
Kate Middleton’s Wedding Gown Demonstrates Wikipedia’s Woman Problem - soupboy
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/13/kate_middleton_s_wedding_gown_and_wikipedia_s_gender_gap_.html
======
kijin
Every time a "problem" like this makes the news, the real problem always seems
to be overzealous deletionists with their ridiculously strict notability
requirement. Gender imbalance might be a problem, but it's not a problem to
the same extent as notability-based deletionism is. Notability is an extremely
vague standard, a perfect recipe for abuse and selective enforcement. A fair
and efficient editorial process should strive to replace vague rules with
clearer counterparts whenever possible.

Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete _any_ article at all,
unless it's obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene
according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity. All of these standards
can be applied fairly strictly, and with much less vagueness than notability.

\- It's not like Wikipedia is short of disk space to store a few million extra
text articles.

\- The argument that it would be too difficult to maintain lots of extra
articles is also weak, because not every article needs to be regularly edited,
and more articles on niche topics might actually attract more editors.

\- No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat. That's just
alarmism. Besides, if something like that ever becomes a problem, a better
response would be a prohibition on self-promotion or some other clear
guideline, rather than a vague requirement of notability.

\- If these deletionists are just being OCD and wanting everything to be tidy
and clean and under their editorial control, I would say that they need to
take a break. In fact, it's possible that people with certain psychological
traits self-select for Wikipedia editorship. But the kind of intolerance and
self-centered narrow-mindedness that overzealous deletionists exhibit doesn't
suit the spirit of a collaborative online project. Keep your OCD to your own
home/office and away from public spaces, thank you very much.

Right now, I get the impression that it's too easy to flag something for
deletion and too difficult to counter the deletionist argument, especially
since the deletionists are so familiar with editorial procedures. This
inequality needs to change. _The burden of proof should be on people who want
to remove information from the Web, not on those who want to keep it._ Isn't
that the same principle that we fought tooth and nail to uphold against the
onslaught of SOPA, ACTA, etc?

~~~
antidoh
"No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat."

And if we did? It think it would be rather cool for everyone, living or dead,
to have his own Wikipedia page. In fact these might have special status as
non-deletable.

If your family ran a web site about its family, would you deny any member a
page, especially if some members already had pages?

Now consider our larger family, all us humans that have ever been and ever
will be. Besides the many topics about our "family" covered by Wikipedia, some
of us have pages specifically about us. Why shouldn't _all_ of us have our own
pages?

Well before Wikipedia came along, I've wished that each person on Earth could
have some way of being recorded for posterity. Some peoples' record will of
course be more interesting than others'. But we're all family, even the boring
and embarrassing ones.

~~~
mjn
If there are good references, Wikipedia has been moving in this direction. But
as an encyclopedia, and one that claims no authority for itself based on any
kind of expertise of the authors, articles really need to be referenced to
good sources in the published literature.

If you _do_ have good sources for something, e.g. there is even a relatively
small biographical section on someone in a published book, or a journal
article, or something similar, the separate "notability" requirement has been
increasingly going away, so that "but I've got sources" trumps it. I wrote a
bit on that last year:
[http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...](http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html)
(I also discuss some of the history around these requirements, some of which
were motivated by trying to do something about Usenet physics cranks who found
Wikipedia and decided it'd be a great place for articles on all their pet
theories.)

I've been systematically going through several references and adding articles
on _everything_ in them, and haven't run into people objecting to my articles
or trying to delete them for several years, since the end of the more
"notability" focused era. Now as long as my articles include some references,
they seem fine. One of my projects is marching through the _Allgemeine
Deutsche Biographie_ adding articles on random people who were mayors of
Prussian towns in 1850, and that kind of thing. There's even a Wikiproject
trying to organize efforts to cover everything in that particular reference:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/ADB)

I do think it's _also_ valuable for there to be other projects, which catalog
information that can't be referenced well. For example, Know Your Meme does a
pretty decent job of doing original research in history-of-memes. There are
several genealogy projects that attempt to catalog people more exhaustively as
well. But those are pretty different projects from Wikipedia's goal of
_summarizing_ stuff that's published in the existing literature, with
references. Wikipedia doesn't have to be the only wiki on the internet, so I
don't see why those original-research projects can't develop in parallel.

~~~
matznerd
I have not seen Wikipedia "moving in this directon." I had some editors delete
a 5 year old page with multiple published sources and 10+ inbound wikipedia
links on it. I am getting it reviewed now. There are some bad apple editors on
Wikipedia who are high up on their horses.

