I can see worrying about harassment. "Inclusivity", though?
(From the tone of the press release, they mean race and gender, not article subjects.) Wikipedia editors are anonymous unless they don't want to be. How can anyone tell?
Hacker news is a really good site for tech discussion.
But when it comes to anything about diversity / harassment in the workplace, it seems like a group of people crop up needing to tell everyone that they're the real victims
There's a signicant subset of people that cry the loudest of censorship only when it comes to communities having a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia.
In any other discussion about Wikipedia, there would be a significant concensus that Wikipedia has a unwelcoming to new editors community.
The community reflects the larger society, which is divided on social issues. Don't forget that users come from many countries and regions. That's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby.
The biggest factor, though, is that Hacker News is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in large internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural/national divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts, it's in a context where conflict is somewhat expected, such as a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends is quoting indignantly (a la "can you believe so-and-so said this"). Then you can bond with your friends about how bad something is.
The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of them, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—something more important.
This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by hostile forces, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now it feels like that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this really is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was?
Different internet communities grow from different initial conditions. Each one replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial condition was to be a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions in a bottle.
This "non-siloed" nature of HN leads to deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article. It's something of a miracle of openness that she was willing to get past that—the shock experience is that bad.
This is a misunderstanding because it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though they certainly do. Rather, it's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place broke into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1].
It's easy to miss, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, however partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about.
Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite of that. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the "orange site" sucks.
I'd like to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode.
HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is uncomfortable. Peace is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring (conflicting) parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different.
I know it sounds strange and grandiose, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to move further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself.
[1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, I'd love to know about it.
The Wikipedia community is unwelcoming and initiatives like this are part of the reason. That's because these initiatives for "inclusion" are quite often used for something superficial or as a convenient cudgel to hit someone you disagree with.
The way "inclusion" in the US/UK is done is what I would consider racist and sexist. I don't want to see more of it in online services that I use. Giving someone an advantage because of their race or sex and thus discriminating against others for the same reasons is racism/sexism.
Edit: we know Wikipedia has been a battleground for US politics for a long time now. I think this is seen as a step towards one side.
Often, such initiatives are about virtue-signaling rather than actually doing something against racism, sexism and homophobia.
Worse, and apparently also often, these initiatives are even worse: They introduce a mechanism legitimizing instant bans following a complaint against a user, with no detailed statement of the claims against them, no ability to respond to the accusations, no due process in handling the complaint, and no transparency vis-a-vis other users. This already poisons the community atmosphere - and of course, such mechanisms never fail to be misused, adding to the acrimony.
This site is incapable of having nuanced conversations about this, because opinions that the loudest voices disagree with are downvoted + flagged into oblivion. This is significant when talking about diversity, because it means minority voices are silenced, and without those voices, such a conversation is meaningless.
For example, look at the comments thread whenever "James Damore," "cancel culture," or "affirmative action" comes up. That should be proof alone that HN is never going to have an actual impactful conversation about this... Ever.
I'd prefer if the mods just banned these discussions forever, because it's exhausting, and forever doomed to end up as a "diversity is bad" conversation.
> There's a significant subset of people that cry the loudest of censorship only when it comes to communities having a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia.
That's your own bias speaking here, HN is pretty vocal against all censorship or community hijacking efforts. It's just that in nine cases out of ten "a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia" is used performatively and in bad faith and few people here buy it or bother to pretend that they do.
People, and I'd argue especially on HN (for an internet community), generally aren't out to promote harassment or exclusivity so it's telling how Orwellian things have become when such a statement - which on the face of it sounds good and worthy - is rightly recognized as Newspeak.
Wikimedia can do as they please, and if it results in a shitshow as many such efforts have before, then on their head may it be.
I've been pretty generous with recurring yearly donations up until now but I'll honestly put things on pause until we see how some of this plays out.
If anyone is genuinely concerned about the impact this may have, I would suggest archiving a recent dump of wikipedia at the least. It's only ~25GB.
All the buzzwords are there, toxicity, harassment, safe spaces, sanction, ban, inclusivity. All to promote/cement the viewpoints that we now understand to be ,self evidently, the correct ones.
