Racist Wikipedians try to cancel Olympic athletes

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Jake Is A Sellout
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Racist Wikipedians try to cancel Olympic athletes

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Sun Aug 29, 2021 6:14 pm

As was recently the subject of press coverage, Wikipedia considers all Olympic athletes to be worthy of a page. The press therefore gleefully reported on one sad sack's attempt to make a page for every athlete at Tokyo 2020. It apparently never occurred to the journalists to ask two important questions - 1., what if he can't get that job finished in four years (actually three), does it mean Wikipedia is actually going backwards in terms of its completion date?, and 2., what do you do when you get far enough back that it's actually quite hard to source some of the lesser known athletes?

The Wikipedians have a proposed solution, a very familiar one. Just pull up the drawbridge and declare that only medallists are automatically worthy of a page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... c_athletes

I want you to look at HOW LONG (or rather, how many commented) before anyone even realised this would be hella racist. It being a sad fact of the Olympics that most medallists come from a few countries.

It was only even hinted at by Canadian Paul 05:56, 27 August 2021 (UTC) and only finally explicitly stated by  Wug·a·po·des​ 20:42, 27 August 2021 (UTC)......
No For a lot of reasons. First, modern Olympic medal awards are dominated by athletes from industrialized nations which pour insane amounts of money into these programs in order to project athletic and political power. In the all-time medal rankings we have to go down 36 countries before we get to a delegation from Africa. There are 45 delegations who have participated in at least 10 Olympic games without winning a medal, and only 5 of those are countries in Europe. Of the 18,876 medals ever awarded, 27% were won by the Anglophone nations of the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. 10% of medals have been won by Russia and its predecessors. 53% of all medals ever awarded went to one of ten nations: the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, China, Sweden, Australia, and Japan. The question might as well be "should we delete articles on African Olympic athletes?" Absolutely not.
In true Wikipedia fashion, where they're more about the PR than the reality, the very first commenter actually argued this would be a good thing for systemic bias, because less sportspeople means less sportsmen, which means the percentage of biographies on women goes up!

:lol: :roll: :oops: :cry:

These fucking people.

How long it will it before their default approach to doing anything, is, WAIT, is the thing I am about to do potentially racist or sexist.

How ironic that the "price of a cup of coffee" to help the poor little girl in Africa learn her shit, might actually first need to be poured into a formal diversity training program for old white dudes. Because leaving these dopes to figure it out themselves, might take a very long time.

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Re: Racist Wikipedians try to cancel Olympic athletes

Post by badmachine » Thu Sep 02, 2021 9:14 am

Jake Is A Sellout wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 6:14 pm
In true Wikipedia fashion, where they're more about the PR than the reality, the very first commenter actually argued this would be a good thing for systemic bias, because less sportspeople means less sportsmen, which means the percentage of biographies on women goes up!

Reminds me of a bit of blather from Missvain (below), who is still a Wikimedian despite being shafted by the Foundation and called a black hat by Sue Gardner. Shortly after that, Gardner would write an LA Times op-ed on why there are no women in tech. :roll:

640px-Sarah_Stierch_-_More_Voices.jpg
https://flic.kr/p/cx4jhU
640px-Sarah_Stierch_-_More_Voices.jpg (50.03 KiB) Viewed 2008 times
How long it will it before their default approach to doing anything, is, WAIT, is the thing I am about to do potentially racist or sexist.

How ironic that the "price of a cup of coffee" to help the poor little girl in Africa learn her shit, might actually first need to be poured into a formal diversity training program for old white dudes. Because leaving these dopes to figure it out themselves, might take a very long time.
When WMF moved to San Francisco because of the 'larger talent pool', i figured they would be inclined to hiring people of color from neighboring communities. It turns out the Foundation prefers to import Europeans like Forrester, Deskana, Keyes, etc. Now that they are more concerned with diversity, it's odd that they still don't seem interested in hiring people from nearby Oakland and instead seem to want to import diversity from overseas instead of utilizing the diversity built into their location. It seems there must be Afro-American people living in the East Bay area who would love a nice paying job from Wikimedia Foundation, but the photographs of WMF events keep showing the organization as being mostly white still.

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Re: Racist Wikipedians try to cancel Olympic athletes

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Sep 02, 2021 7:39 pm

badmachine wrote:
Thu Sep 02, 2021 9:14 am
Reminds me of a bit of blather from Missvain (below), who is still a Wikimedian despite being shafted by the Foundation and called a black hat by Sue Gardner. Shortly after that, Gardner would write an LA Times op-ed on why there are no women in tech. :roll:
Sarah was doing bad things, also some good things. Good string-puller. Did not matter. Bad publicity? Oops, throw her to the wolves. Thanks to Russavia.

And since then it's all been "forgotten". Sarah is STILL openly paid-editing articles about wineries and resorts, the Ada Initiative fell apart without a peep, the scandal of Valerie Aurora accusing her father (prominent Scientology protestor Keith Henson) of rape is still not mentioned on Wikipedia, in fact Wikipedia no longer mentions that they are related AT ALL, blah blah blah. Sue Gardner is gone and "forgotten" already.

One big happy wiki family!! Everything's fine! Ignore all that creepy stuff that happened in 2013 and 2014!
How ironic that the "price of a cup of coffee" to help the poor little girl in Africa learn her shit, might actually first need to be poured into a formal diversity training program for old white dudes. Because leaving these dopes to figure it out themselves, might take a very long time.
The ONLY way their crap will be stopped is via public shaming and belaborment with "woke" talk. If someone could get the more lunatic Twitter shamers to post ranting screeds about Wikimedia being racist/sexist/entitled and not hiring enough people with African backgrounds, the rotten process would take its course. It would be ugly and stupid and embarrassing--and that's the ONLY way to effect change at the WMF. Having a bunch of staffers with Asian backgrounds might not be enough to satisfy the worst Twitter screamers. Maybe.

Won't have any effect on the "valued volunteer community" anyway. They will continue to be dominated by deletionist patrollers, who are 90% pissy little white boys.

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