I suspect if you comment receives downvotes, it will be because it is verging on the incomprehensible. Seriously - I read it 3 times and I only have the haziest of ideas as to what you are trying to get at.
Concur. I'm likely sympathetic to whatever aakj is trying to get at, but the post could really, really use edits or a more coherently formatted repost.
Maybe as a slight input to why your comment would get downvoted: You're expressing a few semi-related frustrations, but it reads pretty incoherent, since you seem to assume folks already know the concepts you're talking about and agree with that worldview.
As such you're not really making sense, and human to human suggest the following: Try to get a different perspective and mingle more with offline people. The whole culture war topics and politics can really lead you down a crappy path, and it doesn't really reflect most of reality.
thanks. there's plenty pro-constructivism in my humanist-marxist circles. They are either openly hypocrites or too young still (like utilitarianism, it is a good thing if possible after all)
But yeah, if you don't still agree it is fringe, and still think so after reading the only link on my comment, then you might as well downvote me. But that is one i'd take gladly.
it is just an intro though. my point is that they are posting several academic articles on that one wikipedia which hunt "succcess" story. and somehow i've seen all of them on the front page here.
Do you in general assume that to be a pro-constructivist or humanist-marxist, one has to be a hypocrite or too young still?
What in constructivism is bugging you? The basic idea is that concepts get their meaning through their relations to other concepts. I find that a very reasonable perspective.
What's the problem with constructivism? Should wikipedia be somehow restricted to e.g. positivist or objectivist or perhaps platonian views of knowledge?
There's plenty of criticism of identity politics in wikipedia (and from the left as well). Wikipedia's philosophical origins are objectivistic if something, but I don't think this shows either.
TL;DR: Parent is first asserting that “______ is just a construct” people are trying to make Wikipedia a “______ is just a construct”-opedia.
Then the rest seems just a construct-ed rant.
Where's this coming from?
The paper examines "institutional" change of Wikipedia, showing how its content transformed over time from lending credence to fringe theories to actively debunking them.
This transformation occurred due to the ambiguity of Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" (NPOV) guideline, which was open to different interpretations.
There were two camps of editors - the "Anti-Fringe" camp pushed for firmly anti-pseudoscience interpretations of NPOV, while the "Pro-Fringe" camp pushed for more neutrality towards fringe theories.
Early disputes over NPOV were frequently resolved in favor of the Anti-Fringe camp, empowering them while demoralizing the Pro-Fringe camp.
The Pro-Fringe editors gradually exited Wikipedia over time, leaving the Anti-Fringe camp with more power to reinterpret NPOV in an anti-fringe manner.
The paper suggests similar dynamics may drive change in other groups like political parties, social movements, bureaucracies, etc. Losers choose to leave rather than keep fighting uphill battles.
Neither the paper, nor the rant, mention one hypothesis for why academia's paradoxically groupthink radicalism may have an outsized or disproportionate influence on Wikipedia: the evergreen activity from teachers everywhere assigning "edit a Wikipedia article" to each new class of haven't yet experienced the real world students and the self-selecting cohort of those who see an outlet for an introverted form of activism that then persists for perhaps a decade among a subset.
The AI commenter is the only one who read the article in this entire comment section. kudos.
But yeah, see how the paper (and your summary) is full of holes? What creates the incentive so that one group become larger than the other? things do not happen in a vaccum, only in this paper I guess. or "endogenously" which might be their code word for "i don't want to investigate who paid for this".
basically, there's one law that can be interpreted two ways (wikipedia NPOV or US abortion law). They argue that if everyone agrees A is better than B and start to push for the A interpretation, the people who likes the B interpretation will just magically go home. Excellent. Who thought it was so easy?
Now, the question I wanted to pose is: why 4 papers in this month alone held this obviously flawed argument, using wikipedia NPOV case as their case study?
Having read the whole article I wanted to reply but know most of HN would not, so needed a recap to reply to you. Yes, recap was by Claude 2 100k because it's a long article and it types faster than I do. :-)
Now:
> What creates the incentive so that one group become larger than the other? things do not happen in a vaccum, only in this paper I guess. or "endogenously" which might be their code word for "i don't want to investigate who paid for this".
You don't need conspiracy to explain the "endogenous" results of democratic processes. They go like this.
> Now, the question I wanted to pose is: why 4 papers in this month alone held this obviously flawed argument, using wikipedia NPOV case as their case study?
