It's nice to see such programs. I wonder if Asian editors or editors with an interest in Asia would be willing to do something similar. The dead white men bias remains too prominent in Wikipedia. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 06:01, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Crisco 1492 I agree that a true encyclopedia must be as unbiased as possible in its coverage and obviously this isn't the case of wikipedia yet. However, this bias is not voluntary but rather comes from a bias in who edits wikipedia. In turn this reflects variations in the general level of education (especially higher education) among minorities, due I believe to both history and societal constraints. It is important to encourage editing on non-"dead white men" subjects but the most important thing to do is really to encourage non-white-men people to edit; the article bias will then disappear. This holds true for black history, articles on women etc. Wikipedia suffers from at least another pervasive bias receiving far less attention, the named topic bias. Iry-Hor (talk) 13:58, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It's not only a matter of getting non-White men to edit, but getting interested parties in general. Although I am pretty much the stereotypical Wikipedian, my own area of expertise (both professionally and on Wikipedia) is Indonesian literature, history, and cinema; hence, our coverage of that is generally better than the related subjects in neighboring nations. My ethnic background has little to do with it. I'm not saying that everybody can write equally well on everything, but that interest in a subject is more vital in getting coverage than editors' own ethnic backgrounds. One of the nice things about the editathons was that they drew together people from all backgrounds with a shared interest in black history, to get better coverage of this important but underrepresented field. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:45, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Crisco 1492 Well I assumed that non-white-men would edit mostly on other subjects that those which interest white-men. Of course this is not a rule: the variablity of interests in any important population of editors guarantees a large coverage. For example your editing of Indonesian literature while being (from what I gathered on your user page) a white(?) male Canadian demonstrates this point. Yet it is the average behavior that matters the most when it comes to covering extensive topics, such as Black History: on average people edit what interest them and, on average, populations with different cultures tend to be interested in different things (their own culture in particular). Thus, while editathons are important in improving under-represented topics of importance and creating momentum for these, I doubt that they change our average behavior. Therefore, while I would like to spend a day improving articles on Black History (under guidance given my ignorance of the subject), I would still likely spend the 364 other days working on my usual set of interests. Hence, I believe that attracting editors from minorities is likely to increase the absolute number of editors whose average interest is the under-represented subject in question. Iry-Hor (talk) 15:21, 7 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Agree, if we look on average, and we should definitely be increasing the number of non-White editors, both men and women, no matter what. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 17:03, 7 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
← Back to Blog