I support Wikipedia. It is a fundamentally flawed but ultimately incredible resource. It is unprecedented that such a collection of knowledge should be made without money, given away, and somehow simultaneously adequate. Because that is Wikipedia's byword: to be just good enough to be useful but not to be the moral handrail into the basement of humanity's depravity. Adequacy.
I begin with my position perfectly clear so you understand my starting point. I start there and travel through the territory of Wikipedia as bad, or destructive, or bigoted. My journey takes me to these places because I read things that I disagree with more often than I seek out support for my own opinion. That's what being an adult is, children, and it's what more of us should try to do. Today, I read an article (this one) by a transgender man worried about the rights of his group. Sam Keeper thinks his thesis has to do with Dadaism or Gamergate, but the reason he wrote the article is here:
If, god forbid, I ever get my own Wikipedia page, my identity--and therefore the identity that search engines like Google display as definitive truth--exists only in so far as "reliable sources have generally gotten on board" with my identity.The article isn't built around proving this point intentionally, but I can tell just by reading that Keeper has done the same thing I am doing. Defending a core tenet. In my case, it's the flawed adequacy of Wikipedia, but for Keeper, it's all about self-determination--of gender, of moniker, of digital representation.
Let me set the stage for you. Wikipedia started in 2001, back when everyone on the Internet was anonymous, there were no trans household names, and gaming was for children. The culture of Wikipedia developed from a basic set of rules meant to insulate the encyclopedia from relevance. Dictums like "Only use reliable sources" and "avoid bias about current events" made their way deep into the heart of the userbase and manifested as a preference for objective over subjective, mechanical over human, and right over human rights. Flash forward to 2015, when people on the Internet use anonymity as a shield to protect their deplorable actions, Caitlyn Jenner is a world-wide celebrity, and gaming culture is bifurcated along a very clear delineation (but still also for children).
In this world, enter Keeper's mix of parts: as an academic he initially values wikipedia, but as a modern artist he sees value in subversion of a system. As a gamer he can identify with a group, but as a transgender man the group has no space for him (and the truth of that stings me for being complicit). I don't know how accurate I am, but his online presence doesn't dissuade me from generalizing at least this far. Plus, I'm sure that whatever distaste I have for the idiots behind #gamergate is magnified tenfold in him. That's the face of this article, after all. The inciting horror is that
Gamergate . . . has been gaming Wikipedia's systems for a while now in order to gain dominance over the article about them.For Keeper, this is established fact. The bias of the article is undeniable, the control of the article is lost to the mob, and Wikipedia is willfully empowering it. The abuse of the Five Horsemen off-wiki and the arguments on-wiki are from identically overlapping sources. (I think it's possible that there are reasonable people who disagree with the Horsemen) Keeper provides several examples of the bias trends in Wikipedia on Hedy Lamar's page and others to make a poignant claim.
Demographically speaking Wikipedia is spreading predominantly the knowledge of the same cishet white tech dudes who run everything in the world anyway.Wikipedia users consistently poll as white and male. It's true. Enter Chelsea Manning, a trans woman who merits a wikipedia page. In a debate over the name of the Wikipedia article, thousands of users argued whether or not the rules supported the name change. Fundamental principles of all encyclopedias such as reliable sourcing and neutrality guided the debate. Finally, the Wiki community leaders decided to move the page based on the predominant news sources using Chelsea, rather than Chelsea using Chelsea. This is a huge problem for many transgender people. Names and labels and pronouns are more important to the community than outsiders will ever realize. Keeper agrees.
And Chelsea Manning's humanity and fundamental right to determine her own identity is on the line.I'm not here to debate that because there's nothing to debate.
Keeper has drifted from his original complaint about the editors of the Gamergate controversy to a more fundamental attack at Wikipedia's bylaws. Keeper eschews neutrality and aims his rhetoric at people who agree with him, using words like "cluster****" and "bizzare bubble world logic" and calling the people trying (unrealistically) to create an unbiased encyclopedia "stooges." It's the most obvious form of provocation: using aggressive language to ostracize the neutral and to enflame the dissenters. Reading the essay, I felt a distinct shift in the tone from one of exposition to a rant about the reliance of Wikipedia editors on rules. His point is encapsulated in the term "rules lawyers," which he uses multiple times to denigrate the system of Wikipedia and the people who use it.