We have not seen the code of conduct. We can't imagine what it will be like based on two or three adjectives from this article.
I moderate a small community. When we introduced new moderators, we had to formalise the unspoken rules that governed our moderation habits.
Now, we follow guidelines instead of intuition. Writing things down forced us to think about our behaviour, and to discuss the flaws in our unspoken rules. It makes our behaviour more consistent, especially towards content we personally don't like.
A code of conduct can be just that. A formal, consistent rulebook for a community.
A code of conduct that flexibly promotes civil interactions between community members is commendable. Framing civility in terms of the language of social justice activism is worrying. Attempts at inclusivity should not hand-out veto power. Safe spaces should not be exclusive platforms for the grievances of anyone who self-identifies as marginalized.
A code of conduct promoting civility should be sufficient.
Wikimedia needs to make some serious changes if it wants more editors to join. They need to do a lot of UI work to make the process for creating a new article or discussing new changes. When I tried it I found the process very confusing. Why is all communication done in a wiki page editor?
> Why is all communication done in a wiki page editor?
Dogfooding, essentially. This guarantees that all participants eventually become broadly competent at using it.
There are newer tools to streamline common interactions, though personally I think they make the learning curve steeper in exchange for making it start off a little easier.
Plus, wiki is often an exceptionally good way to hold discussions. The fact that other contributors can, e.g. fix broken links and that freeform layout can be used... that multiple contributors can seamlessly collaborate on a single comment. It's very powerful.
Wiki for discussion also builds community and trust, because people could screw up your comments but they don't. (and if they do, it'll get fixed promptly and they'll have helpfully identified themselves as someone either totally clueless or having difficulty with self control)
Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve?
I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency.
Also if this just formalizes existing practices why creating a "retroactive review process"?
> Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve?
Know the phrase "follow the money"? In this case, follow the power.
To be caught up arguing about codes of conduct in general is a distraction.
>I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency.
Remember that time the Wikimedia office banned a user for unclear reasons, without engaging community governance that would typically handle the banning, and the row it caused because that wasn't the normal way of doing business? If you doubt how huge the separation of responsibility between the people who work FOR wikpmedia and work ON wikpedia is, see: https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/wikipedia-fram-banning-...
This release from wikimedia says that they're going to be taking top down control, but unless you're already versed in the structure of the system you just hear names of groups without understanding the boundaries they represent.
> Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve?
Either, the wikimedia board is again trying to "fix" wikipedia engagement with all the insight, art and tact of people that wouldn't be caught dead participating as editors within wikipedia's self governance system.
Or, a wedge issue has emerged that will allow the foundation to take more direct control while minimizing the appearance of ramping down wikiepedia's self governance.
> enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity across projects
Well done. I like how Wikimedia works with many languages and helps to share human knowledge. It is a great institution and a good example on how humans can collaborate to create something great. Inclusivity is at the roots of humanity at its best.
It is sad to see the unconstructive cynical comments in this post. We need more people to build a better world. Cynicism is a good tool agains tyranny, used agains a foundation that has done so much good is just a cheap shot. Be civilized, be constructive.
I remember when the Go community adopted similar code of conduct. There was similar push back based around concerns that the rules would be abused and the community would end up becoming less welcome. This hasn't actually happened in the last 4 years, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Most other open source software projects have adopted similar guidelines and they're thriving as well. Taking Rust as an example, they manage to put out high quality releases every six weeks. Thousands of developers of all backgrounds have contributed, which makes me think that the Code of Conduct has encouraged more participation rather than less.
There are dire warnings in this thread about how Wikipedia is going to burn to the ground because of this change. Based on experience of Go and Rust, I'm somewhat skeptical.
I have always feel a mix of amusement and scepticism regarding codes of conduct.
I don't actually mind them. They pretty much can all be boiled down to please act as a reasonably well adjusted and decent human being to a point I don't really see what they actually aim to achieve. I fail to see how writing a set of vague rules are supposed to solve deep cultural issues in a community but I guess that at least signal a willingness to tackle the subject which might in itself be enough. Anyway, if it gives some people a warm fuzzy feeling, I'm all for it.
