[Foundation-l] irresponsible practices, vandalism by sysops, misleading funding calls re: "third world" wikipedia

Tue May 4 01:32:01 UTC 2004

> WikiReaders are an invention of the German Wikipedians, 

This is false.  "Simple English Readings in SUBJECT" were being written on the Simple English Wikipedia before they appeared in German.  They covered such subjects as Cosmology & Health, and were designed to be useful as staged readings for people who were learning English - proceeding from simpler to more complex articles & vocabulary.  Some "Simple English User Stories" were included, a standard technique to illustrate some ways in which the articles might be used by real developing-world end users.  So, what happened to all this?  Vandalism, basically:

These were unilaterally deleted by "User:Angela" as part of a "clear cut" of policy issues and staging and other material that was clearly directed towards developing-world users. Bad policy decisions were made, such as failing to recognize the most common 2000 words as a desirable threshold (this is the threshold used by idiom dictionaries which are explain English culture, there is no evidence that any FEWER words suffices to overcome cultural biases - sticking to fewer words will always create interpretation errors and so is suitable only for the most basic subjects).   These too were made by Angela.  The deletions may or may not be visible in the log of the Simple English Wikipedia since they occurred around the time that it changed software from usemod to mediawiki.

These readings should simply be undeleted, and Angela banned from any involvement.  She certainly has proven to be capable of generating unlimited hostility in any project, in large part due to this kind of behaviour.  However she is not the only one abusing powers:

> to fund such a reader (on the subject "Internet"), primarily for the Wizards of OS
>conference in June
is obviously an abuse of donated funds.  The people who attend this conference certainly do not have any need whatsoever for printed copies.  They need no subsidies of any sort.  It is a fairly transparent attempt to appeal to an already over-represented audience on an already over-covered topic and so further bias Wikipedia away from users in need.  It is particularly disturbing that funds would be abused this way given the following goal:

>Jimbo has also publicly stated that he wants to use foundation money to  
>bring Wikipedia into the third world:
>
>"The day will come when I will put out the call for funds to distribute  
>paper copies of Wikipedia to every child in every third world country in  
>the world. This, too, is our mission."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Webby_Awards

If this were in fact genuinely the mission, then other Simple English material regarding the demographic and linguistic profile of all potential users/readers, required vocabulary, and cultural issues would also not have been unilaterally deleted by User:Angela.  

This "call for funds" is in bad faith as long as there is no practical plan or parameters for the creation of these "paper copies", no integration with NGO work in those countries, nor even an independent board to supervise the material and free it of the editors' cultural bias.  Until such an independent board exists, expect strong resistance at every level to such a plan.

>It seems like good stewardship to announce our intent to use donated money  
>in this fashion beforehand.

It would be better stewardship to actually study the needs of the users you claim to want to serve, to direct work towards topics that are actually relevant to their lives (not yours), and put yourselves in an editorially subservient position to those that understand those needs and work in those regions.  It is unacceptable to solicit donations to replace work that has already been contributed, or print botched copies produced without any serious attempt at assessing the language and topic needs of the actual end users of the "paper wikipedia" you propose.  And why should it be in English?  This is just more cultural bias and imperialism, akin to the University of Nebraska's printing of textbooks for Afghanistan in the 1980s that stated math problems in terms of hand grenades and dead infidels.  That at least had the merit of being obvious.  While Wikipedia's articles on "Gross Domestic Product" that contain not a hint of criticism of that measure, and on "Easter Island" that have
 no links to "deforestation", despite being the prime example of that phenomena, are deliberately from a neoclassical economic perspective, the same that people riot to oppose in the streets in Argentina.

The day may come when they are rioting against the distribution of an English Wikipedia.  That will certainly occur if the project is governed as it is at present.

It is the worst kind of hypocrisy to promote the potential for such a developing world focused project on the one hand, but sabotage every sincere effort to move it forward.  If you think that you can create and distribute something that meets only your own standards of relevance and neutrality in the developing world, you are certainly stupid.  This is the only warning you are likely to get before the backlash against your practices becomes unavaoidable, and sinks your plans to send your English-culture-centric pro-neoclassical-economics high-consumption-lifestyle biased propaganda to helpless folk.

You could always change your organizational culture, but that would require you to admit that many "trolls" are absolutely right, and your working assumptions are totally wrong - and that most of you who are involved in "the foundation" are not qualified to work on this.

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