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Opinion

Public response to the editors of Settler Colonial Studies

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By Tamzin
The Signpost strives to publish a variety of opinion pieces, essays and letters representing a diversity of perspectives; the following letter is a response to a paper written by Tamzin, a Wikipedia editor. On one hand, it concerns specific claims made in an academic paper; on the other hand, it relates strongly to the public interest and the mission of Wikimedia projects, which the Signpost exists to foment.
While we as Wikipedia editors accept that our work is mostly anonymous, and while we lack the prestige and imprimatur of academic institutions, in the name of our project's stability and continued reliability, it is important to stand up for ourselves from time to time. — J

Tamzin Hadasa Kelly (they/xe/any; Mx.)
wikimedian@tamz.in
3 June 2024

Dr. Janne Lahti et al., editors
Settler Colonial Studies

To the editors:

I write in response to "Wikipedia's Indian problem: settler colonial erasure of native American knowledge and history on the world's largest encyclopedia", an article by Dr. Kyle Keeler published on 24 May 2024. I believe that this article contains multiple factual errors, as well as an undisclosed conflict of interest.

But before we get to that, I'd like to tell a story.

In February of 2023, a user named Insitemobile came to Wikipedia's administrators' noticeboard for incidents, to report an Indigenous editor named Yuchitown for reverting his edits. His report, titled "Spam, Vandalism and Bullying By Native Tribes", contained the claim that Yuchitown had a conflict of interest regarding the Saponi and Sappony because the Yuchi historically fought the Saponi.[1] Wikipedians broadly recognize that attempting to disqualify an editor's opinions on the basis of inherent or quasi-inherent attributes (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) is hateful conduct, and administrators routinely block[2] editors who make such claims. Yet, while administrators did call out Insitemobile as disruptive, none called out the racism in his comments. He was blocked for a week, which became a month when he called his opponents "wikinazis". He then switched to editing without an account, writing to Yuchitown, "I have some advice, be careful online with oppressing other groups of people and especially be careful what IT people you offend and call an OP because this site and country is not safe. people can drive around and use any ip and stalk etc". A second administrator blocked the IP subnet.[3] But the Insitemobile account remained under a merely temporary block. Ten hours later, I noticed this and converted his block to indefinite. I added, "[In my opinion], where threats are involved, that's 'indefinite as in infinite'."

I do not mention this anecdote to claim credit for some act of heroism. I did what any administrator should have done; it took me only a few minutes. I mention it for a few reasons:

Firstly, it was a good introduction to the challenges of systemic racism that editors face in the Indigenous topic area. I do not believe that either of the two administrators who under-reacted harbor any racism against Indigenous people. Assuming good faith is a core principle on Wikipedia, and I assume that the first administrator simply overlooked the racist argument of disqualifying based on tribe membership (which arose several paragraphs into a long post) and that the second didn't realize that the first had only blocked temporarily. But such oversights are often good indicators of where systemic biases lie. If an editor had tried to disqualify someone's views because they were a woman or Black or gay or Muslim, it would not have taken 30 hours and an intervening threat of violence for someone to block the account indefinitely.

Secondly, this incident is how I got to know CorbieVreccan and Indigenous girl. I exchanged emails with both of them about their experiences in the topic area and their sense of administrators not stepping in to keep Indigenous editors safe. I was left with very favorable impressions of both of them. That remains the case with Indigenous girl.

Thirdly, this provides a good illustration of what Wikipedia administrators do and don't do. They[4] do determine whether editors are acting in compliance with our policies and guidelines, especially as pertains to user conduct. They do not decide who is right or wrong in a dispute. I made, absolutely, the right call in blocking Insitemobile, but I couldn't tell you who is right in the underlying dispute as to how Wikipedia should characterize the recognition of the Sappony. I am not a subject-matter expert. Even if I did have a personal opinion on the matter, it would not have influenced my decision. My action was based on the racism and death threats, no more, no less. This distinction is important to keep in mind as one considers the narrative that Dr. Keeler has presented.

I do not wish to delegitimize the core message of Dr. Keeler's piece. Members of WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America (IPNA) have often been mistreated by Wikipedians who are racist, clueless, or somewhere in between. There was great potential in this article to uncover the nuances of how the Wikipedia community has interacted with CorbieVreccan, Indigenous girl, and other members of IPNA. Dr. Keeler, however, squandered that opportunity in two ways: First, he failed to disclose his personal involvement in the matters his article discusses and his past conflict with me. In addition to the ethical implications of these omissions, Dr. Keeler's lack of necessary distance led him to his second critical mistake: not interviewing all of the people he wrote about. By presenting a narrative based only on his own recollection of events and those of, apparently, those with similar perspectives, he perpetrated many easily avoided errors and misrepresentations. This is a shame: What could have been a compelling investigation into systemic racism on Wikipedia instead becomes, in essence, one ex-Wikipedian's grudge piece against people he feels wronged him and his allies, facts be damned.

Part one: Conflict of interest

This part I will address to Dr. Keeler: I would like to start off with an apology. When I took administrative action against your account[5] some time ago, I was hasty. I don't think you were behaving particularly well in the dispute in question, but I had gotten in over my head and tried to quell the unrest with blunt instruments rather than defusing tensions. I am, genuinely, sorry about that.

To the editors, however, I do feel that Dr. Keeler has done you a great disservice about failing to disclose this past interaction. The article that you published mentions me in three contexts, none of them flattering, and none of them accurate (as we will see in the next section). It is hard to believe that this is a coincidence given his and my background.

