Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-21/News and notes
Wikipedia's Manual of Style marches into Manning's coming out as transgender
In one of the more surprising turns of events surrounding the WikiLeaks saga, after receiving a 35-year jail sentence for her role in disseminating classified documents to the organization, last Thursday U.S. soldier Bradley Manning announced a change in her sexual identity with a statement read by their attorney on the Today show:
| “ | As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility). | ” |
The media was quick to note Wikipedia's actions: Slate Wikipedia beats major news organizations, perfectly reflects Chelsea Manning's new gender, Buzzfeed, Truthdig ("How Wikipedia edited Pvt. Manning's gender without spectacle", New Statesman "Behind the Wikipedia wars: what happened when Bradley Manning became Chelsea", the Daily Dot, Market Watch ("Bradley Manning: 'I am a female'")—all took note of Wikipedia's lead.
Wikipedia's use of gender pronouns is straightforward. The choice of pronouns is governed by the identity section of Wikipedia's Manual of Style (MOS): "the term most commonly used for a person will be the one that person uses for himself or herself", and specifically, "pronouns, and possessive adjectives that reflect that person's latest expressed gender self-identification".
After Manning's declaration, there was rapid editing on both the related article and the MOS. At the MOS, one editor tried to insert the same change four times and was reverted. A formal warning was threatened on the editor's talk page; but in the end, the page was merely protected, which allows editing only by administrators. The Manning article itself was moved from Chelsea Manning back to Bradley Manning, and then back again, after a cordial talk-page discussion revealed that the editor moving the article was not aware of the announcement. Eventually, that page was also protected.
Three blocks, then ANI
The earlier cordial editor behavior on the Chelsea Manning talk page quickly evaporated as administrator and arbitrator Risker blocked administrators Mark Arsten, Jimfbleak and Zzyzx11 for edit warring. The blocks were protested vigorously at the Administrator incidents noticeboard.
All three users were unblocked in short order. Black Kite, who unblocked Zzyzx11 and Jimfbleak, called the blocks "completely farcical": "Zzyzx11 was fixing a date formatting issue, Jimfbleak a MOS issue, and Mark Arsten reinstating a category that had previous[ly] been removed by mistake (and had been edit requested), ... That's one of the most ridiculous and bone-headed blocking actions I've ever seen on Wikipedia. … WP:PROTECT says that pages that are protected because of content disputes should not be edited except to make changes which are uncontroversial, or absent an edit-request. Two of the edits were the former, and one the latter."
Risker did not agree that the edits were uncontroversial: "I'd expect just about every admin to realise that date formatting remains a highly controversial area in just about every article where it is raised… there's hardly an edit that could be made to this article right now that will be completely uncontroversial, and that goes for categories, markup, MOS fixes and typos."
Editing through protection
It quickly became clear that there was a difference of opinion on editing through protection. "Doing maintenance edits like correcting typos, fixing categories and such are allowed by policy and any admin can feel free to do them on any protected page," explained Hahc21 (ΛΧΣ). "Terrible, terrible blocks," said tariqabjotu. "If absolutely zero editing on protected articles were allowed, we wouldn't have an {{editprotected}} template."
Others indicated that even if it is not spelled out in policy, that with the exception of BLP violations or copyvios, administrators should not make changes without full consensus on the talk page. While it "may not be an abuse of the letter of our protection policy," Kww said, "I sympathize with desire to block: it's apparently the only thing that will get some admins to respect full-protection." "I would support blocking," said ItsZippy. "They can and should be blocked" said Beeblebrox. "Even if it's not in the rules that they can't," said The Bushranger, they shouldn't edit, "because that's a good way of feeding the 'admins are more equal than others' arguments that we see so often." "If the protection policy doesn't make that clear, then I think we should fix it," wrote SlimVirgin. "I'd personally just say reblock," said Jamesofur, "it seems we have too many admins pissy about their 'rights'".
Hidden warnings
"Has the world gone mad? I didn't even read the talk page, and I find that I've been blocked for not doing so!" said Jimfbleak after being unblocked, pointing out that he had made "one unsuspecting edit to a page with a warning hidden on a talk page". The warning, against editing "absent a clear-cut edit request," was made on the Chelsea Manning talk page, and has now been automatically archived.
Risker's reply: "Jimfbleak. If you can't bother reading the talk page of a protected article and getting stuck in to understand why it's protected and what the issues are, you shouldn't be editing that page at all." Jauersock thought differently, though, writing "You can't put a warning on talk page like that and expect anyone to see it, it's now mixed up somewhere in the middle of the page like any other thread ... If a user who outright vandalizes an article is 'warned' like that and then gets reported to AIV, it would get declined in a heartbeat for insufficient warnings."
