Scrubbing Parliamentary biographies; Wikipedia's invisible history

The Daily Telegraph reports (May 26), in a story widely circulated in the British media, on Wikipedia editing to articles of Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom prior to the May 7 United Kingdom general election from IP addresses assigned to Parliament. The editing included the removal of a sex scandal and involvement in the United Kingdom parliamentary expenses scandal, as well as the addition of "flattering" details. Many of the edits have been restored or removed by other editors. None of the politicians contacted by The Telegraph admitted that they or their staffs were responsible for the edits. A spokesman for one MP, Joan Ryan, denied responsibility, pointing out that she "did not even have access to the Parliamentary Internet network from which these changes were made" as she was not in office until the May 7 election. The Telegraph wrote: "It is impossible to prove the changes were made by the MP in question or their staff. However it is unclear why people unconnected to the politician or party would gloss up the Wikipedia biographies from inside Parliament."

The news outlet provided details on changes made to the articles of twelve MPs, listed in the chart below. G.

The New Statesman writes about gender bias on Wikipedia and asks "does it matter if our biggest source of knowledge is written by men?" (May 26) The Statesman notes the failure of the Wikimedia Foundation to increase the number of female editors from around ten percent and provides more examples of the disparity in article coverage: the well-maintained List of pornographic actresses by decade versus the "sprawling dumping ground" of List of female poets and the single article for six seasons of Sex in the City versus the 43 articles about Top Gear. The Statesman interviewed several women about their experiences on Wikipedia. Zara Rahman spoke about her negative experience editing the article on inventor and actress Hedy Lamarr, where Lamarr's discoveries were de-emphasized in the introduction in favor of information about nude scenes and a male film director's opinions about her appearance. (Rahman has previously blogged about her experience.) Theresa Knott (User:Theresa knott) became a Wikipedia editor in 2001 and was an administrator and member of the Arbitration Committee, but she stopped editing in 2012. She said about Wikipedia "The women who were on there were more likely to be people like me...Very geeky kinds of females who thought in a certain way and kind of fitted in with the men. There weren’t many women who would not traditionally be in a male sphere." Claire Millington, a PhD candidate in classics at King’s College London, began editing at a 2013 editathon. She said "There’s a pattern in what’s written about women and their achievements, and it’s basically that they’re not written about. I don’t want Wikipedia to be a place where women are written out of history again, because if it’s not on Wikipedia, it’s not visible." G.

• An Aboriginal Wikipedia?: The Guardian discusses (May 26) the challenges faced by Clint Bracknell of the University of Sydney and other academics who want to create a Nyungar language Wikipedia, which would be the first Wikipedia from the Australian Aboriginal languages. Nyungar is spoken by 369 people at home as of 2011 and is primarily a spoken language. Bracknell said "Any language that’s not predominantly written is going to require greater flexibility in terms of uploading audio and video." Bracknell also said such a project would have to prioritize sources differently than other Wikipedias, such as oral history over inaccurate written depictions of Aboriginal life by Western observers. G.
• "The Big Gay War": After an amazing win by the Swedish artist Måns Zelmerlöw in the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 in Vienna, Austria with the song "Heroes", which received the third-most number of points in the competition's history, Nyheter24 [sv] reported (May 25) that an editor had vandalised the article List of wars between Russia and Sweden. Russia, known for its strict anti-gay laws, had received second place in the contest, and the vandal added the contest to the article as "The Big Gay War". The article was protected after this and other Eurovision-related vandalism. J.S.G. & G.
• Charitable arguing: Jimmy Wales wrote an article (May 24) for the Radio Times about the subject of charitable giving. He wrote "For me the idea of 'giving' has evolved, and I don’t think doing something good has to be about pity or being compelled by my conscience. I think there is a much more modern spirit of giving. Rather than giving being a totally selfless act I actually think it should be a selfish thing – in a good way. It can be fun and uplifting and just part of our everyday lives." The article seems to have attracted little notice or comment regarding its actual subject, but a clause unrelated to the topic – "When I first launched Wikipedia on 15 January 2001" – resulted in a long user talk page discussion on the oft-debated topic of Wales' precise role in the founding of Wikipedia, prompted by the usual suspects from Wikipediocracy. G.
• "Too fast and too furious": Your Thurrock reports (May 24) on vandalism to the article of Thurrock MP Jackie Doyle-Price, which appears to be in retaliation for her stance against cruising. G.
• "Right Back Where We Started From": Singer Sinitta told Xposé (May 22) that her age is repeatedly changed on her Wikipedia article and she has "to log on again and change it almost every day". Talk page arguments about her date of birth go back to 2007. G.
• Frozen Island Discs: Jimmy Wales appeared on the May 22 episode of Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. One of his choices was the song "Let It Go" from the movie Frozen, which he said "will be very familiar to anyone who is a parent of under 5 year olds, particularly girls." G.
• Exciting local news: The Mid Devon Gazette reports (May 20) on a complaint added to the Wikipedia article for the village of Willand in October 2014: "As of 2011, two unknown vandals have been reported doing various things around the village, they have yet to be identified and the local police force has done nothing to find them." The Gazette noted that "at the time neighbours had complained about youths gathering on motorcycles in the vicinity of Willand Village Hall were becoming a nuisance." G.
• Unfrozen caveman tweeters: BuzzFeed reports (May 19) on the Twitter backlash faced by cloud computing company FORTAcloud after it tweeted an advertisement featuring a woman in lingerie. One Twitter user linked to the "Objectification" section of the Wikipedia article sexism. The company responded to complaints with tweets claiming their ads were not sexist and that it was an advertising practice engaged in by other companies. One tweet read: "According to Wikipedia, advertising with images of beautiful girls is sexism." G.

