"Hospitality, jerks, and what I learned"—the amazing keynote at WikiConference USA

Sumana Harihareswara delivered the opening keynote to WikiConference USA last week. Sumana is the current senior technical writer for the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as a member of the Ada Initiative's advisory board, and active blogger for Geek Feminism, but spoke here in her personal capacity. She's also heavily active in the broader world of free and open-source software. A full transcript of Sumana's speech is available, and versions are on Commons in both video and audio form.

Because not all Wikimedians can view these formats, I've gone ahead and uploaded both the audio and video versions of Sumana's keynote to the Internet Archive—if you can't view her speech on Commons, you should be able to view it using one of the formats the Internet Archive has transcoded the files to.

I never feel quite adequate trying to paraphrase Sumana's words: she is so articulate. I highly encourage every person who reads this article to directly watch her keynote—it directly speaks to a lot of Wikimedia's most significant issues, made with great eloquence. We have a serious issue with retaining editors, and parts of her speech could serve as a pretty good partial blueprint towards how we could begin to fix that problem.

Sumana recently returned from a three-month sabbatical during which she attended Hacker School, an experimental school structured to provide a friendly, pro-actively safe environment where people work together in a collaborative environment to improve their programming skills. She applied lessons and observations she had taken from Hacker School and brought them to bear on the Wikimedia environment—with one of the most significant single points she brought up (in my mind at least), being the balance between liberty and hospitality. The difference between an environment where social norms are enforced to some extent (including through exclusion in extreme cases) and an environment where complete liberty is allowed (or to paraphrase Sumana paraphrasing of John Scalzi, "the ability to be a dick in every possible circumstance") is often perceived as a difference between an environment that excludes, and one that doesn't—but that's not the case. Quoting Sumana: "If we exclude no one explicitly, we are just excluding a lot of people implicitly."

Digressing from the direct content of her speech, there was one remarkable interchange between Sumana and an audience member that I think is worth noting—one that highlighted many of the issues she brought up in her keynote. Speaking to a photographer in the audience, she commented that she started more wildly gesticulating whenever she was being photographed, and hoped the photographer didn't object. To directly quote a snippet from the transcript:

• Camera operator: Don't worry; I'll make you look beautiful!
• Sumana: Make me look smart, that's more important.
• (cheers)

Sumana's keynote touched on more issues significant to Wikimedia's community than I have space to mention here, but I highly encourage you to take a direct look at the transcript or video/audio of her speech that I linked at the beginning—I think the ideas she puts forward could represent an excellent first step towards creating a more friendly, open, inclusive Wikimedia movement.

• ... to keep us from accidentally discouraging other people from doing the things they need to do to learn, at Hacker School there are four social rules ... to help everyone feel okay with failure and ignorance: no feigned surprise; no "well-actuallys"; no back-seat driving; and no sexism, racism, homophobia, and so on. Now, the user manual, which is available online, does a great job explaining all these, and I'm going to talk about the first two, because they're the most important for our context.
• So Hacker School provided a relaxing learning community for me where I could fail safely and I had role models. It was great. I learned a lot. And then in January, when I came back to work, I felt like a fish who had taken a three-month break from the water she swims in, and wow, it was demoralizing. It is—we have demoralizing people in the Wikimedia community, and we have some demoralizing processes in places, and some of us have gotten used to it, but then there's the people who are leaving or who are thinking of leaving, or who never even come in. It's super demoralizing to be in a world where some people seem to follow the opposite of those four social rules, like those are the key tactics in how they relate to others.
• I was able to able to articulate this to myself as the spectrum of liberty versus hospitality. The Wikimedia movement really privileges liberty, way over hospitality. And for many people in the Wikimedia movement, free speech, as John Scalzi put it, is the ability to be a dick in every possible circumstance. Criticize others in any words we like, change each other's words, and do anything that is not legally prohibited.
• Hospitality, on the other hand, is thinking more about right speech, just speech, useful speech, and compassion. We only say and do things that help each other. The first responsibility of any citizen is to help each other achieve our goals, and make each other happy.
• I think these two views exist on a spectrum, and we are way over to one side, and moving closer to the middle would help everyone learn better and would help us keep and grow our contributor base.
• Valuing hospitality: another thing I'd like us to do. When someone is criticized for doing something inhospitable, the first response needs to not be: "Oh, but remember their edit count. Remember he's done X or she's done Y for this community." We need to start treating hospitality as a first-class virtue, and see that it is the seed of everything else. Alberto Brandolini said "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." It has a big cost when someone treats others badly. If someone is ruining the hospitality of a place by using their liberty in a certain way, we need to stop making excuses, and start on the path of exclusion. If we exclude no one explicitly, we are just excluding a lot of people implicitly. Including people like me.

