WP:THREATENING2MEN: The English Wikipedia's misogynist infopolitics and the hegemony of the asshole consensus: Nothing makes Wikipedians more angry than a discussion of gender and feminism on Wikipedia.
“ | ... my focus is on how misogynist infopolitics define Wikipedians' interactive habits, shaping the social environment in ways that make Wikipedians of many genders and sexualities hostile to information that challenges forms of male privilege understood to be diminishing or endangered by institutional diversity initiatives. | ” |
“ | In the case of campus sexual violence, facts came under question not through debates about statistics and occurrences of sexual violence, but rather through debates about the value of including this "type" of content on Wikipedia... | ” |
“ | ... these lawyeristic maneuvers are the most effective weapons for individuals who do not know very much about facts, as they allow Wikipedia editors to replace expertise about subject matter with expertise about Wikipedia's rules. | ” |
“ | Closing the gender gap on Wikipedia" gave form to a wider crisis of masculinity taking shape across sites of knowledge production, one predicated on the decline of white male privilege through "diversity initiatives. | ” |
“ | For Wikipedians, the authority granted by agreement based on Wikipedian expertise is constituted by an aggressive dismissal of expert knowledge as biased using WP:<POLICIES>, and a replacement of expert knowledge with mastery over Wikipedia's various policies for designating "legitimate" information. | ” |
“ | It becomes clear that the intention is not to improve content...but to prevent the publication of content. | ” |
“ | In the interests of so-called "neutrality" and "objectivity," Wikipedians sought to deny Rodger's own assertions of misogynistic intent because they revealed the ways in which something else – male privilege – is at stake on Wikipedia | ” |
“ | In the context of Wikipedia's gender gap, the use of policies to "rule with reason," is in essence a façade for maintaining a misogynist infopolitics fundamentally opposed to information threatening to male privilege both on and beyond Wikipedia – regardless of how well-sourced. | ” |
“ | Wikipedians protested a violation of a metaphysical neutrality that was not defined by benchmarks, but rather "feelings" that "political" information was not information at all. | ” |
“ | ...the meaning of WP:RECENTISM and WP:UNDUE is supported by a history that Wikipedians write themselves, yet presume to exist as an object outside of their own creation | ” |
“ | ... what makes Wikipedians a unique type of asshole... is their combined ability to force everyone around them to resign to being an asshole too as a strange survival strategy. | ” |
“ | We should definitely document all of this history and add it. But I can't. I get enough shit for writing about women mathematicians. I won't even weigh in on the debate because of how toxic it is. - anonymous Wikipedia editor | ” |
“ | In short, the hegemony of the asshole consensus has the power to transform everyone into an asshole. | ” |
“ | Making Wikipedia better requires not simply the addition of women, but the creation of a space of multiple points of view. | ” |
“ | In order to establish healthier habits and traditions, the Wikimedia Foundation would have to actively cultivate a climate of respect. | ” |
In this issue
Discuss this story
Untitled
waving handsexpressing our opinions here will change nothing, unless, as I wrote, someone is willing to scrutinize it in a critical reply submitted for publication to Ada. Staszek Lem (talk) 21:59, 20 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]Your irony is misplaced. WP:RS criteria include objectivity. And if you look into the WP:RS noticeboard, you will notice that objectivity of some sources is routinely challenged, i.e., the issue is taken seriously. What is more, we even know that "reliable" may be in an honest error. Wikipedia text is not cast in stone. Errors may be corrected, bias may be fixed. Staszek Lem (talk) 22:40, 20 August 2015 (UTC)Stricken (sorry, jumping to conclusions base on incomplete information.) Staszek Lem (talk) 22:49, 20 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]Deletion of category for Schools under investigation for Title IX violations
Policies, WP speak and Women artists
Thanks for using that graph about the RKD database showing the women artists and accompanying it with the quote about 24% women on Wikipedia. Since the graph shows clearly that the best matching percentage is only about half that, then it is clear that Wikipedia does better than the RKD at including biographies (or at least Wikidata items) about women. In fact Wikipedia is twice as good. That said, 24% seems lagging, but this has to do with a gendergap in the arts world. Wikipedia cannot fix any existing gendergap, but it can help to stop them being amplified. A gendergap is amplified for example when a museum opts to spend all of its purchasing power on modern artworks by men. This may not even be a decision made by the museum directly, but indirectly, by stipulating that only prize-winning works should be purchased, and no prizes are awarded to women that year, etc. Looking at the history of this particular case, namely the history of sexual violence in US universities, I can imagine the amount of pushback this got at each turn. Most Wikipedian