~~~
mjn
I'm not arguing it never happens, but that it's been "moving in this
direction", i.e. that notability plays an increasingly small role relative to
verifiability. That's my observation over about 8 years of writing articles
now and then, but I would be interested in a more quantitative test of that
claim if someone knows of a way to do it. Nobody has given me any grief since
around 2008 for new articles, even ones on quite "minor" subjects, whereas the
question of "does this belong in an encyclopedia?" used to be a more common
discussion in Wikipedia's early days, as everyone was trying to figure out
what "a wiki encyclopedia" really meant. (In particular, people coming from a
more academic background, like Larry Sanger, were advocating for a much
smaller, more traditional encyclopedia, certainly not one with millions of
articles.)

I do think there are specific areas that remain more controversial, mainly
around recent pop culture and business. If people suspect you're self-
promoting, then they may try to get an article deleted (there was a recent
rash of hotels hiring PR firms to add articles on them, which wouldn't be so
bad in itself if the articles didn't read like ad copy). Same if you write an
article on a recent internet meme, or a website.

In the areas I've been working in, which are mainly geography, history,
science, mathematics, and literature, "notability" as a separate requirement
seems basically completely dead in practice. I used to have to argue against
deletion of my articles on minor 19th-century Prussians. But nobody even
thinks of deleting those these days, as long as they have solid citations.

edit: Looking elsewhere in the thread, it looks like your views of Wikipedia
are generalized from one very self-interested example: an article about your
dad. May I suggest that isn't the most unbiased way of forming an opinion on a
complex subject?

------
haberman
I am frequently surprised to find Wikipedia articles about very narrow,
highly-specialized technical concepts. For example, there is a Wikipedia page
about iso646.h in the C language standard
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iso646.h>). If you're wondering why you never
heard of iso646.h before, it's because it is only useful if you are
programming in C on a system that does not support cutting-edge characters
like "&" or "|". This is esoterica that does not have any measurable impact on
the world. And this isn't even an article about ISO 646 per se, it's about a
_header file_.

I find such articles extremely useful, so I'm not advocating that they be
deleted. But surely the wedding gown worn by a British Monarch who is widely
known for her fashion sense is at least as relevant to the world at large.

~~~
johncoltrane
Judging by the number of magazine covers and news segments devoted to this
woman, I'd say it's a lot more relevant.

I agree with the current top poster: they shouldn't delete anything that
doesn't conform to general rules of objectivity.

------
lien
Wikipedia is an interesting place. I am not sure what classifies articles for
deletion, but it feels like only people who live in the Internet industry take
part in actively running and editing the articles. I don't think of it as a
male dominant community (even though I am female), but it feels like to me
that only for people who are only care about stuff they know. It feels more
like a closed minded community than having a woman problem.

My previous company was a chip and Wi-Fi module startup (ZeroG Wireless). I
had requested our company name to be created around 2009. At that point, we
had been around for 4 years and we had taken $30m in funding. However, we were
never granted a section on Wikipedia.

On the other hand, plenty of internet companies who were around than launch
much shorter than that and their names are currently on Wikipedia, for
example, Pownce. I am sure that many others are granted a Wikipedia entry for
being around less, accomplishing less than what we did. The only difference is
that these were Internet startups and ZeroG was not.

Some people simply need to wake up and stop living in their own bubble. Let's
hope that one day they can realize that others do care about things that the
community doesn't care.

~~~
philwelch
> My previous company was a chip and Wi-Fi module startup (ZeroG Wireless). I
> had requested our company name to be created around 2009. At that point, we
> had been around for 4 years and we had taken $30m in funding. However, we
> were never granted a section on Wikipedia.

There are a lot of ways to get yourself discredited on Wikipedia, but trying
to get an article written about yourself, your company, your band, or anything
else you are intimately involved in is the most reliable.

~~~
lien
I never attempted to write about my company. I submitted a request to have my
company created as an entry. You need to have your company name created first
before anyone can write about you.

~~~
philwelch
I never said you did attempt to write about your company.

> You need to have your company name created first before anyone can write
> about you.

No you don't. If you're logged in and you go to a blank page, you can just
start writing something there, unless the page has been specifically blocked
from page creation because someone keeps putting spam there.