For the public version of this letter, I am not going to name the account or give much information about it, because I respect that Dr. Keeler may have good-faith reasons for keeping it private. But the evidence is all pretty clear-cut, down to similar phrasing used on Wikipedia and in a published paper. So instead I will summarize the relevant facts: Dr. Keeler had a somewhat active Wikipedia account; he was involved in the overarching conflict described in the article, although not the specific disputes; I took administrative action against him once as described above (not about an Indigenous topic); he at least twice cited himself in a manner that exceeded what's allowed by policy;[6] and he retired from editing while in good standing. If there is any part of that that Dr. Keeler disputes, he is welcome to let me know. The private version of this letter will go into more detail.

Dr. Keeler's article discloses no conflicts of interest. I submit that the failure to disclose both the general involvement in content disputes about Indigenous topics on Wikipedia, and the specific conflict with me in a different setting, violates your journal's policies. Per Taylor & Francis, "Examples of non-financial conflicts of interests [include] ... personal, political, religious, ideological, academic and intellectual competing interests which are perceived to be relevant to the published content." Certainly a dispute with someone mentioned in an article is a competing personal interest, and being part of the group of editors discussed in an article is a competing ideological interest. T&F considers the non-disclosure of competing interests a form of authorial misconduct. As we are about to see, this misconduct harmed not only the subjects of this article you published, but also your readers.

Part two: Factual errors

I have neither the expertise nor the time and energy to fact-check everything in Dr. Keeler's article, at least not for free. But I know well the parts that I was involved in, so I will go over those. I suppose it is possible that I was just unlucky and everything else in the article is accurate, but, per Crichton and Gell–Mann, I feel obliged to assume that this rate of errors is pervasive throughout.

Freoh

In July Freoh was blocked by Tamzin, an administrator, 'for persistent disruption ... after warnings by three admins across two massive [Administrator's Noticeboard] threads' and edits that 'consist almost entirely of stirring drama.' Freoh's history at administrator's noticeboards, and the narrative constructed there by settler nationalists, follow the strategies utilized to remove editors who settler nationalists disagree with. Content disputes were turned into conduct disputes, Freoh was accused of pushing a specific point of view and righting great wrongs, settler nationalists suggested banning Freoh, and administrators did so. Freoh's suggested content was never added, the pages Freoh sought to edit read as they did before Freoh intervened, and Freoh was erased from Wikipedia.

The term "block" on Wikipedia usually refers to what most other sites would call a ban. My action against Freoh, however, was only a partial block, making him unable to edit some behind-the-scenes parts of the encyclopedia, but still able to edit all articles and their discussion pages. I did this specifically because I felt Freoh was a productive content contributor and needed to focus on encyclopedic work rather than drama. Furthermore, Freoh was not editing about Indigenous topics when I blocked him. I blocked him for editing another user's comments[7] to remove what he saw as an unacceptable insult against the French. A good illustration of constantly stirring drama, less so of being a martyr in the fight against settler colonialism, what with France being perhaps the most overtly colonialist country in the world.

Freoh was not banned. Freoh was not blocked sitewide. Freoh was not erased. Freoh simply chose to stop editing[8] at that point, cut off from drama venues.

Pingnova

PingNova [sic] continued to ignore Native and allied editors, and they reached out to Tamzin for help. Tamzin accused CorbieVreccan of mistreating PingNova [sic], explaining that 'This could land at [Administrator's Noticeboard] with a lot of recriminations.' The message was clear: if Native editors did not allow PingNova [sic] to edit articles related to Native topics they would be taken to the Administrators' noticeboard and removed from digital space.

Let's quote a bit more context of what I said:

To be clear, I did ask [Pingnova], before posting this, if they would agree to some kind of mentorship / 'on-the-job learning', and they did. What I've seen so far here is that they made some good-faith changes, and you [CorbieVreccan] came down fairly hard on them, and they've taken umbrage at that, and now we're in a cycle heading in a bad direction. This could land at [the administrators' noticeboard for incidents] with a lot of recriminations. Or we could defuse tensions and try to get some quality content out of this. I'd really like to see both Pingnova and you step up to the plate on that.

There is, of course, no threat to "remove" anyone here. One informal role of an administrator is to ease tensions before they land at our infamously drama-prone user-conduct noticeboards (i.e., to avoid removing anyone from the community), which is why I intervened in hopes of getting Pingnova good advice on the particulars of editing in the Indigenous American topic area, which is Wikipedia's standard practice for well-meaning new editors who are making some mistakes. By Dr. Keeler's article's own description of it, nothing that Pingnova wrote was hateful or otherwise would have disqualified them from continuing to write in the topic area with some guidance, and so that is what I sought. After Indigenous girl graciously agreed to make herself available to answer questions from Pingnova, I withdrew from the discussion:

The rest, from here, is up to [Pingnova]. They can heed your critique, or not. I just wanted to make sure they were getting a fair chance to sink or swim. I hope that makes sense. All the best.

CorbieVreccan

One day later, Tamzin opened a public case against CorbieVreccan at the Administrator's Noticeboard, accusing them of 'meatpuppetry,' or when an editor recruits acquaintances offline to support them in a debate on Wikipedia.

That's a very brief summary of the controversy at the heart of this paper—one that omits almost every important detail. It does not even name the other editor involved, Mark Ironie, a fellow administrator and long-time offline associate of Corbie's. It is important to understand here that abuse of multiple accounts is one of the cardinal sins of Wikipedia: We cannot have a collaborative, consensus-based community if we don't know how many people we're really talking to.

One of my volunteer roles at the time[9] was to investigate multiple-account abuse. I was spurred into investigating longstanding rumors of multiple-account abuse by Corbie on August 26, when Pingnova pointed out an action of Corbie's that I recognized as violating a different administrative policy.[10] After my initial private report led to Mark and Corbie being ordered to disclose their shared IP, on 11 September 2023—six days after the "This could land" comment, not one—I explained to the community, in painstaking detail, how almost all of Mark's substantive participation since 2020 was to back up Corbie, including demanding sanctions of those Corbie opposed and even blocking someone who opposed Corbie in an "edit war". For a paper ostensibly about tactics used on Wikipedia to manipulate disputes, one would think that Dr. Keeler would have been more interested in these details. Mark and Corbie's peers, including fellow IPNA member ARoseWolf, certainly were.