editors are students or just-graduated and looking for a job. In both cases they are highly motivated to keep their alma mater pages in order. If you had selected the topic of deaths relating to alcohol abuse at universities or just fatal accidents due to stupidity during "rush week", a yearly phenomenon which happens alas to ALL genders, I don't think the outcome would have been different. Wikipedia is not good political arena, though I would agree that it is one. It is just very tricky to maneuver within the confines of the Wikipedia policy system. I am ashamed to say that I agree with some of the quotes that you repeat here by Wikipedians. Sorry about that, but I think ALL of your work would be welcome on Wikidata, and we should probably make a Wikidata project to do just that. Jane (talk) 16:44, 20 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
GGTF
One small point, I thought that the WP:GGTF was a community initiative started by @SlimVirgin:, not a WMF one started by Sue Gardner. ϢereSpielChequers 19:42, 20 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Off wiki criticism
The article rightly pointed out that one of the critical comments was on Wikipedia Review, but while it linked to motherboard.vice.com for the quote "Accusing Wikipedia culture of being 'trollish and misogynistic' is nothing less than a way to silence people who challenge mainstream feminism,", it didn't name that site in the text. It would have been better if it had been clearer that this criticism was also elsewhere on the Internet, as currently written this could be misread as criticism from within the Wikipedia community. ϢereSpielChequers 20:06, 20 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Cherrypicking
The author has constructed a lot of generalities out of a handful of incidents and quotes, and ignored other facts that are hard to fit into the narrative. For example, he also created a List of American higher education institutions with open Title IX sexual violence investigations. This, too, was subjected to a deletion debate, but in this case the keep and delete votes were almost evenly divided. Ultimately the nominator withdrew the nomination without prejudice and redirected the list to Office for Civil Rights, where prose coverage of the investigations could be developed, offered to help develop it, and had no objections to the eventual creation of "a decent article on Title IX sexual violence investigations." At the time, the author seemed content with that decision. Wikipedia is not monolithic. RockMagnetist(talk) 06:29, 21 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
And how many edits did you contribute to those articles? Zero.It appears that Wikipedia policy is no barrier to coverage of this issue- if you understand why it is there and how to work with it.RockMagnetist(talk) 16:24, 21 August 2015 (UTC)[reply], which you have contributed 6 edits to. While you were dreaming up slogans like "hegemony of the asshole consensus", other Wikipedians were getting things done.RockMagnetist(talk) 17:00, 21 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]UNDUE
Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), and categorization
This op-ed was a difficult slog for me to read, as I'm not sure it adequately summarized the point(s) it was making. So I'll just comment on two of my takeaways from it. (1) Regarding the idea that men dominate Wikipedia so as to suppress coverage of topics like campus rape, see Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). This topic was featured on Wikipedia's main page in the "Did you know?" section. This is a controversial topic, as demonstrated by its extensive talk page archives, but the "men's club" here has not suppressed it. (2) Regarding categorization, yes, Wikipedia:Defining applies here. I created Category:Facebook groups, and successfully defended it from a deletion attempt. Note, however, that it has less than a dozen members. I don't do Facebook, but my understanding is that it has thousands, if not millions, of "groups". However, only a handful of notable organizations are WP:defined by this characteristic. For example: "Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE) is a Facebook group..." I'm thankful that, as yet, there are no colleges which are so well-known for the frequency of rape on campus that we define them by that. Wbm1058 (talk) 19:46, 22 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
General comments
Uncivil
In an earlier discussion on this page, I made an ad hominem attack on Thebrycepeake, and I was surprised at myself. This is something I studiously avoid doing in Wikipedia (not to mention real life); I believe strongly in the core policy of civility. I came to realize that it was a response to the extended incivility of this article. It is one massive failure to assume good faith. When editors disagree with an initiative by Thebrycepeake, it is because the information threatens male domination. When they cite policy, they are using "scientism" to mask their ignorance of fact. Deletion debates become opportunities for the majority to impose their will on a minority. And by extension, Wikipedia as a whole is subject to a "hegemony of the asshole consensus." There is no real evidence for these claims; they are constructed out of a mixture of mind-reading, rhetoric and guilt by association. It positively invites an uncivil response.
