
Editing Wikipedia as self-care activism - The_ed17
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/07/13/wikipedia-self-care-activism/
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cooper12
Do people just knee-jerk react to stories here after reading the title only?
The "self-case activism" she talks about is adding wikilinks, adding info she
just researched, and expanding a Wikipedia article. The only political things
she mentioned at all were her own interests in African Diaspora and LGBT
topics which she contributes to in order to "help this world become a more
equal place". It is extremely common for Wikipedia editors to contribute in
their areas of interest; in fact there are WikiProjects set up specifically to
facilitate that. [0] What she isn't doing is adding bias, but helping to
address Wikipedia's systematic bias by adding to those areas. [1] Not going
around injecting bias into articles as the comments here are saying. (And even
that is valuable in itself because Wikipedia is meant to be written from a
neutral point of view, which requires that articles "fairly represent all
significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources" [2])

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Director...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Directory)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Due_and_undue_weight)

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grondilu
This is barely an acceptable behavior. You're supposed to use a neutral point
of view when editing Wikipedia. As this editor publicly admits she's editing
Wikipedia as a form of activism for her political views, she at least declares
her _intent_ to have a political effect while editing.

She may manage to make edits that remain neutral, but still the whole attitude
is edgy.

There are many good reasons to be willing to edit Wikipedia, and politics is
not one of them.

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exolymph
No human communication can be apolitical, since politics is just formalized
social relationships.

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ralfd
This reply from me to you is not political.

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rhizome
It absolutely is if you're asserting that your statement isn't self-refuting.

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ralfd
Explain please: How is it self-refuting?

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rhizome
It's along the lines of "this sentence no verb."

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wyager
Wikipedia is a public information source, not a psychotherapy tool. People who
are emotionally invested in the edits they're making hurt the quality of
Wikipedia.

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mdholloway
{{citation needed}}

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Mendenhall
I find the whole of wikipedia skewed with all sorts of "activism". I find it
sad how many people rely on it for information.

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crazy2be
What would you prefer that they relied on? In my experience, it tends to be
the least biased of available sources; books are usually sold to promote a
particular agenda, news articles are devoid of content and without citations.

At least on Wikipedia, I can check the citations easily...

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jsnsjsfnts
At what point do minority groups become proportionally overrepresented because
of this kind of behavior?

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205guy
What does it even mean to be overrepresented in a searchable database? Seems
like you're making up problems.

~~~
tehwebguy
And they probably didn't read the article