"If we don't axe single-edit anonymous vandals, we shouldn't do the same to other editors," said Joy [shallot], adding, "If this was my first block ever, as it appears to have been the case for Mark Arsten, I would actually find such a block to be an explicitly insensitive act of destroying a previously clean block log."
The role of talk pages
The one unanswered question is why no effort was made to engage any of the editors on their talk pages. "If you went to each of those admins," wrote tariqabjotu, "and said, 'hey, [link to discussion], that wasn't as uncontroversial as you thought,' I doubt any of them wouldn't have acceded to reverting." Zzyzx11 recommended that the protection policy be changed, "knowing that admins like me will less likely respond to {{edit protected}} or any other similar admin assistance requests for fear of getting blocked by other admins.", while another editor, UltraExactZZ, commented:
| “ | Maybe, just maybe, Risker and Mark could have, you know, discussed it. …How many new editors have been told to go discuss their concerns with the admin in question? Why didn't Risker, here, do that same bloody thing? Five minutes, two edits, and the problem would have been solved. Instead, Risker blocked. | ” |
In brief
- Gender diversity conference: Registration closes 20 September for the Wikimedia Diversity Conference, to be held in Berlin from 9–10 November 2013. The conference aims to facilitate dialogue between collaborators in Wikimedia Chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation and the international communities, and to frame initiatives for increasing gender and other types of diversity in Wikimedia.
- Wikipedia Weekly rebooted: An ancient, in Wikipedia time, podcast is being resurrected by Andrew Lih. Wikipedia Weekly was, as its name suggests, a weekly podcast in 2006 and 2007 before dropping off; three have been published in the last month, with two focusing on Wikimania. The most recent is available in video.
- Wikivoyage logo: The final selection of Wikivoyage logos is being done on Meta.
- OTRS upgrade: The Wikimedia Blog has reported on the upgrades to the OTRS system.
- Wikipedian in Residence opening: The medical evidence library Cochrane Collaboration is looking for experienced editors to become a Wikipedian in Residence—a paid and remote position with Cochrane's Infectious Disease Group. Active editors with a background in science or medicine are invited to apply.
- Wikipedia Library redesigned: The Wikipedia Library, an open research hub to organize Wikipedian's collective library efforts, was redesigned. Its major goals are to improve access to local libraries, free resources, and paywalled sources while building community relationships with libraries and institutions, facilitating research on Wikipedia, and advancing open access broadly.
- Wikipedia a poor tool for reputation management: Mike Wood, writing on Allbusiness.com, describes "why Wikipedia can be a dangerous reputation management tool". Wood explains that companies often try to relegate negative content to the second page of Google search results, which fewer than 2% of Google users access, and that in 99% of Google searches, Wikipedia appears on the first page of Google results. But he warns that while it may feel tempting to put a "gleaming positive article" in Wikipedia, taking the place of some other link on that first page, any negative content omitted from the article will probably be added at some time by another editor, and then remain forever lodged at the top of Google.
- Is Google making us sick?: Readers Digest Canada published a piece on medical information in Wikipedia and other websites, highlighting the work of James Heilman (User:Jmh649) on Wikipedia.
- Wikipedian barred from leaving China: Techinasia.com reported that Chinese Wikipedian Huang Zhisong has been banned from leaving China until 2016. Zhisong "believes the blockade has been put in place to put pressure on him, and stems from his frequent trips to Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan on Wikipedia editorial issues." The Daily Dot later clarified that Zhisong has actually been banned from travelling since 2009, and that the ban was unrelated to Jimmy Wales' recent statements about censorship in China.
- Tory MP and estranged wife in "Wikipedia battle": A story broke this week that Mark Pritchard, a British politician, and his estranged wife allegedly edited his article under various usernames. They were taking a divorce dispute public. The story was reported in the Daily Mail and The Drum.
- "Wikipédia, ce n'est pas l'Encyclopédie": France-Amérique opined on several issues facing French and English Wikipedia, including BLPs, scientific controversies, and historical spin.
- Women contributors still face hurdles at Wikipedia: The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog covered the gender gap.
- Wiki wormhole: List of films considered the worst was covered in AV Club with amusing commentary.
- How Open-Access Scholarship Improves the Internet: The Atlantic published an article this week on open access initiatives mentioned the benefit that Wikipedia derives from free journals.
- Canberra's Southside versus Northside 'war' hijacks Wikipedia : The Canberra Times reported on vandalism to the article North Canberra.
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