I would say that the combination of not knowing how Wikipedia works, asking
other people to do something for you, and on top of that, trying to get an
article written about yourself, your company, your band, or anything else you
are intimately involved with is a perfect way to get yourself ignored and
discredited.

~~~
lien
All I did was request my company name to be created. I never attempted to
write the article myself.

I didn't find a way of writing on a blank page like you did, the situation may
have changed. Well if you did, you're definitely more knowledgeable than me
about Wikipedia, but please don't tell me what I did and did not do.

I am OK if Wikipedia deletes my article if it's their policy. My issue is that
they did not treat my company the same as the the rest of the world due to own
ignorance.

------
konstruktor
Articles like this make me angry. Wikipedia is one of the most important, if
not the most important, example of digital commons, created by an enourmous
amount of volunteer work. 91% of those doing this work are male, according to
the article. Now a group that has contributed only a small fraction of the
work for a decade complains about being underrepresented? This is not the
military, which had actual barriers of entry for women, this is Wikipedia,
which you could edit without an account only a few years ago. At that time it
was a true, anonymous meritocracy, as opposed to a mailing list where your
name gives away your gender and may subject you to gender discrimination.

~~~
Mvandenbergh
Except of course that having articles deleted is a barrier to entry.

~~~
konstruktor
Which would have been a gender-neutral barrier had women contributed a similar
share of work and dedication in the early days and thus achieved similar
influence.

~~~
aristus
Influence has a way of perpetuating itself, especially when its protected by
nerdy little enclaves. So you are saying that because women (or mexicans or
furries) did not contribute in the past, they now deserve to be excluded in
the future?

~~~
konstruktor
No, I would hope to see more work from (and proportionately more influence
for) women on Wikipedia. But the article presents what seems to be the result
of past inaction, back when Wikipedia was a meritocracy, as a Women's Rights
issue. Yes, there is a gender bias on Wikipedia now, and even chauvinistic
behavior. We should get rid of both, if possible, which may be difficult as
such an environment is not inviting to women.

------
conradfr
Some years ago I cleaned up some random biology article vandalized with lots
of not-even-subtle profanity. It was immediately reverted by some editor and I
had to insist that he _reads_ my modification to get it approved.

It was the last time I tried to edit anything in WP, as I always had this kind
of problem.

I read it a lot like anyone else and donate small money every year but each
time I read about the behind the scene, I'm appalled.

~~~
Danieru
I wrote a small article on an obscure piece of software, I even studied the
wiki syntax and added an infobox & image.

It got fast track deleted the next day.

Wikipedia has reached an equilibrium point between articles that cannot be
deleted and deletionist desires to delete everything. In many cases the
deciding factor, or the demand to the deletionists' supply, is public outrage.

------
alan_cx
Why are any articles deleted, unless they are factually wrong? Censorship. Who
is to say what will be important in the future? Censorship. Who is to say that
people will want to read? Censorship.

There should not be any notion of importance. All knowledge is important. What
I find important is as valid as what any one else values as important.

Frankly, and to my shame this is the first time I have given any thought to
it, I am disgusted that something which, IMHO, is supposed to be an unbiased
information repository actually deletes knowledge. To me, this is the most
disturbing case of censorship I have ever thought about. Government censorship
is expected, bad news, sure but expected. But this is supposed to be above
that. How can they bleat on about SOPA etc, then allow a small number of geeks
to tell me I can't see an article about some princesses dress? Wikipedia is
NOT Geekpedia. And it should not be censoring knowledge.

Quite sad actually. My Wikipedia love bubble just burst. :(

~~~
jeffdavis
Censorship is when you try to prevent a class of ideas or knowledge from being
communicated in any medium. Dictators try to stop criticism, regardless of
whether it's by pamphlet or radio broadcast. That is not the issue we're
talking about at all.

We're talking about editing a specific body of work (Wikipedia) to exclude
things deemed unfit. In fact, the motto of the NY Times is "all the news
that's fit to print". That's editorial control, not censorship, because they
don't try to prevent Small Town Weekly from printing a story about a lost dog,
they just refuse to print it in the NY Times.

------
w1ntermute
This brings up a very interesting point - can anyone think of topics that
Wikipedia has inadvertently omitted thanks to the narrow section of society
that contributes significant amounts of new content to the site?

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how the "initial work" of
adding information to Wikipedia is mostly done, and that from here on out,
it's going to be mainly about adding new content as it's created (new events,
people, companies, etc.). But it seems possible that myopia on the part of
editors could be having inadvertent effects.

