User talk:Jedisg

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 * Hi !  We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission.  I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
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Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

 * Hi !  We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission.  I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
 * The Teahouse new editor help space
 * Wikipedia Help pages

--

Your comments on the NY Times piece at the teahouse
Hi Jedisg. I appreciate the time and effort you put into your comments at the Teahouse, but I'm afraid you have misread both the intent and conclusions of the article. I think you've also managed to misunderstand a couple important aspects of wikipedia as well. Let me start with those.

You mentioned ''[w]e editors do not generate all of the content by any stretch of the imagination. The world generates the content. I would say instead (to a first approximation) that individual editors do'' generate all of the content:  we don't do automatic article generation here; at the end of the day, there is an actual person deciding what goes into an article, what gets left out, where the emphasis is placed, which sources are used and to what extent, etc. Those individual editors are operating within the context of a wider community, and while that community does have norms, those norms are in practice both fuzzy and pliable.

The idea of notability is a set of those norms. Even for individuals, we have widely differing notability guidelines for professors, althletes, artists, politicians and criminals. These definitions change over time, and even under a strict interpretation there are far more notable individuals than articles about them. And that's fine. We have more volunteers who are interested in popular music than classical music, so we will tend to have more coverage of the former. The same is true for novelists and poets, football and chess players, etc.

If you're going to use the wikipedia corpus as a scientific dataset, you need to understand the limitations of how that data was assembled. This is no different from using any other scientific data. All data has limitations, skews and biases, and part of the process of doing quality scientific research is understanding what those limitations are and how, if necessary, to correct for them. That's exactly what Seth Stephens-Davidowitz did: he was looking for an independent measure of success and decided that&mdash;with a few caveats&mdash;baby boomers who had wikipedia articles and who were not categorized as criminals would be a useful approximation of successful individuals. There are certainly other approximations that might be used: membership in the National Academy of Sciences, winners of Grammy awards, members of professional sports teams, etc. Using any one of these categories would have its own biases; using wikipedia gets you all of these people in those categories and many, many more besides.

If you read the article as the author intended&mdash;as a first cut in establishing a link between geography and success&mdash;then I think you'll find it places wikipedia in a very complimentary light. Despite our collective limitations, the sum of our efforts has reached a point where, as a whole, it is accurate enough to support useful and interesting scientific work.

I'll leave you with one final thought: I like the fact that you're thinking about the big picture here, but with 50-odd edits you're missing a lot of important nuance. Keep thinking about the big picture, but also put a few articles through WP:GA, participate in WP:AfD, and become a member and active participant in a wikiproject. By the time you hit 500 edits you'll have a much deeper understanding of how the encyclopedia works, and by 5000 edits you'll have observed both the encyclopedia (and your understanding of it) change over time.

With much respect,

Lesser Cartographies (talk) 19:46, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

PS: There has been a lot of good work done on the demographics of users and editors. See WP:USERS for pointers to the actual studies.


 * Greetings. I'll take this to the public forum of your choice, as soon as you indicate what that is.

From what I can tell, you and I read Stephens-Davidowitz the same way. His analysis is good and the implications are, indeed, that Wikipedia is a reflection of a certain demographic. I don't think the piece is either complimentary or derogatory, but rather, it's neutral: as science should be, as wikipedia should be. The ""implications"" of the data are that Wikipedia's notability reflects the norms of a certain demographic. Since Wikipedia strives to reflect and represent all demographics, the implications of the implications of Stephens-Davidowitz's data analysis are that we are not meeting our goals. It's pretty obvious that, if neutrality in data about the world is the goal, then we may not be reaching that goal.

What's even more obvious is that Stephens-Davidowitz's revelation of what most of us already knew makes this a great time for action. The perfect example is the one you just inadvertently provided. You read into my current handle and made some deductions. They are not on target, however. I've been contributing to wikipedia for years. I started contributing in 2003. In 2009-11, especially, I would hop on when I saw a problem that pertained to my field and do my best to fix it. I was using a separate email login related to an institution of which I am no longer a part, so when I read the story about Wikipedias missing female editors, I looked back in time and grabbed the only login I had left. I did this because analysis was done and word got out. We wouldn't be here having this conversation if the discovery hadn't been made and announced. After the announcement, Wikipedia reached out and said, "we want more women." I heard that and hopped back on after a couple of years of silence, using a different handle.

We can do the same thing now with this announcement. A public outreach campaign to folks who reflect a more diverse demographic is possible. I would argue, it's a requirement of being able to think of ourselves as reflective of life at large. Having lived in the big cities all of my life, I am now in a place that produces far fewer notables than the power-producers of LA, Boston and SF. There is innovation happening her, but it's quiet. There are people worth noting, but they are the silent types when it comes to themselves. There are countless people who could contribute, but they won't because they don't know that wikipedia wants them. If Wikipedia does, then steps can be taken, like the NPR-interview about wanting more women, to recruit them.

Does wikipedia support useful endeavors in its current incarnation? Of course it does. More than anyone probably understands, Wikipedia is making up for gaps in our society: our woefully inadequate educational system, our shuttered libraries, our scattered and difficult-to-access academic institutions. I would like Wikipedia to continue doing that, and do even better than it has been doing. I think that can happen best and most rapidly if we use this moment to create something new and better. I'm trying to start a conversation about what that might look like.


 * Hi, Jedisg. First, and least important, remember to sign your comments with the four tildes as such ~, and that you need to indent each paragraph separately (a problem that might be going away if the flow model is implemented).


 * I've reread your original teahouse post and read and reread the above response several times. Despite that, I genuinely don't know what problem you're trying to solve.  Yes, we can certainly stand to have more women and underrepresetned minorities editing (and I'm very pleased our outreach efforts succeeded in your case!).  We have several ongoing efforts to do just this, with the Teahouse being one of the more visible (and successful).  I think it would be terrific if you helped out in those efforts.


 * But I get the sense that you're trying to increase the pool of editors to solve a separate problem, that of "notable" people (in the wikipedia sense) being concentrated near universities and in large cities. I don't see that being as much of an issue of editor demographics as it is an issue with our notability guidelines.  I think you've conflated two senses of the word "notable" when you write "There are people worth nothing [noting], buy [but] they are the silent types when it comes to themselves."  In the strict wikipedia sense, people are not "worth noting".  The term only connotes that there is enough independent writing on the person for us to fill up an encyclopedia article.  Good, honest, intelligent and generally worthy people who don't get sufficient press coverage are, in the strict wikipedia sense, not notable.


 * Perhaps you want to argue that the "sufficient" bar should be lowered. Perhaps not.  As this point, I feel like I'm carrying both sides of the debate, so I think I'll stop here.


 * Best,


 * Lesser Cartographies (talk) 02:53, 25 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I asked very politely if we can take this to a public place. I appreciate your comments, but I didn't really come here to talk to just you. If the teahouse is not the place, that's fine. Where in the wikiverse can I take this please?
 * I get the sense from reading the comments you leave for others that you are somewhat accustomed to carrying on at least 2 sides of most conversations.
 * Jedisg (talk) 03:19, 25 March 2014 (UTC) Jedisg


 * One of the many dangers of being an academic is being infatuated with the sound of your own voice. Anyway, in my response at the teahouse I suggested the Village Pump–Misc.  See you there!  Lesser Cartographies (talk) 03:27, 25 March 2014 (UTC)