For a glimpse of male hegemony in action, consider discussions at WikiProject Universities on University Sexual Assault Investigations in Lead, where staunch hegemonists like @SarahStierch express doubt that the material belongs in article leads or in its own "controversies" section; or Editing Infoboxes, where another gang of oppressors questions its inclusion in the college/uni infobox template. Yet, on reflection, these people don't sound very frightening. They don't challenge the accuracy or value of the information; they simply question the way that Thebrycepeake wishes to present it. And they frequently propose alternatives such as creating a separate article on the investigations and linking university articles to it, or incorporating the material into the history section for each article. Indeed, that has been done in University of Chicago, while in Occidental College it is part of a multi-issue Controversy section.
The real problem is that Thebrycepeake wants to broadcast his information with a megaphone, and when his desires run counter to what he calls WP:<POLICIES>, he blames the policies. Consider, for example, the question of defining characteristics of a subject. To quote WP:CATDEF,
In the category deletion debate, Thebrycepeake says, "The fact that the President's own taskforce NAMED (for the first time EVER) these institutions, and that the news has widely broadcast this naming, further makes it a defining feature for a lot of current and future occupants." Unfortunately, the other editors are not able to articulate the crucial flaw in this reasoning, falling back on statements like "it doesn't have the long-term and wide-ranging significance to be defining." But the real point of WP:DEFINING is clear from the examples it provides:
When the University of Chicago is named in an article on the President's task force or on sexual assaults in colleges, the investigations are the subject of the article, so they are not defining. If, however, U of C were commonly referred to in other contexts as "The University of Chicago, a university under investigation for Title IX violations," it would be defining. But, of course, it isn't.
I have not been involved in any of these discussions, but it seems to me that most participants were trying to honestly assess the information and the best way to present it; and they believe that Wikipedia policies are there for a good reason. They don't deserve this smear. They have proposed reasonable alternatives, and there is no evidence that Wikipedia policy is any barrier to implementing them. RockMagnetist(talk) 19:03, 23 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Scientism and the other
The op-ed seems to take an issue with scientism on Wikipedia, definining it (I am paraphrasising here) somewhere along the lines of an unjustified use of scientific arguments and terms to silence critics and dissenters, strengthening one's own political views with scientific authority and thereby claiming objectivity, and, on top of it all, being blind to the various forms of injustice and discrimination that are created in the wake of objectification and neutralization. While the above text makes those things sound as if the devil himself had devised them for this site, it should be clear that in most of the cases, these things are absolutely normal and essential for Wikipedia. Even Thebrycepeake, if he is serious about his work here, will have to engage regularly in these kinds of activities: We cite a physicist's textbook to silence those who claims that jet fuel can't melt steel beams; we counter claims that there is no racism in western societies with statistics of the job market; and we make a clear distinction between points of view that deserve to be presented in a well-balanced fashion and those who don't deserve that kind of privilege. And if we follow our conscious, we are doing this by being faithful to our sources, the issues we write about, and what we hold to be true and just.
But of course this is not what Thebrycepeake protests against here. What delineates scientific from scientism, it appears, is that the latter is phony and hollow, and that its proponents either bluntly lie about their real motives or (even worse!) are oblivious to the inherently mysoginist, sexist, hegemonic, or what ever you would like to call the forces that make them act in the ways which are criticized in this opinion piece. They are borrowing from science an authority they don't deserve, making them the actual opposite of what they claim to be – neutral, objective, fair, pragmatic, and so on. But here we might hesitate for a second: Isn't this article doing the same thing by citing renowned scholars who allegedly support the author's point of view? Isn't erecting the ideal of a fair and balanced account that manages to include everyone's views, claims, and needs and then pitting it against the messy reality of everyday Wikipedia guilty of the same sleight of hand that accuses others of their bias and their obvious personal interests, while firmly situating oneself outside such political quarrels? Doesn't the op-ed, by shifting away from the countless wikilegal, wikipolitical, and wikitechnical arguments brought forth by countless Wikipedians who hardly qualify as "Men™" (at least not any more than Thebrycepeake himself) towards the issues and arguments the author deems the most important commit the very same crime of ignoring problems that actually matter in the here and now in favor of dogmatized slogans, phrases, and claims which only bear the cloak of feminism?