The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. Editors wishing to propose their own op-ed should email the Signpost's editor in chief.

Reader comments

2014-06-04

Ye stately homes of England

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By Adam Cuerden and The ed17

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 25 to 31 May.

Featured articles

Ten featured articles were promoted this week.

• Deathrow (video game) (nominated by czar) An Xbox science-fiction sports game created by Ubisoft centred around the fictional sport of Blitz, a more-violent combination of basketball, hockey, and American football, with a Blade Runner-like design æsthetic.
• Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746–1817) (nominated by Gwillhickers) A Polish military engineer, who managed to not only become a Polish, Lithuanian, and Belarusian military hero, but was a friend of Thomas Jefferson and assisted the Americans in the American Revolutionary War. Seriously, just read the article, it's an amazing story of someone who never saw what he saw as a just war without hurrying over to help out in it, and who, at the end of his life, tried to use his fortune to help educate and free the American slaves, although his plans were thwarted after his death.
• Gubby Allen (1902–1989) (nominated by Sarastro1) A cricketer who captained England in eleven Test matches, later served in the administration of cricket and had a role in the subject of another recently-promoted featured article, the D'Oliveira affair. This was a complicated situation involving Basil D'Oliveira, a mixed-race South African cricketer who was playing for English teams, and the threatened cancellation of a tour of South Africa should he be included on the national English team. Calls for Allen's resignation began after it came to light that he was partially responsible for D'Oliveira's initial exclusion from the team.
• Invisible rail (nominated by Jimfbleak) might sound like an unusual train, but it is actually a large flightless bird. Its name stems from the difficulty of finding it; a German ornithologist commented in the 1930s that "I am solidly confident no European has ever seen this rail alive, for that requires such a degree of toughening and such demands on oneself as I cannot so easily attribute to others."
• Babe Ruth (nominated by Wehwalt ) was quite likely the greatest baseball player of all time. Starting in 1914, Ruth changed baseball to focus far more on home runs, something that endures in the present iteration of the game. Outside baseball, Ruth was a celebrity known just as much for his drinking and womanizing as for his baseball skills.
• Voting Rights Act of 1965 (nominated by Prototime ) prohibited discrimination in voting. Designed to supplement the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the US constitution, the Voting Rights Act ended widespread disenfranchisement of racial minorities, particularly in the Southern region of the country. It has been championed as the most effective civil rights law ever enacted in the US.
• Union Films (nominated by Crisco 1492) was a film production company located in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. The latest in a lengthy series of Indonesian film articles from the nominator, Union Films produced seven movies before it was dissolved in 1942 as a result of a Japanese invasion and occupation. All are now considered lost.
• Przevalski's nuthatch (nominated by Fuhghettaboutit ) is a bird endemic to parts of Tibet and China. Partly translated from the companion French Wikipedia article, Przevalski's nuthatch was only given a separate species designation from the white-cheeked nuthatch in 2005, though many bird organizations have not followed suit.
• Empress Matilda (nominated by Hchc2009) was a claimant to the English throne during a nearly twenty-year civil war ("The Anarchy"). The nominator says that Matilda was "one of the few female war-time leaders of the medieval period", and that "even at the end of her long life she was felt to still be a powerful personality".
• Clackline Bridge (nominated by Evad37 ) is an unusual Australian work of engineering—it carried a major highway over both a waterway and a railroad by using a curved, sloped design. Designed and constructed in the 1930s, Clackline was quickly outdated and had to be widened in 1959 and 1960, but continuing concerns about safety led to further alterations in the 1970s. The bridge was bypassed in 2007 and 2008, but it continues to see use in local road service.

Featured lists

Five featured lists were promoted this week.

