many times that many subjects on many linguistic concepts on the Chinese Wikipedia look very different and that seemingly English-language linguistics and Chinese-language linguistics can come to very different conclusions from the same data. That of course is troubling in and of itself, but it should be featured proportionally. From what I understand, among English-language communication, the Altaic language hypothesis has essentially completely bee discredited, but many linguists in Asia apparently still consider it plausible. — I don't have the expertise to judge who is wrong and who is right here, but English-language Wikipedia should either give those voices a proportional weight, or, at least note that it is discredited among English-language linguists, as right now it arouses the impression that it's globally discredited.
- Ensorceled 4y ago> When they flung some banner about soliciting more female contributors in my face which reeked of Americana it was the last straw. What was this ad that was so objectionable?
- happymellon 4y agoI don't remember it, but I was assuming that they felt like it was still requesting white Americans.
- soundnote 4y agoThe thing with those sorts of requests is that a lot of the push for diversity is literally skin deep - they want people who look different, but think the same. They're not trying to say "hey, we'd like more electrical engineers, nurses, priests, political conservatives, etc." to contribute. People with actually different experiences and backgrounds, somewhat the way how the ideal model of science is set up - individual humans are fallible and partisan, get your work checked by someone who disagrees because they're the ones who most want it to not be true. They want (woke) social liberals who look different, and at least in America wokeness is just about the most white woman thing you can do. If you write about, say, the controversies around the Latin Mass in the Catholic Church, getting a liberal woman to check a liberal man's work is useless - they're both likely to either have a dim view of the conservative sects that prefer the Latin Mass, to be just utterly unable to understand the religious conservatives' POV and worldview, or both. I know I did until I actually befriended some, it was something you could liken to moral colorblindness - the modern secular liberal is aggressively morally colorblind and lacking in understanding of others - again, speaking from experience.
- Ensorceled 4y ago> They want (woke) social liberals who look different, and at least in America wokeness is just about the most white woman thing you can do. You do know that any traction you are getting with these arguments goes out the window when you start using terms like "woke".
- 4y ago
- lupire 4y agoTo be clear, your complaints are: 1. Wikipedia is biased toward Anglo perspectives. 2. Wikipedia is trying to recruit contributors with a broader range of perspectives. This doesn't seem like a problem with WMF.
- Blikkentrekker 4y agoThey're not trying to recruit contributors outside of the Anglocentric perspective; they're not in any way trying to mitigate that problem.
- Chris2048 4y agoHow did "female contributors" become "contributors with a broader range of perspectives"?