8 ms·
Sarah Stierch leaves Wikimedia Foundation over paid editing
- aroch 13y agoJeez, the white-knighting on her user:talk page is atrocious... I say good riddance. We don't need paid shills in the WMF and we certainly don't need them writing and reviewing articles. There are enough issues, as is, with idiotic editors/reviewers and "policy" that those users have pushed as de jure.
- pilsetnieks 13y agoI don't have a horse in the race but would you still call it white-knighting if the editor was male?
- tptacek 13y agoNo. It's a terrible term that needs to die.
- redthrowaway 13y agoWhat would you replace it with? It describes a particular, unique phenomenon where creepy guys on the Internet rush to the "chivalrous" defence of a damsel in distress. It's widely misused, but there's definitely something there that needs some term to describe it, and in lieu of anything else "white knighting" suffices.
- tptacek 13y agoPeople defend other people on the Internet for all sorts of dumb reasons. Only women get a special term for when guys stick up for them.
- redthrowaway 13y agoIt's about the men, not the women. The term refers to a certain kind of guy with certain views of women who acts in a particularly bizarre fashion towards them. It doesn't refer to the generic act of standing up for someone, or even the generic act of standing up for a woman. It refers to men who defend and act nice towards women in the vague belief it will get them laid, if indirectly, through being the type of man they believe women will have sex with. They're the type of man who usually tries being too nice for a couple of years, gets frustrated, then gets into the PUA community.
- tptacek 13y agoIt is a point that doesn't need to be made, and that diminishes all of us almost every time it is. Let it go.
- redthrowaway 13y agoI'm curious why you feel that way, but I don't want to pollute the thread with an OT discussion. Shoot me an email if you're interested.
- hamburglar 13y agoI think a concise way to put it is that automatically assuming a man's only reason to defend a woman is to infantilize her infantilizes her. [edit: i know you didn't use the word "infantilize", but that seems to be the gist of the term "white knighting" to me -- the accusation that someone posing as the big strong man is rescuing the weak person] If most people in a particular population are men and a random set of people come to a woman's defense, she's mostly being defended by men. Don't read too much into it. edit: I can't reply to you, redthrowaway, so I'll just say that I wonder what the evidence is that these guys defending Ms. Stierch deserve the term "white knight" if it's not a knee-jerk reaction to any man defending a woman. I haven't seen any evidence of "expectation of a sleazy reward" so I question the application of the term. edit2: we probably agree on this particular point. I see that you take exception to the overall rejection of the term, on the grounds that it's possible to apply it correctly. I tend to agree with tptacek that it tends to be overused and incorrectly used, and really wouldn't be unhappy if it just disappeared along with the term "butthurt." :)
- jrochkind1 13y agoThe problem with it is it ends up being just as denigrating to the woman involved, who you are after all accusing of being a 'damsel in distress'. I'm not sure there needs to be a term to describe quite that frame of reference. If the guys involved are creepily harassing the woman (even through 'kindness'), than the term for that is harassment. Otherwise, I don't think a special term is needed to describe when you (especially male 'you's) believe a woman is only being defended because of sex appeal, so what. Why does there 'definitely' need to be a term to describe that?
- redthrowaway 13y agoPerhaps I should have put "damsel in distress" in quotes. It describes the attitudes of those behaving as "white knights", not that of those calling them out on it. "Harassment" describes a very broad group of behaviours. It's fine as a descriptor for that class of behaviour, but that doesn't mean specific terms to describe specific behaviours shouldn't exist. That's like saying you shouldn't use the term "knock" to describe premature ignition when "engine trouble" also describes it. That said, you're correct in saying that the use of the term tends to be sexist and dismissive towards women. I don't have a solution for that.
