Part of my RIP VIII reading. Book 2 in The Raven Cycle In the first book we learned that Blue Sargent is the only non-psychic in a family full of clairvoyants, although her presence can amplify the gifts of others. She...
Blue is the daughter of a psychic. A non-psychic in a family of those with the gift. But she does make things “stronger” or clearer. So she will often accompany them on their readings. Every year on St. Mark’s Day she...
ISBN: 9781406310252 LibraryThing ; Wikipedia[1] Chaos Walking # 1 I wasn’t too convinced that I was going to like this book when I first started reading it. The first chapter didn’t grab me and I really wasn’t too enthralled by our...
Travelling: the dank oily days after Christmas. The motorway, its wastes looping London: the margin’s scrub-grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon.
For nearly as long as the antifeminist culture war known as Gamergate has raged across the internet, a microcosm of the battle has taken place on Wikipedia. Should Gamergate defined as a push for ethics in gaming journalism, or a paranoid campaign against women in gaming? This week, Wikipedia’s highest court made a major decision in favor of the former.
[…]
If the phrase “Wikipedia’s highest court” surprises you, you’re probably not alone. Theoretically, the free encyclopedia is a purely democratic operation—anyone can edit Wikipedia, after all—but there is a byzantine and largely unseen hierarchy that governs disputes among editors, culminating in a Supreme Court-style panel called the Arbitration Committee. The committee’s latest decision: to punish a group of five editors who fought to maintain a Gamergate page that presented the “controversy” largely as an assault on women—that is, who fought to present Gamergate as it actually is.
Mark Bernstein, a blogger and Wikipedia editor, notes that the so-called “Five Horsemen” were not only barred from contributing to Gamergate articles, but from any articles relating to “gender or sexuality, broadly constructed.” By contrast, the only pro-Gamergate users punished by the committee, Bernstein writes, were “disposable accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned.”
The episode punches a neat a whole in the idea that Wikipedia is a neutral and democratic platform. The Wikipedian community is something like 90 percent male, and if Bernstein’s numbers are correct, its highest ruling body has a similar demographic makeup. That the world’s seventh-most popular website would look at Gamergate and decide that what’s needed is a silencing of feminist perspectives is depressing, but it’s hardly surprising.
Wikipedia Purged a Group of Feminist Editors Because of Gamergate. (via wilwheaton)
I think it’s time I stopped using Wikipedia, no matter how useful as quick research it may be. Who’s with me?
(via fluffyfemme)
Wikipedia has always been pretty useless when it comes to politically charged subjects such as Gamergate because of crap like this. You can still use it for random bits of specific trivia, but not to get uniased information on a current topic that talk about oppression.
(via a-little-bi-furious)
Photo By Richard Baxter
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