What I find really amusing however is what they say about the culture of the people writing them. For exemple, I have always found it very amusing that the Rust code of conduct feels the need to explicitely address avoiding overtly sexual aliases as its second point, a long time before condemning harassment.
These developments are indeed reassuring, but we're still not sure what Wiki's "universal" code of conduct will look like. It should go without saying that CoC's and related initiatives have also led to quite a bit of tension in other software projects, even recently (including w/ devs resigning as a result), and I don't think anyone clearly understands why it is that Go and Rust have fared so well wrt. these issues.
Standards and a "universal" code of conduct to adress harassment and promote inclusivity, that all sound extremely American both in the approach taken and in its wording.
I impatiently await to see how it's going to be received by the international Wikipedia community. If I had to guess, I would say with a large dose of scepticism but who knows, that might work.
Whether this is true or not(I can't be bothered to research), it sure feels that way sometimes. I remember recently overhearing what started as a friendly conversation in a waiting room. It devolved into politics, and I remember the black fellow just kinda replying 'I dont care much' or 'yeah, I don't get into that'. Not refuting, just implying he didn't have an opinion. By the end, the older white fellow was fuming at the black guy for not hating Trump because he is bad for black people. Really makes me laugh, even to this day.
> The irony in this is that this type of language about "inclusivity" only really appeals to a narrow subset of upper middle class white people.
IME, bourgeois identity politics is mostly popular in members of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletarian intelligentsia (which maps loosely to the dominant American use of the term “upper middle class”, which is really tied to any coherent model of economic class), but seemingly slightly more (Proportionately) in the groups it on its own term seeks to extend inclusion to than Whites.
You will be quickly disabused of this notion if you talk to poor and/or brown people. While I’m sure that you can find occasional individuals who do not care about inclusivity, the large majority do care.
The attitude that your comment reflects crops up a lot in relation to, for example, the Washington Redskins naming controversy. Folks who like the current name are always bringing up a couple of examples of Native Americans who say they “don’t care” about the name, and claiming that it’s really only white liberals who are offended; meanwhile, in my experience, the large majority of Natives actually do care very much, and are upset that a racial slur used for their ethnicity is being used as the name of a sports team.
Just searched on 'wikipedia editing for beginners'
The top item links to article 'Help:Editing'. This page is -not- for beginners.
The article: 'Help:Wikipedia'
does not mention editing. It does lead to 'Help:Menu'. It offers general help.
Anyway, I had to wander around a while to find this article: 'Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Editing for the first time'. This page also tries to do too much.
It seems clear that a site this size, trying to attract new and diversified editors, could afford to invest in a 'tutor-text' approach to taking on different kinds of editing tasks. Beginners could jump in at 'adding a link' or 'changing a spelling' or 'rewriting a sentence'. Each would offer them a sandbox to try out something they want to learn to do. After couple of dozen of these, they'd feel more at-home in the editing environment.
These ideas can come from good intentions, but what it often means is that a certain opinion is the _right one_ and another opinion isn't.
As an example, some parts of the internet ostracised Brendan Eich for a personal donation he made to support a Californian ballet proposition on same sex marriage; forcing his resignation. There were no complaints about any of his behaviour or actions at Mozilla whatsoever.
That's not a good thing to be doing.
As another example, the recent Stack Overflow changes where a controversial, over-empathsised policy change on respecting pronouns (also pretty much a non-issue, I have never seen pronoun complaints come up on Stack Overflow) has forced multiple community moderator resignations and a widespread community revolt.
These changes are often negatives for the projects involved.
(I'm willing to catch some flak for this, since I know this may be controversial but it's how I truly think about this)
What to you may be just another opinion is another's legitimacy of them being them.
Maybe it's because I see myself as a progressive, I understand why people were mad at Eich and petitioned his removal. Him being the face of one of the biggest tech companies in the world actively working against your best interests must be hurtful. In my bubble it's absolutely normal to be gay, gay marriage is also nothing to be frowned upon, my country (NL) was the first in the world to legalize it. I realize a large portion of the rest of the world sees it differently, but I'd place it in the same category of a CEO donating money to the KKK or other extremist groups - should black people just think well hey he's doing a good job right? Who cares he's funding a group that actively detests me not for who I am but the color of my skin? Just like gay people think he's funding a group that detests me for something that isn't even my choice?