~~~
patio11
It used to be even worse -- when I started using Wikipedia (dinosaurs walked
the earth) they had substantially more written about several comic book
characters than on obscure religious cults like e.g. Catholicism.

That said, long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of
Wikipedians (who are _so screamingly not representative of the population_
that it almost pains me to have to mention that) than on any objectively
awesome target for Wikipedia. Happily, Wikipedian's consensus target for
Wikipedia is, even if far from perfect, pretty close to one of the most useful
tools on the Internet.

~~~
w1ntermute
> long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians

The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of
"Wikipedians" who are the primary editors. As long as the site doesn't make
editing/adding articles a more user friendly/advertised feature, things aren't
going to change.

Case in point: I went just yesterday to add some new content to an article,
along with which I had a citation to add. Imagine my surprise when I found out
that citations are still added in MediaWiki syntax! I can say without a doubt
that every single acquaintance of mine who doesn't have an interest in
computers (and quite a few who do) would have been utterly discouraged at this
point from editing the article.

How difficult can it be to add a GUI editor? It would be a small, purely
technical, step that could have a significant impact on the userbase, if
advertised properly.

~~~
jacobolus
Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at
least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be
a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance
from the existing user base.

Most GUI text editors around the web are horrible buggy piles of crap (to take
one example I was recently frustrated by, the editor at Adobe’s forums – and
Adobe is a gigantic company with thousands of highly paid, experienced
developers). The result of any such effort could easily end up making the
software more complex and harder to use rather than easier.

~~~
MikeCapone
> Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at
> least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would
> be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of
> resistance from the existing user base.

As one of the most popular websites on the net, it's not like they don't have
the resources to do it.

I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it
somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism against newbies. This
probably does some good, but it also definitely does a lot of bad (keeping out
worthy contributors just because they don't feel like learning the markup
language).

I'm sure they could achieve their goal some other way without pushing away
talented contributors.

~~~
jacobolus
> _it's not like they don't have the resources to do it._

Have you ever looked at the Mediawiki code base? Last time I skimmed a bit, a
few years ago, it was an utterly horrible mess of spaghetti PHP. Just finding
developers capable of doing this would be a big challenge. The Wikimedia
Foundation has a lot less resources than you might imagine, considering the
reach of its projects, and there are an awful lot of other funding priorities
(not to mention other code priorities). They’re doing the best they can, but
making sweeping changes to the code base is a lot harder than it looks.

> _I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it
> somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism._

Do you have any evidence for that? As conspiracy theories go, this one seems
pretty weak to me. I can’t think of another organization of comparable size
which is as welcoming and open to involvement and contribution from ordinary
community members, at all levels of decision making. Almost the entire
management and operation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation is carried
out in public, nearly all of the parties involved are volunteers (with a quite
small number of full time staff keeping infrastructure running, handling legal
issues, and so on), and many many decisions are made collectively, by
consensus.

It’s easy to hate on anything, as a disinterested outsider, without making any
real attempt to understand the internal processes involved, but organizing
millions of people is a highly non-trivial job, and I think the Wikimedia
community has done pretty admirably, all things considered.

~~~
michaelkscott
I just downloaded Mediawiki and took a look at the source code. Some of the
later added code doesn't seem as bad, but there's an overwhelmingly extreme
amount of mingling between the data logic, including the classes and actions,
and the html markup. It makes it utterly hard to read understand for someone
wanting to contribute. The codebase isn't light either so (correct me if I'm
wrong but) I don't think a complete rewrite of the application ever occurred
after the first version.

Now if only some of us stopped creating social networks for kitties, and
actually contributed our time and hackery into something that actually
benefited the world.

~~~
mjn
You might be interested in the Parsoid project, which Wikimedia funded
precisely to try to build a more maintainable pipeline for parsing syntax into
some kind of AST or document model, disentangled from the other cruft:
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>

I believe it's currently being maintained separately, so the logic in
MediaWiki itself is still the crufty version.

------
aw3c2
Isn't it sexism to say that linux distros are for men and wedding gowns for
women?

~~~
saraid216
Yes. Isn't it silly to ask a stupid question for the sake of making a
rhetorical point?

~~~
qxcv
Yes and no. To be honest the article strikes me as a fluff piece attempting to
meaning into something what is really a pair of fairly trivial problems -
those being deletionism and and the fact that the majority of editors are
American males[0].