CorbieVreccan explained that the issue had been resolved privately by administrators some days earlier.

This argument was rejected by every single person to hear it, including the same group of administrators (our Arbitration Committee) who Corbie claimed had resolved the matter. Nor would it matter if they had: Honest participation in consensus-building is a bedrock aspect of running a collaborative project, and no entity can give someone permission to manipulate the community.

Indigenous girl was also placed under scrutiny for working with CorbieVreccan.

This bit is true, and it's the bit I most wish weren't. Indigenous girl is an amazing editor and got dragged into this (not by me) even though no clear evidence was ever presented against her. She absolutely deserved better.

For what it's worth, we remained on good terms throughout the dispute, even as we clashed on-wiki, and had a long, very cathartic debrief phone call after the dust settled. I wish her nothing but the best, on-wiki and off-.

Native and allied editors pointed out the suspect timing, given the proximity to Tamzin's disagreements with CorbieVreccan about PingNova's [sic] editing.

Explained above. If Dr. Keeler does not believe my explanation for why my investigation of Corbie began the same day as Pingnova, he should say that, not cite speculation that I already publicly responded to. Furthermore, combined with the "One day later" error, the sentence before it about how "The message was clear", and the omission of the resolution of the Pingnova matter, this sentence gives the implication that I reported Corbie for failing to reconcile with Pingnova. This is demonstrably false: The public record establishes that I had submitted my private evidence against Corbie 10 days before the reconciliation attempt and 16 days before the administrators' noticeboard thread.

CorbieVreccan and Indigenous girl were brought before Wikipedia publicly for refusing to allow non-Native editors to add colonial viewpoints to Native pages

They were not, and nothing Dr. Keeler writes up to this point supports this statement.

Just a note here about Corbie. At one point in the dispute about Pingnova, Corbie said

[Pingnova] added in a quote from a Pretendian as a giant pull-quote up top and argued with Indigenous people about it. When some of us tried to engage with them here and on talk, they were either incivil or refused to respond. They have whitesplained to Indigenous people, insisting they know these topics better. They have pinged non-Natives into discussions instead of Indigenous editors.

Corbie often spoke in this way, blending "we/us" with "Indigenous" in a way that didn't quite say "I'm Indigenous" but sure implied it. (They are not Indigenous, by their own admission on their personal blog, although they do claim some amount of Native American heritage.) Dr. Keeler's way of describing Corbie—here on the side of "Native pages" and against "non-Native editors", earlier lumped ambiguously among "Native and allied editors"—perpetuates that long-term blurring of lines.

If that seems unfair to CorbieVreccan, if it seems to go against what I said earlier about assuming good faith, please understand how profoundly disruptive an editor Corbie has been on Wikipedia. Much of this evidence was presented to the Arbitration Committee, but Dr. Keeler omits it. In addition to the massive, long-term breach of trust that allowed them and another (also non-Indigenous, to my knowledge) administrator to manufacture consensus about Indigenous topics, they used Wikipedia to promote their personal agenda for almost two decades. They promoted an obscure religious movement that they and Mark are prominent figures in, and advocated against the legitimacy of rival pagan movements. They promoted a personal friend's questionable claims of having married Jim Morrison. They fought to deny that queer rights activist Marsha P. Johnson was anything other than a gay man.[11]

Summation

This is the kind of added depth that Dr. Keeler's article could have had if he had interviewed a more diverse group of editors. He could have avoided easy errors, put forward a more complex narrative that better advanced the too-small field of Wikipedia research, and offset his own biases as a participant in the overarching dispute and a critic of mine.

He could have also strengthened his own arguments about racism. For instance, Gwillhickers has responded to the article with a horrific comment about, among other things, how all civil liberties are thanks to settlers and how Indigenous people who resisted colonization were genocidal. A quote like that would have made for a much more concrete example of racism and colonialism on Wikipedia than much of what is actually in the article. And it would have sent a clear message back to the Wikipedia community that Gwillhickers is someone who is incapable of editing neutrally about Indigenous topics, who is himself on a crusade to "right great wrongs", who should be as unwelcome to edit about that topic as CorbieVreccan is to serve as an administrator.

If I were to write a Wikipedia article about Dr. Keeler, every fact in the article would have to be verifiable in reliable sources. And I would pull my hair out making sure that they all were, because I take my role seriously, even if I don't get paid to do it, even if it doesn't require any degree. I would subject myself to the most rigorous fact-checking I could, and my peers would do the same to me. I would also be held to a pre-review requirement because of my conflict of interest with Dr. Keeler. To create the article at all, I would need to convince an independent editor that it fully complies with all of our policies, including verifiability and neutral point of view, and to make any subsequent nontrivial changes I would have to go through a similar process.

I imagine you all consider Wikipedia a less reliable source than your own journal. Wikipedia itself does not consider itself a reliable source. Why is it, then, that I would be held to a higher standard when writing about Dr. Keeler than he was held to when writing about me?

I request corrections of the numerous errors highlighted above, an acknowledgment of Dr. Keeler's conflict of interest, and an acknowledgment that Wikipedians who were criticized in the article were not given the chance to comment. I reiterate that I have not fact-checked those parts of his article not about me; I suggest consulting with a disinterested experienced Wikipedian for expert feedback.

