Wikipedia:Not The Wikipedia Weekly/Episode 50/transcript

hello and welcome to wiki voices episode 50, yes we've hit the 50 mark here, half way to 100. I am durova, your host for the evening, and I'm here from San Diego, with Seddon who's doing technical hosting

hello there!

and awadewit

hi from the state of indiana in the united states

and hello blurpeace.. ah, blurpeace is joining us in text... Coffee...

hello this is Coffee I'm an OTRS member and admin. I'm calling from the state of Louisiana, Barksdale Air Force Base

and newyorkbrad

I'm newyorkbrad. I'm brad from new york. I've been editing for about three years, I'm an administrator and arbitrator on the english wikipedia

and ishadowed

hi, I'm ishadowed from Pennsylvania

Jake Wartenburg

hello I'm an administrator on the english wikipeida and i'm joining you from frigid western Massachusetts, where it is icy and rainy and cold and dark

thanks for the description! Julian, Julian Colton

hey there, I'm Julian COlton, I'm an admin on 5 wikimedia projects including the english wikipedia.

Mitchanzenia

Hi ya from the - even though it's freezing I don't really care - New Jersey

Nuclear Warfare

Hi there, I'm Nuclear Warfare

Private Musings

hello, I think I'm the, am I the, ah no, Seddon's not from the states. Well I'm from the state, well not from, but it's the state of New South Wales, Australia, down here - hello everyone - it's sort of a greyish rainy sydney afternoon down here

and the thing that should not be

hello there

hi

I'm from the frigid cold state of Utah

ouch, ouch that's quite a bit. Well here for episode 50, newyorkbrad has kindly offered to join us to discuss something that's a very important and serious matter, it is internet safety particularly for the under 18 crowd - and would you like to discuss a little bit of that, brad

well I'm happy to open - I don't know whether there are any specific aspects that we wanted to discuss, but basically there are a number of different ways that one can come up at this question - it's raised with regard to both the internet generally, and it's raised both on-wiki and by some of wikipedia's critics in terms of wikipedia specifically, and that's the role that users who are under 18, or under any age that one might set, have on the site - and I guess the first thing you think about addressing in that context is, you know, rules of good safety and good practice and common sense that apply to the internet generally, and secondly is how those editors interact with wikipedia. The general admonition that's given to younger people online is to limit the amount of self identifying information that people give about themselves and on wiki as we all know, the policy is that you can edit totally anonymously you can disclose a limited amount of information about yourself, you can disclose who you actually are or you can even go further and have your real name as your username if that's the choice you make. and other than the requirement that people like checkuser and arbitrators identify privately to the foundation there is no requirement that anyone disclose who they are in what we call real life on wiki with the very limited exception that you're asked not to blatently lie about claiming credentials you don't have. Notwithstanding that, in the last few years, at least some people heave urged a movement towards greater openess, greater transparency in terms of people indicating who they are, what credentials they have, some people think that's a good thing, some people think that's a bad thing, and that intersects with the general internet wide admonition that when younger people use the internet, they should not, for a variety of reasons, reveal too much information about themselves, where they're located, how they can be contacted, their offline lives. Now the further issue that arises when I've discussed this off wiki on a critic site is what one means by underage editors, you know, I have very different feelings in terms of how a hypothetical 12 or 13 year old editor should be protecting himself or herself versus how say a 17 year old editor might feel at liberty to interact with people, notwithstanding that both groups are quote unqoute underage - so that's sort of an entry level question that one has to address in this type of conversation. If the very young editor you know, reveals too much information about himself or herself and too much is of course in the eye of the beholder, an administrator will delete the information, and sometimes people even ask that we oversight the information. If someone we know to be say 17 chooses to come out, and gives his location, her location, you know, we probably wouldn't take any action whether or not people think it's a good idea. So again, that's not a unique to wiki issue, that's an internet wide issue in terms of how we caution younger people how much information they want to give out about themselves, and we do have people who don't like wikipedia for whatever reason who sometimes do try to give our administrators in particular a hard time, and that raises, you know in the workplace, or in school, or in their other internet lives, and that raises problems for you know, people of any age - raised a problem for me at one point, and I'm 47 - in the interest of full disclosure - so certainly it might raise problems for somebody younger who is still formulating their internet prescence as they think about applying to colleges, applying for jobs etc. so it's an area where people need to be cautious, make important decisions

something I've been wondering about as far as this goes, I know we need to protect certain people of certain ages on the site, I mean, I was a person who personally never protected any of my identity on the site, it was just pretty much thrown out there. I recently turned 18. One of my issues with the protecting or the, I forget the exact topic, but the idea of it, is how do you find out their age? and should we be going around, should we be asking these people their ages? should we be asking they to give out personally identifiable information in order to protect their personally identifiable information?

sometimes when a person is younger and they're editing wikipedia, whether or not they say 'hi I'm x years old' or 'hi I go to x high school, or x junior high school, or x middle school' and you can get an approximate idea of how old they are, you don't want to stereotype - we try to treat all editors eqaully within the bounds of what they have to contribute - but sometimes you can look at a user's page, and a user's interests, and say the odds are that this is someone who is on the younger end of the editing spectrum - sometimes you can't - there's one well known underage user who I think, you know, shocked everyone when he revealed that he was 13 or 14 at the time and then there are other times when you look at somebody, and I'm not talking about people who have maturity issues, or maybe shouldn't be editing yet, or should be watched closely, I'm talking about people who are perfectly competent editors sometimes even outstanding administrators, but you look at what they write about, and how they write, and you say you know I bet I can guesstimate how old this person is so sometimes we do have an idea, sometimes we don't. I don't think anybody is seriously proposing that we take a mandatory census of users by age, and in fact precisely in order to prevent even the possibility, or to prevent the perception that we're encouraging the possiblity that we're trying to encourage people to seek out younger groups of editors, categories like 'wikipedians born in 1996' type of thing were deprecated, were removed, several years ago. so you're right, it's a fine line.