• The discography of Kumi Koda (nominated by Prosperosity) includes 31 albums and 56 singles. Koda, a Japanese pop singer, has found great success in her native country, reaching the top of the charts put out by Oricon and G-Music.
• The List of Marvel Cinematic Universe films (nominated by Favre1fan93, TriiipleThreat, Fandraltastic and Richiekim) includes a quickly expanding roster of movies that revolve around Marvel's superheroes. It includes nine released films; four more named movies are on the way, with two more (unnamed) planned and a plethora of ideas for more. The Avengers, the 2012 film that featured most of the universe's characters, is the third-highest grossing film of all time, while the series as a whole will soon surpass the Harry Potter films as the most lucrative of all time.
• Anatomical terms of motion (nominated by LT910001) can range from flexion to adduction to plantarflexion. They are scientific terms used to describe specific motions capable of being done by humans, so that "eversion", for instance, describes when you stand on the outside of your foot.
• The list of international cricket centuries by Graeme Smith (nominated by Vensatry) is 37 items long. Smith, a recently retired South African cricketer, is the country's second-highest centurion of all time.
• The Latin Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, (nominated by Hahc21) as the name suggests, is awarded to an alternative music album put out by a Latin artist in the previous year. First awarded in 2004, five of the eight victors have come from Mexico, including the only two-time winner Julieta Venegas.

Featured pictures

Five featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Marriott Henry Brosius (created by Bureau of Engraving and Printing, restored and nominated by Godot13) Marriott Henry Brosius (1843–1901) served Pennsylvania from 1889 to 1901 as a Republican in the United States House of Representatives. He also served as a soldier in the American Civil War, reaching the rank of second lieutenant.
• El Atazar Dam (created by Carlos Delgado, nominated by Crisco 1492) El Atazar Dam, near Madrid, Spain, is a curved, arch dam blocking a narrow gorge.
• Hawksmoor Towers, All Souls College, Oxford (created and nominated by Godot13) The towers, designed by renowned architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, for All Souls College, part of Oxford University. Godot13, besides his excellent work with currency, is also a talented photographer.
• Wells Cathedral (created and nominated by Diliff) Wells Cathedral, in Somerset, England, has been described as "unquestionably one of the most beautiful" and "the most poetic" of English cathedrals. Diliff's photograph of it, like the Waddesdon Manor one that leads this page, is, as you might expect from those quotes, stunning.
• Waddesdon Manor (created and nominated by Diliff) Waddesdon Manor is a country house in Buckinghamshire, England, built in the style of a French château in the late 19th century. Now owned by the National Trust, its "theme of unparallelled luxury" makes it an impressive and popular visitor attraction.

• 
  Portrait by Karl Gottlieb Schweikart of Tadeusz Kościuszko, the subject of a new featured article.
• 
  Baseball player Babe Ruth, the subject of another featured article.

Reader comments

2014-06-04

Reliable or not, doctors use Wikipedia

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By Go Phightins! and Kevin Rutherford

The month of May saw significant coverage concerning the reliability of Wikipedia's medical articles. A study entitled Wikipedia vs peer-reviewed medical literature for information about the 10 most costly medical conditions (available here on the National Institute for Health's website) concluded that nine out of the ten Wikipedia articles on the costliest medical conditions have factual errors. Wikipedia's medical editors vehemently disagree. MastCell wrote: "I don't doubt that we need to improve the accuracy of our medical articles, but I agree with James that this particular study is utterly meaningless and isn't worth the electrons it's printed on."

Other editors questioned the neutrality of the The Journal of the American Osteopathy Association, with one editor asserting they have a vested interest in "trashing" Wikipedia. The Guardian noted the study, and seemed to support its findings:

“

Lots of studies have looked at Wikipedia's accuracy. It seems more reliable for kidney disease and mental health problems, less so for drug information (especially on how medicines interact with each other), digestive and liver diseases, and gastroenterology. One study found information on children's ear, nose and throat problems had twice as many errors on Wikipedia as on eMedicine, a free online resource for medical professionals. This latest study found that, for each Wikipedia article, between 55% and 100% of the factual statements found were substantiated by the peer-reviewed literature. There is, however, often disagreement on what is "medical fact" within that literature and the study didn't take this into account.

”

Regardless of its reliability, Men's Health reported that a majority of doctors use Wikipedia at least occasionally, and suggested the websites of the Center for Disease Control and the United States Department of Health and Human Services as alternative sources.

