User talk:Hydrangeans/thoughts

This page is an inexhaustive approach to the subject.

My experience has been that if I've accomplished anything on Wikipedia, it has been despite, not thanks to, its policies and culture. That's pretty sad. But the longer I'm on Wikipedia, the more that the evidence of experience attests to it.

Praise and support for high effort and quality work are passing and superficial. Criticism and opposition are discrediting, destructive, and long-lasting. Preservation is hard, deletion is easy, and editors can and will delete what you contribute without helping you reconstruct.

Vulnerability and concession might not be met halfway; the interlocutor can just as easily double-down and use the proffered compromise to retrench their position's perceived strength.

Wikipedia aims to reproduce what is already extant. Transformation is primarily aesthetic. The project's inspirations are conservative and maybe even reactionary (1) (2), as is its design.

Sources: Editors favor secondary sources that are freely-accessible online. This often means older scholarship. Editors have sincerely cited works written in the 1800s as reliable secondary sources simply on the grounds of their having been published in antiquarian periodicals. Editors are unlikely to make the effort to find cutting-edge, peer-reviewed work that comes from and supports emerging scholars. If they don't cite old books, newspapers are assumed to be reliable and independent despite being primary sources, so historical scholarship is discounted in favor of going back to the earliest accounts with the least perspective and the most sensationalism. If newer writing is cited, it's usually major news websites, often producing either breaking coverage or opinion editorials. Size and reputation are favored as barometers over accuracy, so when questions get raised about a transphobic newspaper's reliability for trans topics, the community knee-jerk defends it, aghast that anyone would prioritize stopping transphobia over preserving the comfortable, cis-normative status quo, and asserts that "the community" deems such concerns "frivolous" (implicitly excluding those who are concerned from the Wikipedia community).

"NPOV": Neutrality and independence are often a matter of assumptions, gut feelings, and expectations more than an actual inquiry into the reliability of content—yet these assumptions get cloaked in the garb of high principle and noble virtues. Wikipedia is too good for community engagement, too good for accountability to the public. By vigorously excluding the subjects of its own content—not based on contextual, situational efficacy or appropriateness (such as the power relationship that exists in the world) but based on appeals to abstract "principles" like neutrality and independence—Wikipedia reproduces the kind of sneering, down-the-nose approach of earlier generations of fields like anthropology, history, and hard sciences (maybe even of contemporary generations). White Protestant or Protestant-inflected Europeans and Euro-Americans are apparently plenty neutral for writing about anything and everything, including their own kings and presidents. But trans activists objecting to transphobia? Train lovers publishing books about trains? How dare you! Not independent, not reliable, not notable!

Subjects: Wikipedia wants pages about Great Men, Big Wars, Major Battles, Powerful Countries, etc., and it doesn't want any interpretations that shake things up or question exclusionary structures that are so baked into society they take on the appearance of neutrality while justice mindsets get perceived as partisan or biased. Editors often murmur about the perceived impropriety of having quality articles on allegedly obscure subjects without taking the time to interrogate why they think of one subject as relevant and another as not. For example, I suspect "Leslie Groves", a man who is hardly a household name, was considered highly relevant anyway primarily because of his involvement in a WWII-era U. S. American military project. White American men get glamorized for their contributions to massive death tolls while women (1) (2) and people of color get "low-importance" labels slapped on them or are deleted outright. Instead of consistently acknowledging sexism on Wikipedia and trying to do something about it, editors obscure the problem by denying that this is a matter of "sexism" (reliable sources be damned) and offhandedly accusing the statistical analysis of being "weak tea" compared to their list. A [prolific] editor can deny that there is any sexism on Wikipedia and casually blame women themselves for the "gender gap" and it's just how Wikipedia is. Instead of celebrating the efforts of a relatively small group of Wikipedians to recognize women's contributions in history, culture, science, society, etc., editors will wince that someone of 'low relevance' has a 'better' page than a white man with lots of medals and will come up with ideas to 'rectify' that. Projects like Women in Red and Women in Religion identify Wikipedia's reproduction of exclusionary norms, but they provide bandaids, not solutions, and Wikipedia by design makes it extremely difficult to offer anything more than bandaids.

Policies: Wikipedia's aesthetic of consensus democracy does not undo its intractability. Expressions of dissatisfaction with Wikipedia's structure get met with suggestions to change the policy, as if the theoretical possibility of changing whole policies could cancel out the extremely live probability that such an effort would be Sisyphean at best. And this approach favors those who are already favored by the status quo. If you're the one hurting, tough luck; if you want the system to change, you've gotta somehow function at a high level in the system anyway to gain the clout and reputation to make that happen, at great expense of energy and time to yourself. Patient, heal thyself. And when the patient does grit their teeth and try to defend themselves or make something change, they are repudiated, shamed, perhaps even blocked or banned for being disruptive. If policy has a systemic bias that makes it liable to be abused? Oh, just change it then! Oh, just don't feed the trolls! Oh, just take it to talk! If someone expresses their frustration, if someone reacts to ill treatment? Then they are being too wordy, or they're disruptive, or they're "clearly not here".

Aesthetics: Wikipedia is hungrier for respectability than anything else. Editors agonize over their sense of appropriate capitalization and definition; they wince and sniff at any formulation too prosaic for their tastes; they nod in agreement when purists say that such and so standard English phrase makes you look dumb; they act as if a narrowly anodyne mode of writing is not merely their preference but moreover objectively best. By doing so they discredit and discourage editors, especially those who are new, who have backgrounds in writing, or who have different language backgrounds. But anyone who says no? Anyone who intimates that this is in any way supercilious, in any way imperious, in any way unnecessary or even hindering? Such complainants are clearly not here! Disruptive! Acting like they own the page! And should, in such a view, get out of the purists' way.

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