Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

Re:Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia? by zozbot234 on Saturday March 05, 2022 @11:57AM (#30569203)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia? by ZeroGravitas on Saturday March 05, 2022 @12:08PM (#30569345)

> 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?

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Re:Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia? by zozbot234 on Saturday March 05, 2022 @12:19PM (#30569484)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia? by ZeroGravitas on Saturday March 05, 2022 @03:06PM (#30571364)

This is a grant giving programme in which they support vital projects that need to be done outside Wikimedia to further their mission and work with outside groups with proven experience in those areas to enable that. So, stuff inside wikipedia, is by definition not going to be in this list, and they are explicitly not doing any of these things themselves, because it's not their focus or skillset. Why are you assuming these tasks won't be done by minorities and/or academics as appropriate? Those both seem highly likely to be involved unless I'm missing something.

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