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• I find it very sad that the "10% female" tale is still being told, when we have known for some time that the percentage is higher than that, and increasing. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:06, 29 May 2015 (UTC).
  

Er, we have? But "the single article for six seasons of Sex in the City versus the 43 articles about Top Gear" is certainly nonsense. Category:Sex and the City has 16 articles, ok one on the film, and only one on an individual episode. But the List of Sex and the City episodes has a lot of info. Category:Top Gear heads a tree of 98 articles by my count, but this covers all foreign editions, and UK ones back to 1977. Heaven knows where 43 comes from. This comparison at least makes a change from the usual SATC/Sopranos one, pioneered by the New York Times 5 or more years ago. As usual the NS article fails to suggest that people unhappy about it should go and edit themselves - it doesn't seem likely they will encounter much trouble from existing editors in the area, since there don't seem to be any. It seems the world's media can only handle one Wikipedia story per decade. In the 2000s it was accuracy and "Wow, anyone can edit". In the 2010s it is gender imbalance. Johnbod (talk) 04:07, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A good chunk of that article is about efforts by women to encourage other women to edit, so it seems they are suggesting that. Gamaliel (talk) 13:58, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Not really - but Jenni Murray did cut straight to the chase on Woman's Hour starts at about 16:40 in. Johnbod (talk) 18:55, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, I'll give this a listen and include it in the next ITM. Gamaliel (talk) 19:20, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• While the real proportion of female editors is above 10% -the exact number is unknown- the big problem is that they are too few and that many of them prefer to hide their gender. It is not unfrequent to hear of female editors with female-sounding nicknames that ask to have them replaced with neutral or even masculine ones in order to avoid "problems". That's very worrying. B25es (talk) 05:47, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• re:An Aboriginal Wikipedia? disappointing article from my perspective as a Wikipedian who has been working on this project for more than 12 months. The article itself carries a lot of inaccuracies, many of the questions asked and left unanswered had as far as we knew been addressed more than 6 months ago. Unfortunately this may be a side effect of Clint being isolated in Sydney some 2500 miles from WA where the project work is happening, the joys of the Australian distance factor. The statistics quoted are of those that speak Noongar at home, does not include those who speak the language elsewhere, nor does it count people who are less than fluent. I think any who read the entire article should do so with the knowledge that its just one persons perspective and its more indicative of some of the challenges we all face in the development of long term projects. Gnangarra 06:20, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• We'd love to have you or anyone else involved with this project to write about it in the Signpost. Gamaliel (talk) 13:58, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Politicians' biographies

The problem with that story is that as usual no one asks whether all the content that was removed was appropriate in context. No one asks whether Wikipedia biographies should properly be long laundry lists of any and all complaints ever published about a politician in a local or national paper. No one asks who the anonymous editors were who added the material that was removed. Would the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography use a source like "Quote of the day: “Bob was a terrible lover ...", London Evening Standard, 17 December 2012.?

There is a lack of clarity and vision as to what Wikipedia should be: A reputable reference work like Britannica? An anonymously compiled compendium of yellow-press gossip and hatchet jobs? A PR brochure? It is all of those, in part. Andreas JN466 18:26, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Well people do ask, and no doubt some of the relevant talk pages are full of discussion. But these matters involve subjective judgement in the application of our complicated rules and principles, and this is a summary. Without looking at these or the articles, the last two in the table seem clearly harmless/beneficial, the first one probably not. For most of the others one would have to dig. Johnbod (talk) 18:37, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

An excellent point that is generally missing from the news coverage. Sometimes people add crap to politicians' articles and it should be removed. Gamaliel (talk) 19:20, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]