Mad Capsule Markets?
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I became enthused about Wikipedia somewhat over a decade ago, and remember thinking that I would take up a topic no one else seemed to be covering then - LGBT Scotland.
To that end, I started a page on Aberdeen Pride (and Edinburgh and Glasgow Prides too). Aberdeen Pride was then a unique event - a distinctly local Aberdeen summer festival with lots of local businesses attending, whether they were gay-owned or not. The page went up for deletion, not long after I finished the stub (my plan was to do a lot of LGBT Scotland stubs and then encourage others across Scotland to get involved editing them).
I defended Aberdeen pride at the deletion process, but everyone else who took part was American and all of them felt that an obscure local Pride event was just not notable enough for Wikipedia. The page was deleted. I gave up the ideas of trying to add LGBT Scottish material to Wikipedia: it was evident that it wouldn’t stay up unless Americans were interested. I’ve never contributed much to Wikipedia since: it never seemed worthwhile trying to figure out what an American audience of editors would think was “notable” before I started work, and it never seemed worthwhile doing any work that Americans could, by majority vote, decide to remove.
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Not them. Some US bands. Cant remember who exactly, was over 10 years ago.
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there’s two kinds of racism. ( i wish i could repeat this every day on every topic. )
the first is the easiest to understand. it’s overt. a person who literally says: i hate black people. ( we can put stephen bannon and richard spencer into this category without much problem. )
the other category of racism is the kind that i have, that you have, that all of us have. it exists in the moments that we can’t see our own behavior. black guy in a hoodie at night, cross the street. white guy in a crisp suit, probably a republican banker who voted for trump.
what sounds like is happening is the second kind of racism, sexism, ism-ism. in fact, the shadow of the “cross the street” behavior. it’s when you notice someone of your own race or something from your own culture and you have no reaction.
so, you see a wikipedia article about beck - and you’re like, i know him, he’s great. this article makes sense. then you see an article about mc lyte, and you’re like who’s he? ( not even a he. )
things like “wikipedia notably” become a ban hammer, then, for minority interests. made worse because of the structural problems that result in white men predominating in the american tech fields.
it’s not “these people hate minorities”, it’s that people from minority groups sit outside of their view.
even more painful is that to succeed in majority culture, women and people of all different skin colors, religions, and cultures have to give up their heritage to become literate in the dominate culture. one example is when children of immigrants don’t know the language of their parents. but this happens on all sorts of levels. so, in practice, a given editor doesn’t even have to be “white”. they simply have to be a part of the white mainstream culture.
it would be interesting to see an analysis of the topics beset by wikipedia article deletion. it’s almost - by definition - guaranteed to be skewed towards keeping the topics white tech savvy men are interested in.
none of the editors need to be racist for the results to be racist in effect. that’s why we have things like affirmative action. and - in terms of wikipedia, or it’s successor - a similar explicit tipping of the balance might need to be undertaken to actually balance the scales.
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I helped contribute to a Wikipedia biography about a notable woman, Carolyn Doran, who had been covered in fairly extensive detail by the mainstream media on two separate occasions in her career. For some reason, Wikipedia did not permit a properly-cited biography about a multi-count felon who had been the Chief Operating Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, and so the article was rapidly deleted and a replacement is not permissible.
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Unshaved weirdo, doing a nice job of demonstrating the “superior attitude” that is so pervasive at Wikipedia. Thank you for your inadvertent support of many of the complaints being made here.
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Especially they themselves complain about gatekeepers.
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Yeah, except we live in a world where this already happened:
http://www.markbernstein.org/Jan15/Infamous.html
TL/DR people tried to write about what was happening to the women targeted by Gamergate, and not only did those articles get deleted and/or totally rewritten, but previously-existing articles about them, plus material connected to anyone who criticised these moves.
Wikipedia has been famously non-inclusive for decades. For a long time (and to some extent, to this day), women’s Wikipedia “writing nights” were a thing – not sure of other underrepresented groups did the same. But now that the deletionism is in full force, there’s more discussion about just walking away.
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not a bad track record for a project less than 20 years old : D
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More than 10 years old, though. 2001 is closer to 20 years than 10.
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Have you noticed yet that being combative and attempting to undermine people’s comments here is not actually supporting your assertions?
'Cos seriously, if you and the other people on this thread claiming to be WP editors always communicate like this, you’re not exactly enticing women, POC, and others to sign up.
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Dunno? Perhaps delete their content?
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How about the fact that if an editor doesn’t know anything about the article stub or the field in general, it’s better for the whole world for them to keep their goddamned mitts off, especially when it comes to tagging for deletion something that’s out of their experience.
So much stuff I look up for work had an article at one time, but because some wikipedia editor doesn’t know that people make a living working with a particular kind of machine, or have to use a particular business method, or whatever, the article is gone, there’s no history, no reference, no disambiguation, it isn’t rolled into a bigger article, nothing. Just ignorant home-office bureaucrats who know nothing but the spelling of “notability”.
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This is the essence. When people trying to get involved and contribute are crapped on rather than mentored, it makes clear that newcomers aren’t welcome. As if the interface didn’t do that already.
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how so?
As a lowly editor with probably fewer deletion requests on his record than years I have been working on this project, I am the first to admit it has problems, and that the OP is basically correct, but made a few significant mistakes in describing its inner workings and dynamics, which I have tried to point out. If you don’t take that for an answer, if you can not grasp that this project has requirements that can not be fulfilled by blindly rallying behind extremist inclusionism (in the Wikipedia sense of the word), I really don’t know how to express this in a more friendly way.
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“If you don’t like, it, do something about it” has been the smug and self-satisfied cry of white men since time itself.
When we do something about it, it’s either not good enough, or they dox us into oblivion.
Instead of patronizing me, how about you shut up and let other people talk.
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You can stay. 
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I don’t think so.
Dude, you’re talking down to people and correcting them for the entire thread, sounding exactly like the pedants that people complain about when they are discussing Wikipedia frustrations.
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Here’s another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Watson - an LGBT+ advocate but only of interest to the gay press, unfortunately considered a walled garden and if news articles are not picked up by non-gay press, may not be presumed to be adequate on their own. It would be interesting to see if anyone has tried to argue the other way, in that news only in non-gay cultural press could be argued to be a walled garden if not picked up in gay newspapers and magazines…
This case illustrates that unfortunately, if someone mistakenly reacts to deletions by creating more accounts and gets caught, everything they created is treated as tainted and gets remorselessly hammered. If you create stub articles for charities you are involved with, nobody will care, but if you get caught it’s going to be a disaster. So really, don’t.
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