Thank you for considering this request,

Tamzin Hadasa Kelly
Volunteer editor and retired administrator
Wikipedia

Notes

  1. ^ I am not an expert on Indigenous history. I do not know if the underlying historical claim there is actually true.
  2. ^ Wikipedia uses the word "block" for what most sites call banning. On Wikipedia, "ban" refers to a small subset of blocks that are imposed through certain formal processes.
  3. ^ When people edit Wikipedia without signing into an account, their edits are tied to their IP address. With the more modern "IPv6" form of IP addresses, an individual end-user will usually not have access to just a single IP, but rather a "subnet" of about 18 quintillion IPs, so this is what Wikipedia administrators block.
  4. ^ I am no longer a Wikipedia administrator. I resigned in February 2024 after the suicide of a friend who had been the victim of brutal personal attacks from administrators and other experienced editors—an event that predated his death by several years, and which was by no means its sole cause, but which I know for a fact was a major trauma in his life. His death caused me to reconsider the way editors treat one another in our back-room processes, and led me to decide I did not want to be part of those processes. I elaborate on this in the audio essay "On the backrooms".
  5. ^ I am being vague as possible for privacy reasons. There are perhaps 3,000 people whose accounts I took action against in some manner when I was an administrator.
  6. ^ In short, editors may cite their own publications if a reasonable independent editor would do so, which was not the case here.
  7. ^ Allowed only to remedy serious policy violations or for technical fixes.
  8. ^ At the time the article was submitted, Freoh had made no edits since the partial block. He has since made some, including a successful appeal to have the block's scope relaxed and an unsuccessful one to have it lifted in full.
  9. ^ I resigned at the same time that I resigned as an administrator.
  10. ^ Corbie has been the primary editor of the Two-spirit article, but also locked the page down to changes by less experienced users, citing a special policy that may not be used by administrators who are editorially involved in a page.
  11. ^ Much of Corbie's work regarding Johnson was devoted to resisting the ahistorical narrative that Johnson was transgender. To that extent, at least, I agree with Corbie: Johnson never called themself transgender, and arguments in favor of that term are based on people's own personal interpretation of what Johnson might have felt, a form of research forbidden under Wikipedia policy. However, in these same debates, Corbie resorted to the same kind of arguments in the opposite direction, applying their own personal analysis of why Johnson really didn't feel like anything other than a man, despite Johnson having variously referred to themself as a man, woman, transvestite, and transsexual, all in the same interview, even. Corbie even omitted well-sourced information about Johnson's use of hormone replacement therapy, based on their own analysis of Johnson's breast size.


