Happy to hear that the author's paternal family hails from La Grange, North Carolina. I spent a lot of time there fishing this past summer. I see the point that "who tells your story matters" repeated a lot, especially in regards to Wikipedia. There's no doubt that our contributor base has resulted in the selection of the content we've covered (i.e. a preference for representing Western topics), but I'm curious if there's actually any empirical evidence if the race of the editor (since that's the salient factor here in the context of African American history) effects how a topic on Wikipedia is covered. Would the Barack Obama article (useful because as an FA it should represent our best work) look any different if it were written by 90% black Americans instead of the probable inverse? -Indy beetle (talk) 01:14, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Indy beetle: Our articles on unarmed black people who have been killed by the police typically favor the POV of the police, go to great lengths to avoid any mention of race (although this has changed somewhat in the past year), and emphasize any criminality or alleged criminality of the victim. I think that's one example of how our coverage might be different "if it were written by 90% black Americans instead of the probable inverse". Kaldari (talk) 00:06, 7 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Here's an even better example. Traditional Maya medicine is still practiced by thousands of Maya people in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. If you travel to these places you can readily find locally published books on the subject which detail the contemporary practices. If you read our article, Maya medicine, however, you would conclude that no one has practiced Maya medicine since the 16th century and you would likely infer that the Maya people don't even exist anymore. That's a great example of how lack of editor diversity hurts how we cover topics, not just whether we cover them at all. Kaldari (talk) 01:35, 7 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting piece but the author seems to misunderstand that editors are not supposed to bring their own individual perspectives to articles and are meant to summarize what reliable sources have to say on the subject. We are not looking for editors that wish to contribute their own knowledge and someone with these lofty credentials should understand that. For that matter, while I am happy the OP has had a good relationship with his father; his stories don't really count as a reliable source for the purposes of Wikipedia. I would hope that this doesn't signal that the WMF wishes to mandate that Wikipedia begin to accept storytellers as appropriate sources for writing articles. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 04:04, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
*her. My impression is that the WMF has disliked both the RS and notability policies for a while now, though fortunately they aren't able to do anything to them. --Yair rand (talk) 04:56, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think the author misunderstands policy at all, but is simply making a point that Wikipedia's editor demographic shapes the depth and breadth of content that we cover. Wikipedians don't make up the content on the project, but we certainly determine (inadvertently) what is covered and in how much detail. WP:SYSTEMICBIAS is a real phenomenon, and not everything is a battle between editors and the foundation. — Amakuru (talk) 10:53, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Of course we want editors to contribute their own knowledge. Do you think the people who work on articles like SKI combinator calculus and Chemically induced dimerization and Porphyrian tree have no relevant knowledge about the topic before they start reading sources? That anyone with access to the sources could write those articles? I didn't see anything weird at all about the clause contribute your knowledge to Wikipedia to build our global history but the focus of the article is more on who tells your story matters, which is indeed very directly relevant to a project where editors are summarising sources rather than writing off the top of their heads about a topic. — Bilorv (talk) 11:16, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
We want editors to contribute knowledge they have access to. That's different than an editor contributing their own knowledge. For many specialized topics it can be helpful to have a personal knowledge of the topic in question but editor's should be using their own knowledge to summarize and coalesce reliable sources into a Wikipedia article, not to directly incorporate their own knowledge into an article. The ultimate goal of Wikipedia is to make existing knowledge more accessible; not to engage in knowledge creation by being a publisher of primary sources (editors' own experiences). That being said there are many cases where marginalized communities can use their own access to knowledge to contribute to Wikipedia (I'd imagine there are a lot of RSes currently being ignored by the avg Wikipedia editor) but that needs to be distinguished from contributing their own knowledge itself which is original research. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 19:41, 16 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Once upon a time there was a wikimedia editor who read Janeen's article. They weren't very clever, but they knew what they liked. One of the things they liked was acronyms. They loved to know what acronyms meant. So they followed the link for OKRs, and found another wonderful page "A Foundation for Inclusion With OKRs". When I say "wonderful" this is because they found themselves wondering "What are OKRs?" So their next step was click on a link for "OKRs 101". Here they were offered 2 hours of videos, including the first one by John Doerr, a Menlo ParkVenture capitalist who sadly has not quite made it into the 100 richest americans. The page did not reveal what OKR stood for, although there were a number of clues. For example they are not KPIs. Our intrepid editor knew what they were Key Performance Indicators. They had worked for a social landlord who used them to hide the atrocious quality of the service they gave their residents. For example, "If the door entry breaks, it will be fixed in 24 hours". Translated into reality this means that if the door entry is not fixed within 24 hrs the social landlord had no incentive to get it fixed, it would then be made a low priority and often was not fixed for several weeks. Our editor was left still in a state of wonder: why use three letters where two would do: BS.Leutha (talk) 11:31, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
As I said the mystery Wikimedian were not very clever. However, they know they aren't very clever, which is an advantage over the people promoting this rubbish who think they are clever. They could have put a link to OKR, but that would be a different story. If we reserve the term "very clever" for, say the most clever 10%, then an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" needs to cater for the vast majority who do not fit this category. Indeed, why waste time on the "very clever": their enhanced abilities means they can sort out all these issues very easily!Leutha (talk) 17:57, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Where is this survey that actually finally tried to quantify how many US editors were black? And no, I don't buy this line that "we value privacy" and therefore we don't want to ask editors in an anonymous survey whether they're black, gay, Muslim, Mormon, Latino, etc. That mostly comes off as saying "we value diversity, but not nearly enough to actually do anything about quantifying it." It comes off a bit like implying that we expect the underrepresentation is absolutely massive and we'd rather not have the bad press. GMGtalk14:07, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
So more diversity would be good, both because expert knowledge makes it easier to find good sources, and also people write about what interests them. However, it does have vague connotations of wanting a change in RS/notability rules, though I still think that if they genuinely want that, make a new project with different rules. Nosebagbear (talk) 15:38, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
"If major media outlets aren't giving equal coverage to topics such as women in STEM, or to milestones in Black history, for example, then there will be no Wikipedia article on those topics, because there will be no citations to build from." -- Uh, many of us don't use content from "media outlets". We use books & articles, often but not always printed on paper & bound into volumes. The problem I often encounter in working on topics that are not either mainstream or popular on the Internet is gaining access to those books & articles, either in print or electronic form. (And if an admittedly upper-middle-class white male in the US has problems getting ahold of these materials, I'm sure BIPOC people around the world encounter even more difficulties. Public libraries are an endangered resource.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:38, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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