- rfrey 13y agoIt's not a term that needs replacing. Shorthand personality bins are not a void that needs to be filled. Classifying the speaker (whether with 'emo' or 'hipster' or 'feminazi' or 'homophobe' or 'fag' or 'geek' or 'jock' or ...) does nothing to elucidate the argument. You do not need to classify the speaker. Your arguments are stronger if you do not classify the speaker. Classifying the speaker leads one to interpret an argument through one's preconception of that class of speaker, weakening one's listening and interpretation skills. And, classifying a speaker aloud often leads your audience to classify you in an opposing class. Use "white knight" and many will classify you as a "bro". Use "homophobe" and get classified as gay or a militant feminist. Use "gay" and get classified as a homophobe. That leads to your audience interpreting your argument through their preconceptions of your classification. In other words, classifying the speaker endangers your critical thinking, endangers your chances of being understood, and has no upsides.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoMaybe you have a nice subtle meaning for it, but 98% of the time it's used to describe any man who defends any woman for any reason, generally with the implication "I can't imagine any reason a dude would be nice to a lady except to get sex." It says more about the speaker than the subject.
- Tohhou 13y agoWhite knight: someone who defends another person without understanding the issues, or defending them regardless of their bad behavior. It's gender neutral.
- kordless 13y agoHow about codependent?
- jimzvz 13y agoNo, it would be called "nut-hugging".
- tzs 13y agoThe submission did not say anything about shilling. Do you have additional information on this case indications she was shilling? Or do you think that all paid editing must be shilling?
- jeswin 13y agoAll paid editing on Wikipedia is certainly shilling. If it is fair, balanced and notable, why would anyone pay for it? And this case calls for a particularly tough response, since she was part of the foundation and probably had admin access.
- tommorris 13y agoIt really isn't. There are cultural institutions (museums, galleries etc.) who have a public interest in making the world aware of, say, science or art history or whatnot. Their mission lines up neatly with Wikipedia's mission. If the Louvre or the Computer History Museum were to pay someone to improve Wikipedia's coverage of the topics their museums cover, I'm not sure how that would be a problem. Or indeed, imagine this hypothetical: Bill Gates chucks twenty million dollars into a fund to pay some select group of Wikipedians a not-much-above-cost-of-living salary to generally improve Wikipedia's coverage of, say, medicine, science and humanities topics. A non-hypothetical example: a friend of mine ran a contest on Wikipedia to improve articles about video games. Whoever improved the most articles in a particular period of time would get a few new games sent to their Steam account. That's paid editing, albeit for PC games rather than money. The motivation of the guy who ran it? He likes video games. We have paid open source software development models: bug bounties, crowdfunding etc. That's not anathema to producing software. With clear conflict of interest statements and an editorial checking process for paid editors, there's a way to do it without it being sleazy or shilling.
- _delirium 13y agoYes, in general I think some paid editing is better than much of the free editing. People who edit for free are not all altruistic people who want to help advance human knowledge. Many of them choose an article to edit because they're interested in advancing some specific agenda, such as their political, social, national, or other views, or engaging in general boosterism of their local city, community, university, software project, church, favorite band, etc. Many are not motivated to do proper research in libraries to support the additions they make to articles, or spend time educating themselves about multiple aspects of a topic before writing about it. People who are paid in "Wikipedian in residence" programs at a museum, to take an example of the "gold standard" paid editing programs that have worked well, typically make much better edits. One can surely be a paid shill, but that's just a good reason to look at whether the edits are any good. If someone is willing to fund non-shill editing that is actually good, then I'd say please do so, just like I encourage Red Hat funding paid open-source contributions. There are many situations where it is a win-win, when the interests of Wikipedia and the funder align (much like the interests of Red Hat and Linux often aligning). For example, to take even a commercial example, I recently noticed that the Greek wine industry is currently very poorly covered on the English Wikipedia (even many of the basic grape varieties don't have good articles about them, let alone any decent history of the industry itself). This is bad for the English Wikipedia (which has a geographical gap) and conceivably it's even bad for the Greek wine industry (which has less information on its produce available to the internet-reading public). If some winemakers' organization was willing to fund a Wikipedian to go sit in a library for a few weeks and improve the articles on Greek grapes, wine legislation, producers, etc., I think that would be excellent for Wikipedia. It's work that needs to get done eventually anyway, whether someone funds it or not, so a funder appearing would just provide resources to make it happen sooner rather than later. Of course, if instead of funding a researcher who sits in a library and writes articles, they wanted to hire a promotional agent who writes fluffy PR copy, then that kind of paid editing should be frowned on and removed. But then it should be frowned on and removed even if it weren't paid: if it were just a patriotic Greek puffing up his local wine for no pay because he loves it, that's bad editing too. So to me it's the nature of the editing that matters: is it encyclopedic, scholarly, referenced, or is it fluffy promotional stuff? Whether it's paid or not doesn't matter to me, because both paid and non-paid work can fall in either category. Interestingly, this is much less controversial on some non-English Wikipedias. On the Swedish Wikipedia, paid editors are welcomed and encouraged, as long as they disclose their sources of funding and are careful about conflicts of interest. The focus is mostly just on "onboarding" them, to ensure they understand what is appropriate for a Wikipedia article and what isn't. One heuristic is that paid editors generally shouldn't remove information from an article, and shouldn't engage in attempts to "own" a page (such as watching it over months and trying to control its direction). But just showing up and writing new material that was previously missing seems generally appreciated, as long as it's suitably referenced and not PR copy.