I followed the SO debacle and what I gathered from it was that there were a couple of individuals who made some very very poor decisions, ruled with an iron first, and any dialogue was not only suppressed but the mod in question was booted in such a despicable way that the rest of the community followed. I don't think they're comparable.
The Stack Overflow fiasco was more about virtue signalling because nowadays you need to be (or rather show) “diversity and inclusion” as a business if you want to appear as a “better” company (useful for soliciting VC investment when you don’t have a profitable business), regardless of whether diversity & inclusion has ever been a problem at the company.
Wikipedia already has too many policies and this is part of the problem. However noble the intentions, adding yet another policy-like document is not going to be part of the solution.
Obviously harassment and toxic behavior are bad and should be discouraged but all this will accomplish is that politically-inclined editors will have even more weapons in their inventory to throw "harassment" and "toxic behavior" accusations at one another.
The bar to start contributing to Wikipedia is already very high: the way it works in practice, one must familiarize themselves with hundreds of pages from the WP: namespace, and learn how to use them strategically to defend their contributions. No wonder few people have the time and inclination to do that. To encourage more inclusivity this burden should first of all be lowered, not raised.
So, if more inclusivity was really the objective here, a better experiment would be to remove all the current policies except a dozen of the most important ones decided by popular vote among editors, and then edit them even further so that they fit on a single page, leaving these as the only rules in force. From then on, not more than a single policy change could be made per month, and all of it should still fit on the same single page. This would give new users an equal footing with the entrenched ones, with rules straightforward enough for everybody to understand and follow, which in turn should empower people to use their own judgement instead of being micromanaged. Disagreements would have to be solved by discussing the matter at hand, as opposed to flinging projectiles from the safety of the WP: namespace. Wikipedia could learn something from how remarkably simple the HN rules are in comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
OK, maybe the above is not the greatest idea but it'd at least rattle things a bit in the right direction if done as an experiment. On the other hand, much of what Wikimedia Foundation has been doing recently is tangential to the development of a free encyclopedia, and this press release is no different: it reads like an exercise in corporate bullshit that checks all the right boxes but will change exactly nothing. The response to the failures of bureaucracy is more bureaucracy: "What we were doing so far has failed, so we urgently need to do even more of the same. This time it'll work."
>Lisa Lewin, Managing Partner at Ethical Ventures, a New York City based management consulting firm, will be the newest member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees
>Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new member and leadership appointments to its Board of Trustees. Shani Evenstein Sigalov, currently an EdTech Innovation Strategist and lecturer at the School of Medicine in Tel Aviv University
I wonder if these new board members were involved in the new CoC and inclusivity rules.
These articles are from August and January 2019, respectively.
And, yes, it is likely that these board members were among the board members that voted on this proposal, considering they are members of the board, and the board voted on it.
Is there any specific problem you see with these two as opposed to other board members, or why do you feel the need to point them out?
Once again, we fall prey to a monopoly. Britannica exists and it’s quite decent, but it’s edited only by a few and has a tiny fraction of the reach as Wikipedia.
It's ironic that, in fear that Wikipedia is an information monopoly, someone would turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, given how many supporters of Wikipedia have historically been seeking an alternative to the centralized print encyclopedia model.
This will be very interesting to observe because it might apply western concepts of good behaviour to a global audience. Previously it let different chapters, different parts of the world behave differently. In effect Wikimedia should want to allow users who are actual signed up Fascists in their countries to contribute to their project, whilst also ensuring they behave themselves.
To me, (most probably because the language of this has been shaped by progressive politics in the west and the article is written in English and Wikimedia is primarily English speaking) this might well be an experiment with applying the western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well on monocultural programming and tech communities to a really globally diverse and actual multi cultural project.
There really is no other global project like this which spans and crosses actual cultures and languages. None.
This will be fascinating to watch, I hope they get it right, or at least publish their failings if they don't.
> western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well
Says who? Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic folks, of course. Don't get me wrong, there is an underlying reality behind the oft-repeated claims of 'Whig history' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history . In particular, democratic and classical liberal values seem to do an unusually good job of de-escalating unwanted social conflict: NPOV (as known on Wikipedia) is at its root a "liberal" idea, not an authoritarian or intolerant one! But these overbroad claims should always be treated with plenty of caution.