> ...the site remains a boys’ club.

This is a somewhat unfair characterisation since the gender of an editor is
usually unknown to other editors or irrelevant to the topic at hand.

> "We have over 100 articles on different Linux distributions, some of them
> quite obscure … and [they have] virtually no impact on the broader culture,
> but we think that’s perfectly fine." [Jimbo Wales]

Claiming that Wikipedia editors are "perfectly fine" with having hundreds of
articles on non-notable topics like minor Linux distributions is a bit of a
stretch. Sub-par articles on minor technical things like programming languages
and F/OSS projects are constantly being flagged for deletion or merging[1] and
to be honest I'm not particularly surprised that what was, on 29 April 2011[2]
a stub on a wedding dress was nominated for merging. Of course, the article
has since grown into a useful and well referenced piece, but I don't think its
fair to claim this incident represents Wikipedia's "woman problem" unless one
is also willing to discuss Wikipedia's "Lisp problem"[1] or Wikipedia's "Linux
problem"[3].

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pseudomonas/IP_editors_by...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pseudomonas/IP_editors_by_country)
[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Arc_(programming_language...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Arc_\(programming_language\))
[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wedding_dress_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wedding_dress_of_Kate_Middleton&oldid=426548936)
[3]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SliTaz>

~~~
ks
_"to be honest I'm not particularly surprised that what was, on 29 April
2011[2] a stub on a wedding dress was nominated for merging."_

The article was flagged only 16 minutes after it was created, so it didn't
have time to evolve.

------
nsns
Having an article marked for deletion means nothing, it happens all the time,
and is one of the ways power flows in Wikipedia's anarchic domain (and I'm not
sure this kind of power play is really gendered, it is more of a conservative,
restraining, force).

While I highly regard Wikipedia's amazing and quite successful project, and
hope there will be more editors that are female (oriented, not necessarily
biological), there is still a lot that's not there, perhaps will never be, yet
matters for various cultures and localities around the world, Wikipedia
English has a built in bias (hint: English), and it's not a gendered one.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
There's a bot I think that marks new articles as speedy delete by default. At
least I wrote a stub, marked as such, and seconds after completion got a
deletion notice.

~~~
mjn
Weird. Did it include any references? I haven't had these problems people are
mentioning in the past few years, and I create articles now and then. They're
usually not even really long ones: 1-2 paragraphs, 1-2 sources cited. Usually
on historical stuff, e.g. ancient Greek archaeological sites, or minor
18th/19th-century government officials, scientists, or inventors.

The most common outcome is that I never hear from anybody. The articles don't
get nominated for deletion, and neither do they get improved by anyone else.

~~~
lizzard
Add a biography of some female scientists and writers and see what happens.
Then watch the pages.

~~~
mjn
That's actually something I do do! One of my on-again, off-again projects,
which now that you mentioned it I should return to, is going through the book
_American Women Historians, 1700s–1900s: A Biographical Dictionary_ , and
adding articles on the ones that're missing (which is a lot of them),
especially those where I can find 2-3 additional sources to use for an article
(which is still a lot of them). So far nobody's tried to delete my
contributions.

There are also some more organized projects. There are a few dozen people at
WikiProject Women's History:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women%27s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women%27s_History),
and Wikimedia hired a paid Community Fellow to focus on gender-gap issues:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarahStierch>

------
wololo
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia)

more discussion at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism> and
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism>

------
tokenadult
I'm a Wikipedian, with a registered Wikipedia user account and moderate
Wikipedia editing experience since 2010. The interesting discussion thread
groups together two kinds of issues: issues discused in the submitted article
from Slate and issues brought up by Hacker News participants. I'll discuss
each in turn.

The Slate article by Torie Bosch,

<http://www.slate.com/authors.torie_bosch.html>

a professional journalist who edits a project covering technology and society
issues, reports from this year's Wikimania meeting that Wikipedia continues to
face criticism from readers who think its group of editors ("Wikipedians")
skew too heavily to "geeks" and result in underrepresentation of topics of
interest to women. Thus far Wikipedia is still working on plans to encourage
more women to become Wikipedians and to edit more regularly.