- trycatch 13y agoNot only this, they are throwing mud at Russavia and Odder who called her out, while their evidence against her is pretty much undeniable. Wikipedia community is extremely toxic. Russavia and Odder are admins, OTRS-members and prolific contributors in Wikimedia Commons, but are nobodies in English Wikipedia (Russavia is permablocked from WP, so he is even worse than nobody), so people just support Sarah Stierch, because she as WMF-member has much higher social status inside of English Wikipedia community.
- jrochkind1 13y agoIt is quite clear that nobody that's paid staff for Wikimedia Foundation should be doing paid editing. But I'm not liking the sound of: > She did that even though it is widely known that paid editing is frowned upon by many in the editing communit Yeah, it's "frowned upon" for _anyone_ to do paid editing, clearly. But "frowned upon" is not usually a good reason to fire someone. If it's not already clearly against clearly stated policies for WMF employees to do paid editing, WMF is hopefully making it so pretty quickly. Next time (which is definitely a 'when' rather than an 'if', I'm afriad), it should say "They did that even though paid editing is a clear violation of WMF conflict of interest policies," not "it is frowned upon." Time to get real.
- bhitov 13y agoI saw two policies cited on her talk page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PAY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PAY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ADMINACCT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ADMINACCT
- cmelbye 13y agoI think the wording he used in the announcement was bad. I think it's fairly universally agreed upon that neutrality and avoidance of conflict of interest are key tenants of Wikipedia, and are certainly things that an administrator of Wikipedia and employee of Wikimedia would be expected to uphold.
- jfoster 13y agoFairly universally agreed upon of course, but the question is whether they have a specific written policy that takes it from being "pretty much agreed upon" to "a clear violation of his/her employment agreement" or something equally robust.
- wpietri 13y agoI think that sort of legalism is unhelpful, especially at Wikipedia. In my view, the most important policy at Wikipedia is the one which says, "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IAR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IAR The point of it is that people should always be thinking about Wikipedia's mission and vision. Rule-systems are always leaky, and on Wikipedia people should never use the excuse, "Well, what I did wasn't against the rules."
- danso 13y agoApparently as a Wikimedia foundation member, you have a lower bar when it comes to getting your own page? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Stierch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Stierch From the Affiliations section: Ada Initiative – Advisor American Alliance of Museums – Member Archives of American Art – Wikipedian in Residence Museum Computer Network – Member Open Knowledge Foundation – OpenGLAM Coordinator Smithsonian Institution Archives – Wikipedian in Residence Wikimedia Foundation – Community Fellow World Digital Library at the Library of Congress – Wikipedian in Residence Her life and advocacy sound fulfilling and good hearted, but nothing seems to meet the (admittedly inconsistent) standard of inclusion of living persons in WP.
- ptest1 13y agoThis stuck out to me as well. Her Wikipedia page reads like a vanity article.
- twelvechairs 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Sarah_Stierch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... > given there were almost twice as many "keep" comments as "deletes" I am closing this discussion as a weak consensus to keep Nothing like quantity over quality when assessing these things.