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  • At a minimum, Dr. Keeler could have learned how to correctly link diffs and old versions of pages on Wikipedia - most of the "citation" links in their article are completely malformed, leading to a serious verifiability problem that should be as equally unacceptable in a journal article as it is on Wikipedia. I also note that Dr. Keeler's proposed remedy—that the WMF convene a panel of academic experts to supervise relevant pages—is the same as Grabowski & Klein's, and equally unworkable for practical and technical reasons. I don't mind outsiders critiquing Wikipedia, but they should do so from a place of knowledge, which includes knowing what kinds of fixes are actually within the realm of possibility. —Ganesha811 (talk) 13:22, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've been a member of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America since 2006, and so am somewhat familiar with most of the Wikipedians mentioned in the above letter. Like many other people in the southeastern U.S., a family tradition claims that my great-great-great-great-grandmother was at least part-Native American, but my other 63 ancestors of that generation were not, and I do not feel any connection to any indigenous group. I concentrate on pre-20th century Native American history, and rarely edit around current Native American topics. I do sometimes edit articles about unrecognized tribes and have removed some unsourced claims concerning various branches of the Sapony people, sometimes crossing paths with Yuchitown. I defer to his opinions on such claims (he has found sources to support some claims I have questioned). He edits prolifically in the area of tribes which are not recognized by the Federal government nor by any state government, and I think he does so with a very neutral point of view that always improves the encyclopedia. I think the claim that having "Yuchi" as part of his user name disqualifies him from editing about the Sapony is dreadfully wrong, and, at the least, falls under "casting aspersions". - Donald Albury 14:54, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think anyone disagrees with that, really, since the editor who made a claim along those lines (when opening the linked-to "Spam, Vandalism and Bullying By Native Tribes" ANI) earned a WP:BOOMERANG block over the edit-warring and other misconduct that came to light during administrators' evaluation of that report. (Which, as Tamzin describes, then became an indefinite block due to their conduct in the ANI discussion.) FeRDNYC (talk) 06:18, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Excellent work, Tamzin. I had had my fingers crossed that Keeler's paper would not be uncritically summarized in the Signpost as "research". It's great that the Signpost editors chose not to do that, and seeing your thorough critique here makes my day. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:44, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Tamzin: Overall, I think this is a very good letter. But I must take issue with the first example you give of CorbieVreccan's promotion of their personal agenda: they promoted an obscure religious movement that they and Mark are prominent figures in, and advocated against the legitimacy of rival pagan movements. This betrays prejudice against CV's religion for being non-mainstream ("obscure"), which is not the same thing as not being notable by Wikipedia's standards (written about at length in reliable sources); the deletion discussion to which you linked was closed as "merge" not "delete" after I folded my cards there (here is the version after my last edit) and the key issue was self-published sources and CV's being the primary author of the main self-published source, which is to say, self-promotion not religious promotion. It's invidious prejudice to judge people badly for their religion, and it's also unconscious bias; I am unsure of the basis of your claim that CV sought to promote Celtic reconstructionism at the expense of other forms of neopaganism (presumably neo-Druidism and other forms of Celtic neopaganism?) but that implies that neopaganism as such is not unworthy of respect. In my opinion, that small part of your letter is both inaccurate and unworthy. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:55, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Yngvadottir: Please don't think that my characterization of CR reflects any personal bias against the religious tradition. I said that it is obscure because it is obscure. And I mentioned this because it is relevant to Corbie's long-term promotion of it, which inflated its significance (and yes, Corbie's own significance, but the two went hand in hand). This is a criticism of Corbie's actions, not of anything about what Celtic reconstructionists believe. I would say just the same about someone who similarly promoted an obscure Jewish movement.
      As to promoting it at the expense of other movements, I was thinking primarily of their comments about the Witchcraft article, where Corbie often spoke about non-reconstructionist pagan movements in a way that promoted reconstructionism as a more valid system of beliefs. Or at least that's my reading. You are of course welcome to disagree, and either way, thank you for your thoughts. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe) 02:23, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • This should come as a surprise to no one. For those who don't remember, two academics released a similar paper last year about antisemitism in Poland. Like this one, it weighed in on a Wikipedia dispute, making accusations against several editors by name, to the effect of manipulating on-site activity. In most circumstances, this would be considered harmful on par with what you'd see in one of the "bad sites". The difference here is that those responsible had a platform that allowed them to publish to a wider audience. For whatever reason, the Arbitration Committee and the community accepted this off-site manipulation, and the effort to influence the topic proved successful. I warned the community twice about the potential threat of other off-site actors using publications to manipulate Wikipedia, but it fell on deaf ears. It has now happened again. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:15, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Out of curiosity, have there been any other instances of academic publications (or similar) making accusations against editors by name, besides this one and the one about antisemitism last year? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:05, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    For whatever reason, the Arbitration Committee and the community accepted this off-site manipulation... But that's not really true, @Thebiguglyalien. The paper which led to the Arbitration Committee proposing and accepting the WP:HJP case was only one of the last four "big event" climaxes in a series of decade spanning disputes. The other three were the 2021 Eostrix RfA, the 2021-22 concentration camp ARC, and the 2022 T&S report. For better or for worse, Arbcom prevented subsequent "big events" by opening the case-- whether that would've been some offwiki craziness, or something that would've looked like Fram 1.5 or 2.0. A case was inevitable-- and it's kind of a comedic, dramatic irony that someone would think otherwise-- the kind you'd see in an allegorical Young Adult novel where the main characters need to deal with "bad optics" because they can't tell the rest of the world about some "secret things" for "the greater good". And even then, when concluding the case, the researchers behind the paper still weren't really happy with the result.
    So damn we really got the short end of the stick! It sucks, but at the end of the day that's just how it is sometimes. I didn't run for Arbcom because I knew things would be easy, or that Wikipedia has no issues. That's why I think, counter to some of what you say, that academic coverage of the site is a good thing and not the real "misinformation enemy", even if some of the recent stuff has been of inconsistent quality. This site still has a lot of issues in various pockets, and having outside critique and review of them is good. Of course, editors know the site better than most researchers, so we need to keep a critical eye towards coverage as well. I think a bigger problem is the sort of coordinated spam and POV pushing operations, which we are increasingly seeing more of but are of a lower profile... those'll become a more defining issue to combat in this era of Wikipedia. I don't mean to call you out in particular-- I just wanted to put out a rebuttal to the whole "Arbcom was tricked into HJP" narrative, because I know a (small) amount of people might still believe it. Usually I just say nothing when I see something that isn't the whole story, but I think it's important to talk about in terms of the site's history, and because I think naturally critical, newer editors-- such as yourself, Alien-- are going to be the group that dismantles narratives and pushes back against the new spammers and POV pushers. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 19:35, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I totally agree, the battleground problems were an issue and did warrant a case. There are probably a few other topics that will justifiably get similar cases in the next few years, for whatever catalyst triggers it, and I'll be glad when they do. I assume you as an arb have a better idea of how close we are to this than I do. My grievance is specifically with Finding of Fact #9 and the general lack of response to the fact that, as I see it, people wanted to engage in a Wikipedia dispute and chose to do this by publishing a hit piece against several editors by name. We take canvassing and supervotes seriously, but those are minuscule compared to the type of influence that papers like this exert over a dispute, let alone the chilling effect it has on named editors. If I had access to some platform or audience and used it to shame editors I disagreed with, I'd probably get banned, and rightfully so. But the authors in these cases are forgiven because of their careers. My hope is that, while understanding there are positives to external analysis, these problems will be more readily acknowledged. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:07, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Agree with this ☝🏽 I would have liked to see FoF 9 more along the lines of Revealing personal information of pseudonymous editors in an academic paper is not technically a breach of Wikipedia behavioural policy, and admonishment of outside parties is beyond ArbCom's remit, but it was unnecessary and shitty of the authors to do that. (Aware that one of the authors did have an infrequently used account here.) Folly Mox (talk) 23:41, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Folly Mox, @Thebiguglyalien; Speaking on my view on the matter, Arbcom was always in a rock and a hard place when it came to that particular aspect of the case. That's part of why there was a remedy asking for a White Paper for best research practices on Wikipedia to be formulated by the WMF (still in progress but expected to be finished soon, which unfortunately has led to it also kind of forgotten about in the public view despite being a key part of the case), and not just because of the outing aspect. Like I said in my vote there, I think Wikipedia is very much in The Real World and that this sort of research is only going to become more common. Alien, you have a point about the "chilling effect", but you've also got to turn it around-- we wouldn't want the case to also have a large chilling effect on academics and research efforts. It's like balancing two knife blades on your fingertips, you know? It kind of relates to your point about "a few other topics", Alien-- unless there's some T&S business, I don't see Arbcom opening a case like this in the foreseeable, but there's surely plenty of other areas that neither of us are aware of where we have some messed up coverage-- whether that's on enwiki or elsewhere-- and it's good to have an outside view highlighting and critiquing that. If what I'm saying makes sense... Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 04:02, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Quick suggestion: User:Tamzin, are you aware of PubPeer? I suggest you add a link to your letter (here) from PP. It's a good tool to know and use. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:17, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Another quick question & comment: Tamzin, did you send this letter to the journal in question and did they decline to publish your response? (For anyone who cares, since some above have already drawn pararells to G&K article to which I have written a response as well - I did send my responce (a formatted version of this) to that journal, and it was declined with the comment "our journal exclusively publishes peer-reviewed articles... unfortunately, due to our current constraints, we are unable to subject your submission to our anonymous peer-review process". I received no responses to my subsequent inquiries.). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:23, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, I used T&F's correction request form to send a link to the letter in my userspace, plus the omitted private evidence. As of 23:51 UTC on Thursday, it is being considered by the production team. I have no idea whether that means it's being hotly debated among all the editors or whether I'll get a form-letter rejection. Guess we'll see. :) -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe) 02:32, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Stupid question, but T&F means..? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:45, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Taylor & Francis. Nardog (talk) 15:44, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Got it. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:19, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @XOR'easter and I had similar issues getting a response (to an email we sent) from the publisher of a different clueless paper misrepresenting Wikipedia policies. Journals just do not seem interested in correcting errors--even egregious errors in analysis that lead the authors to a conclusion exactly opposite to what their data say-- when it comes to how this community works. PubPeer hasn't been much better; I think between the two of us we had to submit our comments like 8 times before the moderators let them stay, even though in my experience the same level of detail pointing out errors in molecular biology papers gets through with no delay. JoelleJay (talk) 07:07, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I think the problem that PubPeer had with my first attempt at submitting a comment was that my comment explicitly advocated for the paper to be retracted. XOR'easter (talk) 23:52, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Is this against PubPeer's ToS? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 00:52, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I didn't advocate retraction in my comments, though. I think my issue was implying intentional deception for some of the problems--even though my language was no more accusatory than that of someone pointing out an image duplication, moderators might have thought what I was saying was simply an interpretation rather than clear-cut. JoelleJay (talk) 02:37, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I do not wish to delegitimize the core message of Dr. Keeler's piece: And yet The Signpost isn't reporting on this core message, but has instead published this 'death by a thousand (proverbially speaking) cuts'-esque debunking that I can't help but suspect will for many readers amount to a delegitimization of the core message: In its current form, Wikipedia is hostile to Indigenous peoples. Its long-time editors, administrators, policies, and structure, refuse, are not equipped, or are not designed to make the adjustments necessary for meaningful change to occur (page 15 of "Wikipedia's Indian Problem"). It's a missed opportunity that The Signpost didn't emphasize this larger interpretive message and instead published this down-the-line debunking that emphasizes the cuts over the core, that will for some readers reinforce Wikipedia's culture of hostility to scholars and distrust of reliable academic sources.
    For instance, Gwillhickers has responded to the article with a horrific comment about, among other things, how all civil liberties are thanks to settlers and how Indigenous people who resisted colonization were genocidal. A quote like that would have made for a much more concrete example of racism and colonialism on Wikipedia: That diff appears to be from 17:48, on May 27, 2024. Keeler's article "Wikipedia's Indian Problem" was submitted to Settler Colonial Studies on November 22, 2023 and was published online on May 24, 2024. How could Keeler have included in his article a quote that postdated its submission and publication? In any case, I would argue we need more help seeing what isn't obvious than what is obvious. We're well served when scholars point out the subtler, structural biases and prejudices that aren't nearly as obvious as overt screeds that 'American Indians were actually the genocidal ones' (to paraphrase the diff from Gwillhickers), which—I hope, at least—we can more readily recognize as colonialist. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 05:15, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Hydrangeans: My point about the quote from Gwillhickers is in the context of the preceding sentences: This [context about Corbie] is the kind of added depth that Dr. Keeler's article could have had if he had interviewed a more diverse group of editors. ... He could have also strengthened his own arguments about racism. Obviously he couldn't have cited a response to his own article, but if he had interviewed Gwillhickers, he could have had access to similar comments. Whether the inclusion of remarks like that would have strengthened or weakened his case is, I guess, in the eye of the beholder. I do think that the existing quotes he has from Gwillhickers are pretty darn bad as it is.