so the issue that so far's been brought up is the revealing of personal information - is that what we're trying to protect underage editors from exactly?

right, like a typical situation that you'll see is that you know someone who's like 12 will come, and they'll edit a few articles and setup a userpage and will be like 'hi, I'm 12' and then you have a pretty big problem, especially if they've enabled email, because that basically enables anybody on the web to contact them privately and you know, administrators on the site will have no idea if that's going on and we can remove the page but there's not really a lot that we can do about that once the information's out there, we don't know who's seen it

and again, this is an internet problem, not a wikipedia specific problem, but it is something that's concerning, and there have been proposals to address it, unfortunately proposals to address it generally start with the proposition that again you're asking people how old they are and one should bear in mind that if somebody has, as we all know, but some people who look at us from outside the site may not know, wikipedia does not supply an email address, only the paid employees of the foundation have an email address @wikimedia - so by definition a child or teenager who has enabled email already has setup an email address and one hopes has been instructed in the appropriate parameters and the appropriate uses of email, and if they're young enough to be supervised with that

Jake brings up a good point, there was an incident I think it came up fairly recently where people realised that although administrators have the ability to block outgoing emails that I don't think right now there's the technical ability to block incoming emails

yeah, we can't do that yet

so if you had somebody who's very young who enables their email and reveals more than they really ought to, so far the admin. corps doesn't have the ability to stop someone from using their wikipedia page to contact that person directly, and it would be a fairly easy fix to implement technically and it seems like a good idea to give that ability to the admin corps for that specific type of situation

I have an outstanding request to the developers that would, for that feature, and we'll put that in the show notes

- who decides when to implement that for a given person, is there an age cutoff, this creates all sorts of subsidiary questions

so the question is, and I know this is going to bring up, especially because of RfA - the ageism debate again, and again, and again. It sometimes seems like the age of a person on wikipedia is becoming an issue we're never going to be able to solve, because someone's going to bring up one problem after another after another, never going to end ......then we're doing censored stuff, and then it's causing more problems

it's an interesting spin on the ageism debate because the ageism question on RfA has always been 'are younger administrators good for wikipedia?' and my answer has always been, you know, yes as long as they use common sense in what they get involved in, but the question has always been 'are younger administrators good for wikipedia?' now we're reframing the question as 'is wikipedia good for younger administrators?'

the problem is, people also take that and take it too far, and too far, you can be an excellent person and work your head off and still be under 18, and you're still going to get your head chewed out at RfA because of your age

well I don't think that necessarily you're going to get your head chewed out

well that's not necessarily true because you can choose not to disclose your age and if you are mature enough that you can be an administrator then just let other people assume you're an adult

one possibility is to let people assume you're an adult, another possibility is to acknowledge your age, or at least your approximate age, but conduct yourself in a reasonably mature way, now the fashions in RfA change one month age related opposes will be in vogue and another month they won't so to some extent it's luck - but plenty of highly qualified younger people have passed RfA with it being fully known that they're underage

with the arbcom and checkuser stuff where they actually have to identify to the wikimedia foundation, if there was some way that the wikimedia foundation, and only the staff though, had access to the information, because they allow you to actually put your birth date in on preferences, I think it would be a little easier, so everyone knows what's going on

but how would that help? I mean if someone is on RfA and the question is asked 'what's this person's age?' the fact that Cary in the office in California knows but isn't allowed to tell anybody, you know I don't think that's going to advance the ball one way or the other

unfortunately the thought is that it's going to get down to the point where age is basically going to be the problem 24 / 7

well if I might say something here, I think that there's this common misconception that age is the issue, I don't think age is the issue, it's clearly maturity

yeah, I can agree with that

you can have adults who are 40 years old, and can be as immature as a 12 or 13 year old and so, the other thing is that it doesn't just extend to protecting those who are under the age of 18 or 20 who are immature, it's also a problem that we need to also protect adults, perhaps they have some sort of psychological disorder which means that they aren't capable of making the same sort of informed decisions that any other adult can, and then again, there are obviously people under the age of 18 who can make those kind of decisions because they are more mature for their age. So the issue is a broader one than one is simply being controlled by age, it is maturity that is the key issue here.

Well that's certainly the key issue when I voted in RfA, and when alot of people vote in a RfA but the RfA voting poll is not monolithic, there are people.....

15'30''

...I haven't seen any advertisements for Wikipedia on Saturday morning cartoon shows, I'm not sure what makes Wikipedia attractive to one age group audience versus another.....

DUROVA : ....if you attempted to go down that path, if you tried it and you didn't do it completely, it could actually open up the door to lawsuits that might gain some traction, and you [brad] would know better than I would how valid that kind of thing is......[durova continues a bit more]

BRAD : Look, lawyers, there are a lot of lawyers in the country right now, many of whom are underemployed, and I'm not going to guarantee that somebody won't bring any lawsuit on any topic at any time - it's what we do......" [39th minute]