His argument, in my words: rather than using the targeted minority's moral or ethical understanding of "right" to guide their actions (Keeper references postmodernism so there's some for him), editors use the condensation of convention: credible sources.
Keeper is shaken by the thought that other people can and will determine how he or people in his community are labeled. He uses Dada and postmodernism to raise the banner for the wholesale destruction of a fact-based neutrality-oriented bastion of objective thought: an encyclopedia.
For myself (Keeper), I'm not really interested in reform, because reform implies that I believe in the underlying principles of Wikipedia as they now stand.The call is: Don't fix it. Destroy it. Wikipedia doesn't deserve to be respected because it "decides someone's humanity on purely technical reasons [author's italics]." Keeper thinks the encyclopedia has so little worth that students should be warned off of it because of his personal opinion (supposedly about the conclusion of a few admittedly controversial pages about recent events and living persons). Keeper wants you to stop using Wikipedia because it is edited by white guys, which revolts him.
Let me recap.
According to people Keeper trusts, the Gamergate controversy article is dominated by biased editors. This is supported by Wikipedia's bylaws. This vilifies the wiki so we won't like it. The Chelsea Manning article is moved from one name to another for unbiased (unrelated) reasons. This is supported by Wikipedia's bylaws. This vilifies the wiki so we won't like it. Keeper has no power to change the things he doesn't like, so he calls for destruction. This is couched in avant-garde terminology to legitimize it.
Yet, I support Wikipedia.
Wikipedia makes it hard to create content and easy to revert it. This shifts power away from creators to give power to any minority who hasn't got the resources for creation. Reversion cannot be denied as a tool of the minority except by banning, and banning a contributor for reversion is difficult. This shifts powers away from creators and gives more to a minority. The five horsemen's main tool was reversion. Power was in their hands, not the reputedly biased majority who try to contribute to the gamergate page. (Because of near-constant reversions, all users were limited to fewer reverts to spread power among groups, rather than allow such intense power of veto to concentrate in the hands of five people. The horsemen, in being too aggressive, became the dominant voice on the page. They abused their power and lost it.)
Wikipedia has an almost religious conviction that recent events and biographies of living persons need to be rooted in the most objective facts. In fact, contributors are discouraged or disallowed from editing Wikipedia's controversial articles before consensus has been reached. This gives power to minorities, outcasts, and the accused. Both Gamergate and Chelsea Manning have been afforded this privilege. Anonymous edits and new accounts cannot change information on these pages.
Finally, there's nothing more powerful than this:
Wikipedia has gained almost universal respect despite being almost laughably open to vandalism.
The Wikimedia corporation has done a lot to foster debate and legitimize minority voices, and if their method of ignoring your moral indignation makes you angry, Keeper, just remember that it is not the ethics committee. Wikipedia is not the moral handrail into humanity's basement of depravity. Contributors don't want to change page names because it feels good or looks tolerant. They don't want to be the leaders of humanity's more unprejudiced future. Wikipedia tries desperately to be a ruler measuring exactly what humanity is. Wikipedia wants to be a compass, moved and tuned exactly to the magnetic field of humanity's truth. Wikipedia doesn't want to tell you if someone wants to be called Chelsea. They want to demonstrate that the person in the article is Chelsea, for everyone who asks. Besides, the Gamergate page actually is pretty critical of the movement, if you haven't read it recently. Not only does it reveal the misogynistic abuse of the group's darker half, but it has this gem about the allegations of unethical conduct in games journalism:
These concerns have been widely dismissed by commentators as trivial, based on conspiracy theories, unfounded in fact, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics.So, I have to ask you: if you're so outraged by a third party determining the terminology for you and your community, then you'll understand my disgust at being reduced to my age (young), race (white), and gender (male). While you're at it, eat your hypocrisy and stop calling me Cishet. That's not a label I would ever choose, but somehow you got to choose it for me. Maybe if I ever deserve a wikipedia page you can add it to my description and I can revert it and the power will be back in the hands of the young white male STEM workers who are trying to make this world a better place.