    I do share your sadness that likely some people will be unable to distinguish between "article contained factual errors and an undisclosed conflict of interest" and "article's conclusion was wrong". But I think that if scholars want to not run into that problem, the solution is to avoid factual errors and disclose their conflicts of interest. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe) 05:54, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    This opinion piece might have read a bit sadder about that matter if more had been done to highlight the core message and emphasize its importance to the audience in the broad strokes and not solely in specific cases. Instead the editors of The Signpost seem to prioritize circling wagons against perceived threats to institutional reputation lest anyone walk away with the sense that Wikipedia's administrative systems have structural biases that favor settler POVs and settler-constructed sensibilities. Administrators lacking any personally held acrimony is better than administrators personally holding acrimony, but it's no antidote for systemic pressures and structural exclusions. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:55, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Hydrangeans The core message here is that some editors wish to abuse Wikipedia to right great wrongs, they were appropriately called out, and a fringe academic (who was allegedly involved in the dispute) got all pissy about it. The solution is that editors who believe they're fighting some righteous crusade against imaginary "settler-constructed sensibilities" need to be removed from the project so the rest of us can actually build an encyclopedia. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:00, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Thebiguglyalien: I don't think that's really accurate, and actually perpetuates the false narrative that Keeler puts forward about Corbie and Mark. They weren't called out for being on a crusade to right wrongs against Indigenous people. The actual substance of their meatpuppetry was largely tangential to my AN filing and the subsequent ArbCom case, and the community's outcry about their misconduct should not be taken as any sort of statement about the underlying content questions, any more than banning Icewhiz meant the community was pro–Holocaust denial. And while I'm not here to take sides on the various content issues, I will say that at a minimum, anyone who thinks that "the Indians were the real genociders" (paraphrase) should not be editing about Indigenous topics—on competence grounds if nothing else. That's not simply wrong; it's a mockery of basically all contemporary scholarship on the topic. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe) 20:17, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Tamzin, I didn't closely watch the situation with Corbie and Mark, and if it looks like I'm describing all mentioned editors in this light, that's my mistake. My experience in this is limited to the place where I'm quoted in the paper, and that's primarily what I'm speaking to. And yes, I have just as little sympathy for those who are waging their own crusade to push the opposite point of view, especially when it's so blatantly inappropriate. I simply disagree that it's as widespread or embedded as the author and those who share his opinion make it out to be, and I believe they're using that claim to create a battleground environment that lets them push their own point of view. I don't believe that challenging a POV-pusher makes someone a "settler nationalist", as I'm described in the paper—even if that point of view is that we should use questionable sources to give undue weight to historical genocides in tangentially related articles. I don't disagree with anything you've said, but to me this is the crux of the issue regarding the POV pushing and Right Great Wrongs behavior. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:48, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I guess my thing about RGW is like: If the wrong being righted is that Wikipedia is out of line with scholarly consensus, that's a great motivation for an editor to have. If the wrong is that scholarly consensus should change, that's a very bad motivation. I think a lot of the time when we analyze "RGW" behavior, we focus more on attitude and less on who's actually bringing things closer to consensus. This has led to a few topic areas (and I'm not stupid enough to say which) where minority views have won out because the people who hold them have done a good job speaking calmly and looking more presentable. Something about Native American topics in particular seems to draw a lot of people, on both sides, into arguing based purely on how they feel things should be and not based on what the scholarly sources say. (These may be the same thing, but it matters which you cite.) I suspect that the overall balance of scholarly sources does demand that Wikipedia treat Indigenous topics somewhat farther in the direction that Keeler wants than is currently the case, particularly on historical matters... But you wouldn't know that from the debates I've read. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe) 23:35, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    That's a good point, and something I'll keep in mind about this sort of thing. It's complicated by the fact that POV pushers and RGWers often believe that the facts and the scholarship is on their side whether it is or not, but that really just brings us back to the unfortunate truth that there's no easy answer to this sort of thing. I suspect that this topic area is fraught with it because it's an issue of ethnicity and sovereignty, but the background is unique relative to some of the other disputes based on nationality and ethnicity. And of course, with the possible exception of AMPOL, it's the easiest target for those who wish to promote anti-Western sentiment. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:58, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Tamzin, I'm keeping that quote:[1]. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:57, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I think this is a complaint that should be forwarded to Corbie & Mark Ironie, not Tamzin. By breaking the trust of the community, they poisoned the well of discussion, making it harder to address such issues neutrally, not easier. Keeler essentially believing their very misleading "side" wholesale is part of the problem. SnowFire (talk) 06:48, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    The field of settler-colonial studies is founded on the idea that knowledge itself enforces Western hegemonies. In order to enact the decolonization of knowledge, what they view as alternative/indigenous ways of knowing must be given equal credit to Western epistemologies. Louis Botha describes these methods of knowing as fundamentally relational, in the sense that they prioritize the role of the relationships among actors, artifacts, and spaces in the construction of knowledge.[2]
    To truly decolonize Wikipedia, we need to retreat from our core content policies that characterize personal knowledge as inferior to dispassionate secondary sources which summarize them. Instead, we would have to acknowledge that indigenous editors fundamentally are more qualified to edit on indigenous topics than settlers, and understand that their lived experiences are more valuable than Western scholarship. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 23:22, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Chess: The problem with characterizing personal knowledge as equal to or superior to secondary sources is that personal knowledge is often variable and unreliable. There is a story in my family that my great-great-great-great-grandmother was Cherokee. Part of the story was about how she and her husband (my great-great-great-great-grandfather) were killed by Confederate deserters during the Civil War. Several years ago I went looking on the Internet and found many versions of the story, such as this, but the different versions varied considerably on details about my g-g-g-g-grandmother, giving her maiden name as Robertson or Robinson, and her given name as Suki, Sukie, Suzi, Susie, Susan, Sarah, and some other variants I don't recall. She was also variously identified as Cherokeee, Choctaw, or "Indian". The story as I learned it was from a short written account that my grandmother had had for many years when she showed it to us some 55 years ago. The details had drifted a lot in three or four generations. Of course, a lot of older history started out the same way, but when sources derived from legends and oral history have been carefully examined and compared with other sources by historians, we do put more reliance on them. I know that some oral history preserves elements of ancient events (I have read The Edge of Memory), but details get lost and mistakes creep in. Donald Albury 01:23, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Donald Albury: I agree, though I don't believe Wikipedia editors know what they're arguing against. As this becomes more prevalent in academia (e.g. how Dr. Keeler believes that his personal involvement does not make him less reliable), we're going to have to decide what to do with journals that don't exert editorial control or do fact-checking because they believe knowledge comes from personal relationships instead of scientific theory. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 23:48, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • the following letter is a response to a paper written by Tamzin, a Wikipedia editor. Just to clarify, the following is actually a letter written by Tamzin, a Wikipedia editor, in response to a paper not written by Tamzin, yes? FeRDNYC (talk) 05:27, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Even ignoring the COI and factual errors, this paper reads like anecdata to me. I'm not familiar with academic writing in this field; is this common practice? Axem Titanium (talk) 14:37, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Axem Titanium Common enough in bad scholarship, some of which sneaks into journals that are supposedly "good". In the end, this is likely because peer review is a lottery. Ask any scholar including myself - papers we consider weak or meh can get accepted in good journals quickly, papers we consider good can get years of unlucky reviews. Peer review is a lottery. Not unlike what we see at WP:GAR and like, there are excellent reviewers and ones who do a cursory skim and miss major problems. Peer review is a bad system, but there are no great solutions (I like PubPeer I've mentioned before, but it is not a perfect fix). And that is assumung peer review actually happens - since there is no record of it publically disclosed in many journals. How can you be sure this very paper here was actually properly peer reviewed? Sure, the journal has a policy, but I've read about and even seen myself cases where journal policies were bent or disregarded by editors, with nobody aware of this outside the editor and the author (and if the editor likes the paper and publishes it despite, for example, insufficient reviews, do you think the author will complain?). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 00:59, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Depends on the journal typically, I'm not that shocked that a small and subjective field like this has drek like this. Usually these types of articles are written by one or two writers. Traumnovelle (talk) 03:45, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Axem Titanium The article Grievance studies affair might be interesting to read. Their findings suggested that many journals are willing to accept expressions of grievance politics as a form of academic study. Obviously it's not definitive without replication, but it's something to keep in mind when critically reading academic publications about identity. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 14:40, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mistakes aside, I find it quite surprising that an academic article just recaps a publicly available recent conflict on Wikipedia. We need academics to transcribe oral tradition so we can cite it on Wikipedia. We need historians to correct racist narratives that arose from propaganda. We need researchers to rediscover indigenous knowledge and culture that settlers tried to destroy. I don't really see what is being achieved here.
    The suggestion that the WMF "[create] a network of trustworthy experts who could audit their areas of expertise" is, at least when those experts are paid, completely antithetical to what Wikipedia is. Why should experts in one field be paid when the rest of us volunteer? The author should learn about Citizendium and consider why it is so much less successful than Wikipedia. — Bilorv (talk) 22:06, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    It could be a good thing if a group of experts went over the Wikipedia articles about their field and pointed out problems: "This is confusing, this is oversimplified, this over here is outdated...". But the result of that process would deserve no more deferential treatment than any other academic publication. XOR'easter (talk) 00:16, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    No good solution here, considering that lack of financial or other incentives discourages many academics from contribution to Wikipedia and like (according to research, including mine). In the end, we get only input from few very motivated folks, some of whom contribute, and some of who just complain about real or perceived (or intentionally misleading) issues. The good news is that the system(s) work(s), more or less (most of academic research is useful and a net positive, and so is Wikiepdia). Unfortunately, every now and then we get collateral damage, like here. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:03, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Last year, at a Wikimeetup here in Portland, I sugggested to Maryana that the Foundation hire academic experts in fields that are poorly covered by Wikipedia, who then can provide advice, critical reviews of articles, & bibliographies for editors to consult. (She seemed receptive to the idea.) One reason these areas are poorly covered is because it is difficult to find material to write the needed articles. (I've had to buy materials for this very reason. For example, I own more books about Somalia that are available at my local public library. While this may sound impressive, I only own three books -- hardly enough to fact check many articles about that country.) The Foundation seems to prioritize various praiseworthy social causes over helping volunteers to research & write useful articles. -- llywrch (talk) 21:52, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    We need academics to transcribe oral tradition so we can cite it on Wikipedia. We need historians to correct racist narratives that arose from propaganda. We need researchers to rediscover indigenous knowledge and culture that settlers tried to destroy. I don't really see what is being achieved here.: These examples are certainly necessary areas of work (which in many cases have deep wells of resources, if only Wikipedians would leverage them) but does seem to rather conveniently leave Wikipedia out from under the microscope and magnifying glass, as if Wikipedia exists outside the world, always observing and never observed. We certainly need such scholarship as your post describes, and there's good scholarly work that does that, but Wikipedia's participation in the legacies of colonization, racism, sexism, etc. is also a worthwhile subject of academic study (and, I at least would add, are issues worth trying to attenuate and eliminate from the project, even if only to better achieve NPOV—even if I think Keeler's recommendations aren't very plausible, because of making unfortunately naive presumptions about what the Wikimedia Foundation is socially able, but more than that institutionally willing, to do). Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 03:23, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I think Bilorv's point is that Wikipedia, willingly and by default, puts itself under scrutiny by having a publicly available history and discussion section for every page, and that the authors of the paper should probably focus on producing material that will actually better our coverage of indigenous people in settler colonial nations rather than write a whole ass """research""" paper because one of them was butthurt about being caught meatpuppeting. The charitable explanation is that they do not understand what consensus means in Wikipedia, and so think that since their POV is the neutral, "consensus" POV (because obviously everyone is absolutely correct in their own minds), they have to go into our articles and "correct" them. Unfortunately, Wikipedia does not lead scholarship - we follow. They need to go fix the settler colonial bias in their fields directly rather than using Wikipedia to do so. If they are successful, we will automatically follow their scholarship. Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI (talk to me!/my edits) 04:41, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    If it wasn't clear, I do think Wikipedia has racist biases over and above that of the literature. I'm happy with us being scrutinised. But I don't see effective systemic critique being done by just describing some things that happened on the website (which anybody could see—it's public information) and naming a lot of individual editors. It could be done, for instance, by analysing the sources used in articles about North American history from 1600 to 1800. Or making a persuasive argument about our interpretation of "reliability" and the types of knowledge we don't accept (e.g. oral tradition). Or in many other ways. However, we do already have quite a density of research about Wikipedia in academia, lots of it fundamentally flawed or just not useful or actionable. — Bilorv (talk) 06:29, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Courtesy pings in case editors are not aware they are named in this Signpost story: @Yuchitown, Gwillhickers, Freol, Pingnova, and Mark Ironie: Clayoquot Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 03:04, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oops, misspelled @Freoh: so re-pinging. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 03:06, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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