In this thread I saw how a petition to show an example of bogus claims of discrimination, followed by a clear cut answer to which not even the asker could argue against, devolved into nebulous musings on what certain organizations should or should not consider unfair advantages.
This is probably the main reason why I hate these discussions whenever they appear in HN. It's not because of whether I consider that initiatives for "inclusivity" are "baseless, performative and counterproductive at worst" or "the right step into promoting a more dynamic exchange of ideas", but because one side of the discussion never stops moving the goalposts.
The conversation only stops when one side has successfully shouted out dissenters, and not out of any actual solid argument made in their favor.
This is something that really strikes me as interesting.
When one side of the debate is clearly completely operating in bad faith what do you do?
I think by now anyone who's joined these debates is familiar with the tactics seen.
- The attempt to exhaust the opposition by wasting debate asking for clarification/examples of things that are common knowledge and to try and drown out core arguments with word salads and getting side tracked in arguments over semantics.
- The tendency for every argument to effectively follow the narcissists prayer.
- The tactic of spamming the same illogical arguments over and over despite the fact these have been refuted before; seemingly in the hope that if enough of their own side pile on with enough logical fallacies it will get too exhausting for the opposition to repeatedly tear down the same arguments over and over again while having to remain civil.
Ironically it's the one thing I can think of that even comes close to aligning with the tolerance of intolerance argument.
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jonnax|5 years ago|reply
But when it comes to anything about diversity / harassment in the workplace, it seems like a group of people crop up needing to tell everyone that they're the real victims
There's a signicant subset of people that cry the loudest of censorship only when it comes to communities having a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia.
In any other discussion about Wikipedia, there would be a significant concensus that Wikipedia has a unwelcoming to new editors community.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
The biggest factor, though, is that Hacker News is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in large internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural/national divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts, it's in a context where conflict is somewhat expected, such as a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends is quoting indignantly (a la "can you believe so-and-so said this"). Then you can bond with your friends about how bad something is.
The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of them, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—something more important.
This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by hostile forces, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now it feels like that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this really is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was?
Different internet communities grow from different initial conditions. Each one replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial condition was to be a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions in a bottle.
This "non-siloed" nature of HN leads to deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article. It's something of a miracle of openness that she was willing to get past that—the shock experience is that bad.
This is a misunderstanding because it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though they certainly do. Rather, it's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place broke into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1].
It's easy to miss, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, however partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about.
Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite of that. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the "orange site" sucks.
I'd like to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode.
HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is uncomfortable. Peace is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring (conflicting) parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different.
I know it sounds strange and grandiose, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to move further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself.
[1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, I'd love to know about it.
[+] [-] Mirioron|5 years ago|reply
The way "inclusion" in the US/UK is done is what I would consider racist and sexist. I don't want to see more of it in online services that I use. Giving someone an advantage because of their race or sex and thus discriminating against others for the same reasons is racism/sexism.
Edit: we know Wikipedia has been a battleground for US politics for a long time now. I think this is seen as a step towards one side.
[+] [-] einpoklum|5 years ago|reply
Worse, and apparently also often, these initiatives are even worse: They introduce a mechanism legitimizing instant bans following a complaint against a user, with no detailed statement of the claims against them, no ability to respond to the accusations, no due process in handling the complaint, and no transparency vis-a-vis other users. This already poisons the community atmosphere - and of course, such mechanisms never fail to be misused, adding to the acrimony.
[+] [-] thosakwe|5 years ago|reply
This site is incapable of having nuanced conversations about this, because opinions that the loudest voices disagree with are downvoted + flagged into oblivion. This is significant when talking about diversity, because it means minority voices are silenced, and without those voices, such a conversation is meaningless.
For example, look at the comments thread whenever "James Damore," "cancel culture," or "affirmative action" comes up. That should be proof alone that HN is never going to have an actual impactful conversation about this... Ever.
I'd prefer if the mods just banned these discussions forever, because it's exhausting, and forever doomed to end up as a "diversity is bad" conversation.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seemslegit|5 years ago|reply
That's your own bias speaking here, HN is pretty vocal against all censorship or community hijacking efforts. It's just that in nine cases out of ten "a stance against racism, sexism and homophobia" is used performatively and in bad faith and few people here buy it or bother to pretend that they do.