She finishes up by writing, "I’ve never been a Wikipedia editor. The community
struck me as uninviting, legalistic." I'll be interested in her experiences if
she decides to wade in. Unlike most Wikipedians, Torie Bosch has actual
professional editing experience, having had to submit manuscripts to editors
who chop out her darling words, and having had to chop out words from the
manuscripts of other reporters. Most Wikipedians have not had professional
editing or research experience of any kind before joining Wikipedia, and what
I find most "uninviting" about Wikipedia is not that it is "legalistic"
(although it often is legalistic) but that many Wikipedians are completely
clueless about what a good source looks like and how bad many of the current
articles have been for how long. I'm not sure yet if Wikipedia is pursuing a
successful strategy to improve content quality.

[http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate...](http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/Improve_Quality)

After being very involved in Wikipedia editing just as there was a major
Arbitration Committee case on topics that I have researched thoroughly for
years,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence)

I have reduced my involvement mostly to "wikignome" editing of random mistakes
I encounter as I use Wikipedia as a reader. I still have the SOFIXIT
mentality,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFIXIT>

of cleaning up problems in Wikipedia as I find them, but to fix big problems
on Wikipedia caused by point-of-view-pushing propagandists is even more work
than editing a publication as an occupation (something I have done), and yet
unpaid. So I really wonder how much time Torie Bosch will devote to Wikipedia
when she could be doing editorial work in an actual collegial environment at
Slate with pay and professional recognition.

The Hacker News comments before this comment have mostly referred to the issue
of "deletionism." For example,

 _Every time a "problem" like this makes the news, the real problem always
seems to be overzealous deletionists with their ridiculously strict notability
requirement. . . ._

 _Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete any article at all,
unless it's obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene
according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity._

 _I wonder if there is an organized campaign to fix the overzealous deletion
problem (by changing the "notability" policy), to boycott as long as it
remains and pledge to donate if it is changed to a more objective policy._

 _Why are any articles deleted, unless they are factually wrong? Censorship.
Who is to say what will be important in the future? Censorship. Who is to say
that people will want to read? Censorship._

 _I have noticed alot of information/articles upon wikipedia get
deleted/flagged for deletion at a rather zelous rate and in that I have one
question: WHY, if they are not superceeded or and made redundant then
personaly I feel they should never be removed._

The one-word reply to comments like these is "Deletionpedia."

<http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page>

I was just browsing random pages of Deletionpedia to see what was posted there
before the Deletionpedia project fizzled out (which appears to have been back
in 2009). These are by no means the worst examples of material that has been
deleted from Wikipedia (I'm not sure if Deletionpedia was ever an exhaustive
list of deleted articles, or only a selected sample of those), but the sheer
lack of maintenance of Deletionpedia over the last few years calls baloney on
the idea that there are lots of readers happy to read stuff that has been
deleted from Wikipedia. As bad as Wikipedia often is, EDITING (modifying and
deleting) stuff on it so that Wikipedia more closely resembles an encyclopedia
makes some Wikipedia pages much better reads than many of the millions of
pages would turn up in a keywork search on the same topics.

I don't believe that a lot of readers see value in an online "encyclopedia"
with a no-deletion or hardly-any-deletion policy because no one has put up the
money to fund one, and I'm not aware of anyone here on Hacker News who is
donating programming skill to start one. If you really think articles "should
never be removed," build a service to host articles written by anyone about
anything and see what happens.

The big problem on Wikipedia is not deletionism. It is insertion of
promotional articles (some more subtle than others), propaganda articles
(likewise), personal or family vanity articles (very numerous), and fan and
hobby articles that are not based on any reliable sources and are written in a
manner more suitable for MySpace than for any encyclopedia.

A lot of people who attempt to edit Wikipedia never look up the article about
what Wikipedia is not,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not>