I have to admit that I do have a problem with the way a number of STS scholars are cited in this op-ed. And it is not merely the fact that this text does not seem to have a problem with quoting both Latour and Bourdieu for its agenda, two authors whose theories and political stances are so radically opposed to each other with regard to this op-ed's theses that I find it hard to believe its author has thoroughly engaged with their relevant writings. For an article so ostentatiously bearing the banner of a critical approach to unquestioned truths, I think it could do a better job at exposing itself to the shortcomings, risks and blind spots of its own approach. Others – Wikipedians, Men, hegemonists, ignorants, formalists, etc. – cannot cease to fail in their quest for truth and neutrality, because they are mistaken from the very start. The author, on the other hand, or who ever it is who speaks through this lines to the readers, does not seem to live the dangerous life of being prone to error or having to learn about his or her own mistakes. I think this way of telling a story is bit too lazy, at least for our times who seem to have their difficulties with perspectives who claim access to an infallible truth.
After Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto I thought at leasts feminists were immune to falling into this kind of trap. But maybe that's also a bit too presumptuous from my side, as I have written pieces like this one myself, albeit I hope it's been some years by now. I can understand the rightful indignation of someone who's seen their hard work erased without sufficient explanation and whose complaints have been overheard, ignored, ridiculed and in any case misunderstood. The only reasonable way of resolving ignorance and misunderstanding, however, is not by hailing some kind of world where the differences from which they stem are finally – once and for all – done away with. Sacrificing this world, how ever inconvinient and troublesome it may be, for a utopian vision which feeds from exactly those false and phony transcendent truths STS has been criticizing for roughly fifty years now cannot be the answer. An encyclopedia where women and men finally get the same amount of kB for equality's sake may be anything, but it sure as hell will not lead to the end of history. Yes, crying out against injustice must be impossible, and that includes questioning the value and adequacy of certain norms, rules, and arguments. But that requires situating oneself within the landscape that is about to be renegotiated and accpeting the risk that, in the end, it might also be ourselves who will have to change or acknowledge our mistakes – and not solely those who we have conveniently bxed as "the others".--Toter Alter Mann (talk) 22:40, 23 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Some comments
I think it is unfair to actual victims of violence against men to apply the term so carelessly. Gender-neutral violence, sadly, usually affects men more. To me, violence against men is violence against someone because they're male or assumed to be male (women/non-binary assumed to be men can be victims of VaM and vice versa). It is a real thing but it doesn't apply in the Isla Vista case.
I am female, I was assigned male at birth and have stereotypical male body parts. I shy away from the label "transgender" because I find the trans community too exclusive. I don't get into gender politics on Wikipedia or edit gender-related articles often because I'm afraid. The environment of gender on Wikipedia is extremely hostile and I don't think I'm qualified enough to speak on gender issues. I am learning to break free from that.
I agree with that Wikipedia policies are exclusive. Knowledge is biased to who writes it and we are seeing that our sources of knowledge exclude the knowledge of minority groups. Of course women and men aren't psychologically different but being treated differently leads to a different PoV.
Sorry if I misunderstood the article. :( Andrea Carter (at your service | my good deeds) 05:03, 26 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Controversy in leads
It's a pretty high bar to include mention of any controversy in any lead paragraph. The controversy generally needs to be a major or defining event for the subject at hand, not just one thing that happened to an otherwise large, complex, or old subject. The removal of these was probably well justified and had nothing to do with any gender issue. Gigs (talk) 20:05, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This editorial missed the forest for the trees
What's happened here is that someone tried to expand, categorize, and restructure a whole bunch of articles in a skewing way, that focused, laser-like, on something that's really a vague, open-ended "investigation" the basis and parameters of which are unclear. When reasons were given why this exact approach isn't appropriate on WP, rather than listen to the reasons and reapproach the issue by writing an article about the investigation(s), their scope, and the targeted institutions (i.e., salvage the work), the writer instead declared WP full of hegemonic assholes, abandoned the work, and parlayed the "experience" into a one-sided journal paper instead. I kind of feel WP was used, and the entire situation is a false dichotomy setup: Either the author gets her way, in every single way, or WP is a wicked place to be publicly shamed. There were so many other ways to handle this.