[+] [-] cmdshiftf4|5 years ago|reply
Wikimedia can do as they please, and if it results in a shitshow as many such efforts have before, then on their head may it be.
I've been pretty generous with recurring yearly donations up until now but I'll honestly put things on pause until we see how some of this plays out.
If anyone is genuinely concerned about the impact this may have, I would suggest archiving a recent dump of wikipedia at the least. It's only ~25GB.
[+] [-] stormdennis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
[+] [-] nicbou|5 years ago|reply
I moderate a small community. When we introduced new moderators, we had to formalise the unspoken rules that governed our moderation habits.
Now, we follow guidelines instead of intuition. Writing things down forced us to think about our behaviour, and to discuss the flaws in our unspoken rules. It makes our behaviour more consistent, especially towards content we personally don't like.
A code of conduct can be just that. A formal, consistent rulebook for a community.
[+] [-] sradman|5 years ago|reply
A code of conduct promoting civility should be sufficient.
[+] [-] Polylactic_acid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullc|5 years ago|reply
Dogfooding, essentially. This guarantees that all participants eventually become broadly competent at using it.
There are newer tools to streamline common interactions, though personally I think they make the learning curve steeper in exchange for making it start off a little easier.
Plus, wiki is often an exceptionally good way to hold discussions. The fact that other contributors can, e.g. fix broken links and that freeform layout can be used... that multiple contributors can seamlessly collaborate on a single comment. It's very powerful.
Wiki for discussion also builds community and trust, because people could screw up your comments but they don't. (and if they do, it'll get fixed promptly and they'll have helpfully identified themselves as someone either totally clueless or having difficulty with self control)
[+] [-] speedgoose|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tumetab1|5 years ago|reply
I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency.
Also if this just formalizes existing practices why creating a "retroactive review process"?
[+] [-] finnthehuman|5 years ago|reply
Know the phrase "follow the money"? In this case, follow the power.
To be caught up arguing about codes of conduct in general is a distraction.
>I find it confusing that the foundation statements says it's just a formalization of existing practices but on wikimedia meta page it say it's an urgency.
Remember that time the Wikimedia office banned a user for unclear reasons, without engaging community governance that would typically handle the banning, and the row it caused because that wasn't the normal way of doing business? If you doubt how huge the separation of responsibility between the people who work FOR wikpmedia and work ON wikpedia is, see: https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/wikipedia-fram-banning-...
This release from wikimedia says that they're going to be taking top down control, but unless you're already versed in the structure of the system you just hear names of groups without understanding the boundaries they represent.
> Does anyone know what problem are they trying to solve?
Either, the wikimedia board is again trying to "fix" wikipedia engagement with all the insight, art and tact of people that wouldn't be caught dead participating as editors within wikipedia's self governance system.
Or, a wedge issue has emerged that will allow the foundation to take more direct control while minimizing the appearance of ramping down wikiepedia's self governance.
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
Well done. I like how Wikimedia works with many languages and helps to share human knowledge. It is a great institution and a good example on how humans can collaborate to create something great. Inclusivity is at the roots of humanity at its best.
It is sad to see the unconstructive cynical comments in this post. We need more people to build a better world. Cynicism is a good tool agains tyranny, used agains a foundation that has done so much good is just a cheap shot. Be civilized, be constructive.
[+] [-] disposekinetics|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nindalf|5 years ago|reply
Most other open source software projects have adopted similar guidelines and they're thriving as well. Taking Rust as an example, they manage to put out high quality releases every six weeks. Thousands of developers of all backgrounds have contributed, which makes me think that the Code of Conduct has encouraged more participation rather than less.
There are dire warnings in this thread about how Wikipedia is going to burn to the ground because of this change. Based on experience of Go and Rust, I'm somewhat skeptical.
[+] [-] alpaca128|5 years ago|reply
A CoC can make complete sense for everyone and still be abused or misinterpreted to fit a bias. The reverse is also true.