and attempt to publish their own thoughts, promote their own causes or
businesses, social network in an online encyclopedia, self-report the news, or
otherwise post material that has nothing to do with maintaining a free online
encyclopedia built from reliable sources.

~~~
SteveJS
'If you really think articles "should never be removed," build a service to
host articles written by anyone about anything and see what happens.'

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki thinks it is worthwhile:
<http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-inventor/>

"no one should have that sort of central control"

------
nsns
Wikipedia's stated aim, to make information "freely" available, has no gender
bias; it doesn't ask for it before serving its content - in marked contrast to
other services (Google? Facebook? certainly the various ad services) which
_might_ structure their content according to a user's gender.

However, if Wikipedia has another aim - to make _the scope_ of its content
bias-free, then I think it has not thought it thoroughly yet: even structuring
information as encyclopedia entries is inherently biased and restrictive (not
necessarily bad though). Correlating Wikipedia's contributors' sex to an
assumed gender bias in its scope (who gets to decide the articles' 'gender'?),
as Wales does, proves how naïve such a project currently is.

------
zerostar07
I think the problem with the Wedding Gown has more to do with the fact that
there is no UK wikipedia, rather than a gender issue. The English wikipedia is
an interesting amalgam with lots of peculiarities when seen from an outsider's
perspective.

------
pnathan
You can get a iPhone app subscription to Britannica for a few $/mo. I have
found Britannica to be excruciatingly better written and more comprehensive on
their in-depth articles than Wikipedia. Things that aren't in the nerd enclave
are covered, and well. I would never donate to Wikipedia as it is today: I
happily send money to Britannica.

There are too many structural problems with Wikipedia - documented over the
last few years by various angry bloggers - for me to feel OK with Wikipedia.
Some of the content - good. The community & rules - blech. c2 is a better
wiki. :-)

------
vacri
Because all women love dresses, just like all geeks love linux.

~~~
streptomycin
Because I wish there were no gender biases, I will pretend that just because
not 100% of a gender is completely monolithic, that must mean that any gender
bias is disproved.

~~~
vacri
Seriously, honestly, the majority of women could not be stuffed about
celebrity wedding dresses. Sure, more women are into it than men, I won't
argue about that. But I'll be damned if 'caring about celebrity wedding
dresses' is classed as a 'women's issue', because, frankly, it's not. No more
than 'caring about racing cars' are a 'men's issue', and most men get through
life not thinking about them much, and just as many find them boring as
interesting. If I was forbidden to talk about racing at work, I wouldn't go
around yawping about how my boss had problems with "men's issues". It's not a
women's issue, it's a fashion issue.

Note that I'm talking about real, actual men and women here; not the
stereotypes that folks have in their head, but the actual people they want to
do editorial work.

A better example: What about guns? The gender balance when it comes to vocal,
visible people who like guns is heavily skewed towards males, but people don't
call out gun control advocates as causing trouble for 'men's issues', or
'trying to silence men'.

The issue here is less 'geeks hate women, and so women's articles suffer in
wikipedia', and more 'geeks care less about subjects outside their bailiwick,
like fashion, and so those articles suffer in wikipedia'. The question is
really 'how do we loosen the reins of the geeks a little', not 'there's not
enough Genital Type V amongst our editors'.

~~~
streptomycin
So what would you call a "men's issue" or a "women's issue"? Or do you think
that no such issues exist?

~~~
vacri
Sure. Motherhood issues. Reproductive rights. Sexism issues (of which there
are tons). Things that are _inherent_ to being a woman. In some places,
there's a _luxury_ tax on tampons (!) - that's a woman's issue. Social clubs
(or gyms) that admit only men/women. And, clearly, trying to break out of the
stereotypes people hold of 'what women are' is also a woman's issue.

Here is an example of what can happen when people think that love of fashion
is inherent to being female. It's an ad campaign using fashion imagery to
attract girls to science - and you wouldn't see a parallel campaign using guns
to attract boys to be a teacher, would you? Or racecars to be a nurse?
Examples of what she's talking about start about one minute in:
<http://youtu.be/x3eZQHwGQE0>

------
Codhisattva
Along the same lines as the dress issue is this piece from On The Media
[http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/09/professor-versus-
wikip...](http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/09/professor-versus-
wikipedia/transcript/). It goes into depth about the editorial problem at
Wikipedia.

------
sbmassey
Why not simply accept that wikipedia has a particular bias, and set up your
own wiki - fashionpedia perhaps - if you want to create articles that
wikipedia doesn't accept?

Wikipedia has become a success because of its culture. It should be very
careful about changing that based on the demands of the entitled multitudes.

~~~
Mvandenbergh
Because Wikipedia aspires not to have such biases. If Wikipedia was
linuxdistropedia then no-one would think it was odd that it was focused on
obscure distros and didn't care for articles about embroidery or the history
of Islamic jurisprudence. But it aspires to be a universal encyclopaedia.