The sad thing is that there really are a WP:BIAS problem and a WP:GENDERGAP problem, but this editorial missed both of them widely, and devolved almost immediately into an incoherent conspiracy theory. Just because not every imaginable approach to coverage of campus sexual violence is an encyclopedic approach doesn't mean that some good ol' boys' club of misogynist douchebags is in control of Wikipedia and is censoring the issue from our pages. What really happened was someone was trying, however inadvertently, to inappropriately use Wikipedia as a soapbox, meanwhile the actual facts they sought to include should actually be included, just in a more encyclopedic, less tabloid, manner. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:30, 28 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This kind of doublethink and cognitive dissonance is found throughout the piece. To just pick a paragraph at random: Peake, in criticizing WP's consensus decision-making model says "This ethnography is not without its quantitative supporters", and cites previous work he feels is enthnographic in nature, but the works he cites are not actually research in that field but two papers by largely the same researchers, on computer-mediated work collaboration; to the extent they have a social sciences component, they seem to be sociological and microeconomic (particularly concerned with distributed organizational ergonomics), not culturally anthropological, i.e. ethnographic. Since when do Wikipedians form an ethnic group or anything like one anyway? WP is a self-selecting affinity group. A sentence later Peake turns this "ethnographic" criticism on it its ear, and says of his own counter-argument "Through an ethnographic approach, however, I am able to go one step further than these quantitative studies to demonstrate ..." [various things he can't prove]. So, what is this? An ethnographers against ethnographers war? While Peake has some educational background in anthropology, I do, too. I'm not detecting anthropological thinking at work in this editorial; it's a socio-political communications (i.e. PR) piece; like Peake, I coincidentally have a degree in that, too, so I recognize it when I see it (especially having been a professional activist for about a decade). An ethnographic approach is certainly not evidenced by a claim of "scientism" on the part Peak's "asshole" opponents. Last I looked, anthropology is a science. And it doesn't require a focus on science to decide whether something is a defining quality of a university, for either lead or a category, anyway. No untoward veneration of science is required to assess whether some vague "investigation" is encyclopedic material or of indeterminate importance. It's absolutely the wrong approach to ethnographic methods to generalize from observations of outlying members of a group to assumptions about every member of a population.
The frustrating thing is, this is all a total distraction from the real bias and gender gap problem on Wikipedia. There is no "WP:THREATENING2MEN" factor at work here, except on the part of a few isolated individuals. Men are not generally threatened by women or feminism (even if some outlying weirdos with mental issues are). Rather, the gap and the bias come from "WP:NOTINTERESTING2MEN". Males in the aggregate tend to be self-absorbed and simply WP:DGAF about things that aren't "guy stuff". There's a reason that WP is dominated by coverage of sports, video games, rock stars, hot actresses, machines, warfare, business leaders, and other traditionally "dude"-leaning interests. It's not because men hate women and want to keep them from writing articles on other things or minimize their proper representation within those topics, too; most of them simply can't be bothered to notice or care. It's not even male privilege, it just male collective narcissism. It's not a conspiracy (and it does not posit one about women), it's just systemic apathy commingled with willful ignorance, a combination that, when it becomes self-congratulatory, we call stupid. There is, surely, a Wikipedia douchebag factor at work (closely related to that found in the gaming community, the free software movement, academia [at least in the sciences], and business, but it's just Y-chromo jackassery, not a vindictive political movement. It's a thick wall to knock down, but hammering on the wrong one doesn't help. I'll close with Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 05:59, 28 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Correction needed
Hi Bryce. It has been brought to my attention that you wrote this article in 2015, and that it cites a diff of one of my edits. Unless I'm missing something, you either used the wrong diff or misquoted me. Here are the diffs:
As you can see, there is a total disconnect between your description of my thoughts and my edit summary. Did you use the wrong diff? If there's another explanation or some other diff and or quote(s) of me in that article, please clarify it for me. Thanks. -- BullRangifer (talk) 17:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]