[+] [-] brmgb|5 years ago|reply
I don't actually mind them. They pretty much can all be boiled down to please act as a reasonably well adjusted and decent human being to a point I don't really see what they actually aim to achieve. I fail to see how writing a set of vague rules are supposed to solve deep cultural issues in a community but I guess that at least signal a willingness to tackle the subject which might in itself be enough. Anyway, if it gives some people a warm fuzzy feeling, I'm all for it.
What I find really amusing however is what they say about the culture of the people writing them. For exemple, I have always found it very amusing that the Rust code of conduct feels the need to explicitely address avoiding overtly sexual aliases as its second point, a long time before condemning harassment.
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drukenemo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brmgb|5 years ago|reply
I impatiently await to see how it's going to be received by the international Wikipedia community. If I had to guess, I would say with a large dose of scepticism but who knows, that might work.
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] travisoneill1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axaxs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
IME, bourgeois identity politics is mostly popular in members of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletarian intelligentsia (which maps loosely to the dominant American use of the term “upper middle class”, which is really tied to any coherent model of economic class), but seemingly slightly more (Proportionately) in the groups it on its own term seeks to extend inclusion to than Whites.
[+] [-] iron0013|5 years ago|reply
The attitude that your comment reflects crops up a lot in relation to, for example, the Washington Redskins naming controversy. Folks who like the current name are always bringing up a couple of examples of Native Americans who say they “don’t care” about the name, and claiming that it’s really only white liberals who are offended; meanwhile, in my experience, the large majority of Natives actually do care very much, and are upset that a racial slur used for their ethnicity is being used as the name of a sports team.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|5 years ago|reply
The top item links to article 'Help:Editing'. This page is -not- for beginners.
The article: 'Help:Wikipedia' does not mention editing. It does lead to 'Help:Menu'. It offers general help.
Anyway, I had to wander around a while to find this article: 'Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Editing for the first time'. This page also tries to do too much.
It seems clear that a site this size, trying to attract new and diversified editors, could afford to invest in a 'tutor-text' approach to taking on different kinds of editing tasks. Beginners could jump in at 'adding a link' or 'changing a spelling' or 'rewriting a sentence'. Each would offer them a sandbox to try out something they want to learn to do. After couple of dozen of these, they'd feel more at-home in the editing environment.
[+] [-] dannyw|5 years ago|reply
As an example, some parts of the internet ostracised Brendan Eich for a personal donation he made to support a Californian ballet proposition on same sex marriage; forcing his resignation. There were no complaints about any of his behaviour or actions at Mozilla whatsoever.
That's not a good thing to be doing.
As another example, the recent Stack Overflow changes where a controversial, over-empathsised policy change on respecting pronouns (also pretty much a non-issue, I have never seen pronoun complaints come up on Stack Overflow) has forced multiple community moderator resignations and a widespread community revolt.
These changes are often negatives for the projects involved.
[+] [-] midasz|5 years ago|reply
What to you may be just another opinion is another's legitimacy of them being them.
Maybe it's because I see myself as a progressive, I understand why people were mad at Eich and petitioned his removal. Him being the face of one of the biggest tech companies in the world actively working against your best interests must be hurtful. In my bubble it's absolutely normal to be gay, gay marriage is also nothing to be frowned upon, my country (NL) was the first in the world to legalize it. I realize a large portion of the rest of the world sees it differently, but I'd place it in the same category of a CEO donating money to the KKK or other extremist groups - should black people just think well hey he's doing a good job right? Who cares he's funding a group that actively detests me not for who I am but the color of my skin? Just like gay people think he's funding a group that detests me for something that isn't even my choice?
I followed the SO debacle and what I gathered from it was that there were a couple of individuals who made some very very poor decisions, ruled with an iron first, and any dialogue was not only suppressed but the mod in question was booted in such a despicable way that the rest of the community followed. I don't think they're comparable.
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrwaway69|5 years ago|reply
Eh, there are. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean there aren't any reports.
[+] [-] 4cao|5 years ago|reply
Obviously harassment and toxic behavior are bad and should be discouraged but all this will accomplish is that politically-inclined editors will have even more weapons in their inventory to throw "harassment" and "toxic behavior" accusations at one another.