- 8ig8 13y agoI'm surprised there is yet no mention of her firing.
- 13y ago
- danso 13y agoFYI, this blog post seems to have sparked the issue: http://twkozlowski.net/paid-editing-thrives-in-the-heart-of-wikipedia/ http://twkozlowski.net/paid-editing-thrives-in-the-heart-of-... Apparently Stierch was exposed because she was advertising the pay-for-article service on her oDesk profile. http://i.imgur.com/iYBNjhH.png http://i.imgur.com/iYBNjhH.png Even casual Wikipedia fans are aware of how good the community is at sniffing out subterfuge...in what bizarre reality can a foundation member exist in as to not think this would be exposed, nevermind being seen as unethical?
- dabernathy89 13y agoI actually don't find paid Wikipedia editing inherently troublesome. The process of discussing and editing a Wikipedia page is entirely open. So why should a company not be able to contribute to their page if the community approves of the changes - especially if that company is open about their involvement? Perhaps higher standards of review should be applied, but I see no reason to consider it inherently suspect. And we should all be realistic - you would be hard pressed to find a company, organization, or individual who doesn't try to influence their Wikipedia page if they have the resources to.
- hobs 13y agoPaid editing by a random person, going to happen, could be a job for people, this is just called writing. Paid editing by someone with authority over Wikipedia, that is where I think people are going to draw the line.
- jebus989 13y agoNeither does the Wikipedia community on the whole [0]; the problem is when it's undisclosed. If the editor makes clear their conflict-of-interest, the edits should receive extra scrutiny for neutrality and due weight and the end result should be the same: a "warts and all", unbiased article about a notable topic. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PAY#Paid_editing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PAY#Paid_editing
- dabernathy89 13y agoThank you for posting that. I was under the impression that Wikipedia took a firm stance against all paid editing.
- emmelaich 13y agoThey also make a distinction (important!) between paid editing and paid advocacy. Read further in the thread.
- massysett 13y ago
- pervycreeper 13y agoWhen her entire raison d'etre at Wikimedia was to inject POV into Wikipedia (subtly/for a greater good/justifiably or not), it can hardly come as a surprise that something like this would happen eventually.
- makomk 13y agoYeah, perhaps even more than the announcement would suggest. I know that at one point Wikimedia's policy on including women called sex-positive feminism fake feminism and said fighting it was an important part of attracting more female editors. Wonder if that was her doing?
- seansouthern 13y agoI thought spending money to get your message across is free speech? Isn't the Wikimedia Foundation an American company?
- chris-martin 13y agoThe Wikimedia Foundation isn't a government agency, if that's what you're asking.
- gojomo 13y agoFree speech is also a value held by many people, including much of the Wikimedia community, separate from the formal enumerations and guarantees that limit government oppression. You can't really call yourself a reliable friend of 'free speech' if your only concern is government censorship. Other forms of power and retaliation also suppress valuable speech.
- username223 13y ago> Other forms of power and retaliation also suppress valuable speech. Right, like covert, paid shilling, which is what is at issue here. If Coca-Cola got to write its own page, Wikipedia would be a lot less useful.
- gojomo 13y agoCovert and thus unchecked by other viewpoints is a problem. But is muzzling the entity and its spokespeople the truth-and-utility-maximizing response? It's suppressing information from the discussion, of which free speech advocates can be rightly suspicious. Lots of paid work, even by people with an interest in the outcome, is useful. Until Wikipedia, all encyclopedias had mostly-paid authors. Almost all of the reliable sources Wikipedia uses have paid authors, often with a stronger-than-"NPOV" perspective.
- username223 13y ago
- mosselman 13y ago"...women and _other_ minorities..." Wait what?
- 6cxs2hd6 13y agoThey publicized this just after the conclusion of the year-end fund-raising push. The timing could be coincidental. Or not.
- emmelaich 13y agoLater in the thread someone points out that there is a important distinction between paid editing and paid advocacy. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-January/129470.html I don't know how it bears on this event precisely but it seems that SS was doing the former.