Integrating my many lives on Wikipedia: Thoughts on how looking for the truth on Wikipedia brings out unexpected things in the real world.
Atlantic Cape Community College's first female and first African-American president, Dr. Barbara Gaba. As a note of disclosure, I teach music at the college, and try to edit the article as independently as possible.
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- Thanks for posting, and thanks for the (movement wide) compliment. I also have my pet projects having to with clouds and have increasing gravitated to local mysteries, which sometimes take me years to solve. Happy editing, thanks for your work, and please keep on contributing! Jane (talk) 15:10, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you. I do completely different kinds of work here and am involved in very different things, but my motivation is much like yours. I'm trying to put information out there in a way that is clear and helpful. I hope that contributes to making the world a little bit better. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 05:01, 25 May 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks reiterated. I joined Wikipedia about the same time as you, though I didn't become properly active until 2007. But I remember being slightly in awe of your work, and I sometimes wondered about the person behind the contributions. Thank you for enlightening me. You can be proud of the work you do here, and in the world outside. More strength to you. Brianboulton (talk) 19:55, 25 May 2018 (UTC)
- Surviving #ShoobieInvasionSummer2018 here. Nice to see another local on WP!TeeVeeed (talk) 16:50, 26 May 2018 (UTC)
- Articles like this are what I want to see more often, since I think it is important that the Signpost provides a space for Wikipedians to not only detail their contributions to the project, but also explain their perspectives on why those contributions matter to themselves and beyond the encyclopedic goal of the project. It is precisely narratives like this which are critical in both defending and defying the Wikipedia project and in understanding both.
For the sake of brevity, especially given that the bytes would exceed that of your entire article and such walls of text are often ignored with prejudice, I have omitted my full rant responses to your two questions at the end. Nonetheless, they proved stimulating and engaged me enough to contemplate for hours not just the questions, and not just their assumptions, but the general role of Wikipedia itself in all this and the relevance of its second pillar in particular. If you are interested in those responses anyway and delight in subjecting yourself to such graphorrhea for some unfathomable and perhaps masochistic reason, please let me know. To summarize both responses:
- I think that while knowledge and information may play a role, that role is optional in principle and the social dynamics involved—particularly the relations and exercise of power—predominate when it comes to influencing politicians to act, as I think is the case with anyone. Once the entire question and terms like "knowledge" and "information" are problematized, however, that opens up a discourse of power that can have damning conclusions for the Wikipedia project and its role in "the #Resistance."
- In short: all of them. I think the scope of the question is too narrow, however, in part due to that answer. The systems and institutions of society, and indeed the social totality itself, can likewise be described as thriving on popular ignorance. Nonetheless, I think approaching this problem as one of ignorance and knowledge is fatally flawed because that ignorance produces and maintains relations of power; and that knowledge needs to be embodied in enaction to be useful, as exemplified by your activism. This, again, turns to matters of power and its practice.
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- The systems and institutions of society, and indeed the social totality itself, can likewise be described as thriving on popular ignorance. - now that's a justification for Wikipedia if I ever read one! How do we fix that, both from a society and a Wikipedia point of view? Societally - our ignorance is nostalgized and reappears as the Mandala effect, such a fake movie that people would know didn't exist if they just looked it up on Wikipedia. That also links up with the fact that Wikipedia is an incomplete encyclopedia. It would be nice if all new editors to the project were adding good content or copyediting existing content instead of doing vandalism - it would save an incredible amount of time for admins and regular users alike. Alas, our society values misinformation for the sake of... politics? Entertainment? Malice? ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 03:44, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
- To your questions - I think that many Wikipedia editors have stories about how they have evidence that their Wikipedia editing was a contributing factor to some social change. Sometimes the cause of the change is informing the people in decision-making roles; more often the cause of the change is informing the people who watch the changemakers. There are a lot of organizations which operate in uninformed environments and leverage their information over people with less insight. Again, Wikipedia corrects that imbalance and is a communication channel to increase anyone's opportunity to make informed decisions if they have to time to learn. Even we try to reduce that amount of time to make it easier. Blue Rasberry (talk) 02:35, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you for taking the time to write this and for your work elsewhere in the movement. Ckoerner (talk) 16:34, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
- This page was last edited on 26 May 2018, at 12:32.
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