Because (a) like 12 people work in academia and they're all at the same conference, and (b) how tenure works.
It's not a conspiracy so much as a "that guy talking about that idea by the punchbowl is going to get credit, I should do that and also get credit" lack of creativity. I think I also used the word "groupthink" above.
> So as a result of this we get, for example, articles like this one on Dana Rivers, who murdered in cold blood a lesbian couple and their son: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Rivers. He is described as "she" and "her" throughout the article, despite this actually being the crime of a man.
In this case, isn't the crime more important than what she chooses to identify as? I'm all for prosecuting a murder, but bringing gender politics into it feels strange and unwarranted.
It's not relevant to the premise of the article, though. I don't understand how someone committing a crime means we should change what gender we address them as.
Does this mean that, for people you like, you respect their gender, while you do the opposite for people you dislike?
Imagine if the Pope started spouting some completely insane nonsense, but did it ex cathedra. Are we to treat his ravings as fact since Catholicism holds that the Pope speaking ex cathedra is infallible? The editors wouldn't, and most of us wouldn't.
Gender ideology/wokeness/whatever you want to call it is in many senses religious, and certainly their claims of TWAW/TMAM are not factual: Our science and medicine come far short of being able to actually change anyone's sex. We can, through constant intervention, force the body to change a bit into one direction, but not much more.
Would you like Wikipedia to claim something that is objectively false like your doctor or parents or "society" tell you what gender you are and your thoughts on it don't matter?
Maybe if you give an example of what issue you have seen?
Describing this man as a woman is objectively false. The reality is that he is a man attempting to mimic women, or rather, his idea of what a woman is.
This is just one example of many. Perhaps worse than this, there is very obvious bias on any page or text related to critics of the transgender ideology. Even the Wikipedia page for Woman has been in endless battles over males trying to stake their ideological claim onto it.
As the now-banned female Wikipedia administrator Athaenara put it:
> I think the domination of Wikipedia's woman niche, for lack of a better term, by males masquerading as females as opposed to welcoming actual, genuine, real women who were born and have always been female, is highly toxic.
> people are the gender they say they are seems to be a very simple policy.
Simple, yes, but is the policy particularily sane? Consider, for example, if I were to claim I was a duck. Should my wikipedia page pretend I have been a duck all my life? That would be preposterous, because as anyone can see, I am human.
Our science and medicine cannot change a person's sex, we can force the body to act a bit more like the opposite sex through constant medical intervention, but nothing more than that.
People's inner feelings fail the "soundnote is a duck" test: There are quite a few MtF writers, for example, whose style of communication is clearly male despite their self-identification: They physically are men, and have grown up as men, and their thinking clearly fits the male mold such that seeing a female name under their text just feels off. Just as I am not a duck, they are not the sex they wish to, even if they say so.
Often completely missing from this debate is the concept that context matters. Sometimes, in casual contexts, it really doesn't matter what someone's sex or gender is, so you may as well address them using the gender terms they prefer, just as you would address them by the name they prefer. If someone looks like a woman, and the context is a casual conversation in the office, then it would be a bit mad to call them he/him, even if they don't really pass, because (a) it's rude, and (b) you don't have a way of absolutely confirming their sex. So, casually, it seems like we should treat trans women as women.
But then some contexts aren't casual, and a person's sex really does matter. It would be equally mad to exclude trans women from prostate cancer screenings, for example, when they are unambiguously male. Given what we know about male pattern offending, granting males (regardless of their gender identity) access to intimate female spaces creates risks that many females would rather not take. Given what we know about male physique and the impact of testosterone, granting males (regardless of their gender identity) access to women's sports creates injury risk and unfairness. So, in these not-so-casual contexts, sex trumps gender and it seems we should treat trans women as men.
Personally, I think a sex offender's sex is absolutely relevant to their crime and thus relevant in a Wikipedia article about their crime - and it's genuinely absurd to read about a male rapist and "her" victim, besides being grossly offensive to women in general. This is not a casual context, and the polite fiction should not take precedent.
Why should I take your word, or anyone else's word, over the person themselves.
For example, go try to change Laverne Cox's Wikipedia to male you will have the same issue.
Why limit it to trans people, go change J.K Rowling to Male because I think she is male, if I get enough Wikipedia editors on board we should be able to do that right?
Also in all of these cases the gender of the person is one of the least interesting and important things about them to me as someone who doesn't know them, so why would I care to tell them what gender they are. Why would anyone else?