In brief

• Wales calls EU ruling "astonishing": BBC News covered Jimmy Wales' comments about a recent EU decision against Google in which it guaranteed a right to privacy. Wales said, in part "If you really dig into it, it doesn't make a lot of sense. They're asking Google... you can complain about something and just say it's irrelevant, and Google has to make some kind of a determination about that."
• Is Wikipedia a reliable legal authority?: Above the Law examined Wikipedia's status as a legal source, noting its frequent citation in court cases (see Wikipedia:Wikipedia as a court source).
• Issues with Google caching libelous versions of Wikipedia: Two incidents underscored issues that ensue when Google caches libelous versions of Wikipedia pages.
• Bad Wikipedia pictures: TheWire.com reviewed some of the less flattering Wikipedia pictures that presently manifest themselves in articles.
• Civil servants behind "sickening" Hillsborough slurs identified: The Telegraph reported that an internal investigation has identified individuals responsible for "sickening" slurs posted on soccer articles.
• Wikipedia is a masterclass in digital democracy: Wired.com reports how Wikipedia is a good example of how democracy can exist on the internet. This is due to the fact that everyone is allowed to contribute to the site, as well as recognize those who do exceptional work.
• "Love and drama at the Wikipedia Conference": New York Magazine sent a reporter to cover last weekend's WikiConference USA. After a candid discussion with multiple editors, two editors were chosen to be a part of the article and made up most of the interviews within it. Frank Schulenburg was also profiled, and included towards the end of the article. The piece was not without controversy, though—Wikimedians on the Wikimedia-l mailing list were disheartened to see the conference represented in such a light, including the liberal editing of the quotes of two of the editors to change the essence of what they said.
  
  Reader comments
  

2014-06-04

Autumn in summer

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By Serendipodous

The northern summer is a time when one is meant to celebrate the exuberance of life; instead, commemoration of the dead was a significant theme this week, as the top three slots were taken up by the beloved poet Maya Angelou, dead this week at 86, environmentalist pioneer Rachel Carson, and Memorial Day, the US holiday for commemorating its war dead. Even Mark Twain's eerie prediction of his own death, in which he hoped to go out with Halley's Comet, got onto the list thanks to Reddit. Other than that, the usual dose of Game of Thrones; a show very familiar with death.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.

For the week of 25 to 31 May, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Maya Angelou		1,227,753		One of America's most popular contemporary writers, Maya Angelou died this week at the age of 86. Since delivering a recitation at Bill Clinton's inauguration (the first poet to give an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost) she became an intellectual celebrity across all boundaries.
2	Rachel Carson		876,502		The marine biologist and conservationist whose 1962 book Silent Spring became a founding text of the environmental movement and led to the abolition of DDT as a pesticide got a Google Doodle on her would-have-been 107th birthday on 27 May.
3	Memorial Day		765,063		The last Monday in May (that's May 26 this year), the day that the United States chose to honour its war dead, is perhaps better known as the traditional beginning of US summer vacation, and is thus eagerly anticipated by millions of people too young to serve but old enough to stand in line for action movies.
4	Game of Thrones (season 4)		712,695		This is the page with the plot synopses for each episode.
5	Halley's Comet		706,568		I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together." So said Mark Twain in his autobiography in 1909, and it turned out he was right. He died the day after the comet's 1910 perihelion. This curious fact managed to spawn a Reddit thread this week (the original poster wondered, I hope jokingly, if the fact that he was born when Halley returned in 1986 meant he was a reincarnation of Mark Twain – respondents were lukewarm to the notion).
6	Amazon.com		701,370		This article suddenly reappeared in the top 25 a few months ago after a long absence; it's always difficult to determine the reasons for the popularity of website articles (how many are simply missed clicks on the Google search list?) but there are a number of possibilities: first, it released its digital media player, Amazon Fire TV on April 2, and second, it is currently embroiled in a dispute with publisher Hachette, a spat with potentially world-shaking implications as to whether book publishers even need to exist in the post-digital world.
7	List of Game of Thrones episodes		642,862		The episode list is probably used to look up air dates.
8	Game of Thrones		587,030		New seasons of this immensely popular show always draw people to Wikipedia.
9	X-Men (film series)		559,739		X-Men: Days of Future Past, Bryan Singer's cross-generational collaboration uniting his original cast of fogies with their younger selves introduced in X-Men: First Class, earned $90 million in its first weekend, but seems not to be generating the fire of other Marvel Comics franchises. Still, it appears to have triggered interest online.
10	Watch Dogs		519,597		The third-person adventure game in which hacking is a significant game mechanic has been hyped to the roof as the showcase for the eighth generation of video game consoles. Well, it worked; the game has sold 4 million copies in its first week.

Reader comments

If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.

Make sure we cover what matters to you – leave a suggestion.

Home

About

Archives

Newsroom

Subscribe

Suggestions