------
naveen99
isn't deletionism irrelevant in a post github world. anyone can just create a
gist instead. i hope github forks the wikipedia.

~~~
lazugod
Copying Wikipedia has been done, and nobody hears about it because it's the
people and publicity that matters, the constant supply of contibutors that
matters, not the copied tech or the content. And there's no reason to think
that Github would bring a userbase that's either different or bigger than what
Wikipedia already has now, much less a better userbase.

------
Zenst
I have noticed alot of information/articles upon wikipedia get deleted/flagged
for deletion at a rather zelous rate and in that I have one question: WHY, if
they are not superceeded or and made redundant then personaly I feel they
should never be removed. This may be some form of gender bias, though I have
not looked up male sports items upon wiki. The dress does have a nice
backstory from what I read in the news and was a pretty big historical event
as far as wedding go and in that factualy it will not be superceeded in that
regard.

So the question is realy for me is wikipedia a source of
knowledge/history/facts or is it biased towards flavour of the month(FOTM) and
if it is the later then perhaps they need to revaluate there priorities.

As to a solution, maybe they could have all articles that are flagged for
deletion, need approval by one male and one female. Though in that I will say
that some males have a female mindset and some females have a male mindset and
in that they should be able to express and vote based upon there mindset as
apposed to some physical gender.

There is no golden solution though I do feel the zelous removal of articles be
curtailed and a approach of only removing non-factualy/incorrect articles be
the approach taken and in that, there will be less issues and references to
items that have been removed.

I hope they resolve a amicle approach or I fear they will only spawn a
womenpedia based site for women only and that would be a sad day and a true
wakeup call to the insanity and directions being taken. Look at business for
examples how issolation impacts - you will see many females who state they
promote women in business and yet you never see a man saying I promote males
in business. One is accepted and the other is sexist. But sadly they mearly
add fuel to the issue and instead of addressing the issue, I personaly feel
they exacerbate the issue. Though if you were or felt persecuted - you to
would stand up and do something about it, if you were strong person. Not all
people are strong in defending there morals and fairness and in that it does
highlight women are just as right to feel persecuted. Though I do wish the
approach of "Supporting fairness in buisness" was adopted as apposed to
"Supporting women in buisness" was the standard they promoted as it is just
that - about fairness and that can and does work both ways on many level.

Much respect to Mr Wales for spotting this issue and taking onboard, a true
sign of a fair person.

I also have no interests in make-up and wedding dresses and the like, but I
fully respect they are facts of the World and in that have as much right as
any linux distro to be there, I'm not forced to look up those articles, nor am
I forced to read linux distros on the site but having that option is something
I compeletly and utterly support and to do otherwise would be unfair and that
is something that I feel uncomfortable with and hopefully this clear and
documented bias can be eliminated in any form it takes in life, be it race,
sex, orientation or origins. We are all humans and in that we strive to be
better every generation we spawn. Humanity is wonderful when it works and
aporant when it fails. Lets stand up and count everybody.

------
mkramlich
I see arguments for and against allowing Middleton's dress to be covered. For:
it meets the criteria of being a widely covered and notable event, documented
by numerous major media entities, and associated with a historical event of
the ruling royal party of England. Against: yes it's just ephemeral celebrity
gossip chit-chat that gives certain people (most likely, mostly women or
perhaps some gay men) a feeling of warm fuzzies when thinking about it or
fantasizing about it. So yes that feels wrong for Wikipedia because there are
plenty of other websites and mediums for that sort of thing.

In other words, the problem is that it both belongs, and doesn't belong. And
they need to resolve that paradox, maybe setting a new precedent or revising
their official criteria.

I think the "not enough women" thing is just a side issue. And one that has an
easy and blatantly obvious solution: if you're a woman and you want to become
a Wikipedia contributor or moderator, then go do it. If enough of you do it,
then the gender balance will shift notably. If enough of you are not
interested, then it won't. There's nothing inherently wrong with either state
of affairs, it would be just the way it is. For example, I don't think it's
"wrong" that the overwhelming majority (99.8%+) of hair cut folks at Great
Clips over the years, in my direct experience, have been women, because that
probably just reflects the natural level of interest of men and women in
working in that role. I don't feel oppressed or excluded. If I wanted to work
there cutting hair, or have a man cut my hair, I'd make it happen, end of
story, and if not, or either way, I'd live with it and move on.

~~~
icebraining
I'm pretty sure those "feelings of warm fuzzies" move a _lot_ of money in the
fashion industry. The influence that even details like that have when we're
dealing with celebrities shouldn't be disregarded.

 _if you're a woman and you want to become a Wikipedia contributor or
moderator, then go do it._

I think the point is that they did, and their contributions got deleted.