The bar to start contributing to Wikipedia is already very high: the way it works in practice, one must familiarize themselves with hundreds of pages from the WP: namespace, and learn how to use them strategically to defend their contributions. No wonder few people have the time and inclination to do that. To encourage more inclusivity this burden should first of all be lowered, not raised.
So, if more inclusivity was really the objective here, a better experiment would be to remove all the current policies except a dozen of the most important ones decided by popular vote among editors, and then edit them even further so that they fit on a single page, leaving these as the only rules in force. From then on, not more than a single policy change could be made per month, and all of it should still fit on the same single page. This would give new users an equal footing with the entrenched ones, with rules straightforward enough for everybody to understand and follow, which in turn should empower people to use their own judgement instead of being micromanaged. Disagreements would have to be solved by discussing the matter at hand, as opposed to flinging projectiles from the safety of the WP: namespace. Wikipedia could learn something from how remarkably simple the HN rules are in comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
OK, maybe the above is not the greatest idea but it'd at least rattle things a bit in the right direction if done as an experiment. On the other hand, much of what Wikimedia Foundation has been doing recently is tangential to the development of a free encyclopedia, and this press release is no different: it reads like an exercise in corporate bullshit that checks all the right boxes but will change exactly nothing. The response to the failures of bureaucracy is more bureaucracy: "What we were doing so far has failed, so we urgently need to do even more of the same. This time it'll work."
[+] [-] etrabroline|5 years ago|reply
>Lisa Lewin, Managing Partner at Ethical Ventures, a New York City based management consulting firm, will be the newest member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees
>Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new member and leadership appointments to its Board of Trustees. Shani Evenstein Sigalov, currently an EdTech Innovation Strategist and lecturer at the School of Medicine in Tel Aviv University
I wonder if these new board members were involved in the new CoC and inclusivity rules.
[+] [-] IAmEveryone|5 years ago|reply
And, yes, it is likely that these board members were among the board members that voted on this proposal, considering they are members of the board, and the board voted on it.
Is there any specific problem you see with these two as opposed to other board members, or why do you feel the need to point them out?
[+] [-] drukenemo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
https://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/anencyc.txt
[+] [-] thinkingemote|5 years ago|reply
To me, (most probably because the language of this has been shaped by progressive politics in the west and the article is written in English and Wikimedia is primarily English speaking) this might well be an experiment with applying the western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well on monocultural programming and tech communities to a really globally diverse and actual multi cultural project.
There really is no other global project like this which spans and crosses actual cultures and languages. None.
This will be fascinating to watch, I hope they get it right, or at least publish their failings if they don't.
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
Says who? Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic folks, of course. Don't get me wrong, there is an underlying reality behind the oft-repeated claims of 'Whig history' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history . In particular, democratic and classical liberal values seem to do an unusually good job of de-escalating unwanted social conflict: NPOV (as known on Wikipedia) is at its root a "liberal" idea, not an authoritarian or intolerant one! But these overbroad claims should always be treated with plenty of caution.
[+] [-] luord|5 years ago|reply
This is probably the main reason why I hate these discussions whenever they appear in HN. It's not because of whether I consider that initiatives for "inclusivity" are "baseless, performative and counterproductive at worst" or "the right step into promoting a more dynamic exchange of ideas", but because one side of the discussion never stops moving the goalposts.
The conversation only stops when one side has successfully shouted out dissenters, and not out of any actual solid argument made in their favor.
[+] [-] textgel|5 years ago|reply
When one side of the debate is clearly completely operating in bad faith what do you do? I think by now anyone who's joined these debates is familiar with the tactics seen.
- The attempt to exhaust the opposition by wasting debate asking for clarification/examples of things that are common knowledge and to try and drown out core arguments with word salads and getting side tracked in arguments over semantics.
- The tendency for every argument to effectively follow the narcissists prayer.
- The tactic of spamming the same illogical arguments over and over despite the fact these have been refuted before; seemingly in the hope that if enough of their own side pile on with enough logical fallacies it will get too exhausting for the opposition to repeatedly tear down the same arguments over and over again while having to remain civil.
Ironically it's the one thing I can think of that even comes close to aligning with the tolerance of intolerance argument.
[+] [-] Mizza|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|5 years ago|reply