Open Codex

Draft: Geek knowing: From FAQ to feminism 101

2013-05-24T00:00:00-04:00

I welcome any comments or feedback on my draft of Geek Knowing: From FAQ To Feminism 101:

Abstract: In addition to information sharing and helpfulness, geek culture has a complementary norm obliging others to educate themselves on rudimentary topics. This obligation to know is expressed by way of jargon-laden exhortations such as “check the FAQ” (frequently asked questions) and “RTFM” (read the fucking manual). Additionally, the geek lexicon includes designations of the stature of the knower and the extent of what he or she knows (e.g., “newbie”). Online feminists, especially “geek feminists,” are similarly beset by naive or disruptive questions, and demonstrate and further their geekiness through the deployment of the obligation to know, with some interesting differences. For instance, geek feminism includes a term for designating rudimentary (i.e., “101”) knowledge, for “derailing” questions, and has novel concerns with respect to stature and extent of knowing (e.g., the Unicorn Law, impostor syndrome, and mansplaining).

Guessing the gender of bibliographic subjects

2013-05-16T00:00:00-04:00

Max Klein's recent posting on Sex Ratios in Wikidata, Wikipedias, and VIAF as well as work by Nathan Matias prompted me to check if I ever published my code behind the Wikipedia vs Britannica gender comparison. Apparently I did not. However, you can now see (and use) the two little functions I used to guess the gender of a biographical subjects: guess_gender_name and guess_gender_pronoun.

Wikipedia and gendered categories

2013-04-29T00:00:00-04:00

Recently, some have claimed that the English Wikipedia was "segregating" female novelists.

I don't follow the complexities of WP as closely as I once did but classification is one of those seemingly innocuous, nerdy things that is more difficult and profound than one would think. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star wrote a (now classic) book entitled Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences in 1999 that showed how nurses' work and the racial distinctions in South Africa reflected the biases and power structures of their societies; they wrote "Systems of classification (and of standardization) form a juncture of social organization, moral order, and layers of technical integration" (p. 33). For instance, my understanding of this Wikipedia case is that Amanda Filipacchi's conclusion was correct: some women had been moved from "American Novelists" to "American Women Novelists" and this was viewed as a demotion.

However, while this can be used as an example of androcentrism or perhaps the work of misguided contributors, it doesn't recognize that the design, function and implementation of categories is far trickier than we might think.

Taxonomy: How ought we organize our conceptual world?

Since the Enlightenment most encyclopedia abandoned earlier efforts to create a taxonomy of knowledge and simply provided entries via alphabetical order: it's that hard. (Encyclopedia Britannica's Propædia was an effort to try to retain some sort of integrated view of knowledge but was in no way comprehensive.) While Wikipedia is sometimes characterized as a "Web 2.0" site, this system of categories and subcategories is out of step with sites that simply permit people to tag things, and then query those tags.

Manageability: What makes a good category page?

In an attempt to create a taxonomy of concepts and related articles, you might end up with massive pages. Hence, many of the decisions at Wikipedia aren't so much about taxonomy but usefulness, and massive pages aren't useful. Hence, there are efforts to pare down pages when possible by moving things to subcategories, which I think is what was happening here.

Biases: How do categories reflect social/historical biases?

Yet, the notion that men are the default is problematic. Why should women be "dumped" in a subcategory? (Similarly, Sam Klein noted that male beauty pageants are separated from beauty pageants.)

Wikipedia's guideline permits gender specific subcategories "where gender has a specific relation to the topic."

For example, Category:Women contains articles such as International Women's Day, Women's studies, and female-specific subcategories. Similarly, Category:Men contains articles such as father, men's studies, boy and human male sexuality, as well as male-specific subcategories. Neither category, however, should directly contain individual women or individual men.

Women novelists doesn't strike me as "a specific relation" and I believe the movement of authors was more of an effort to pare down the size of the page.

Meaning: Is being moved from "American Novelists" to "American Women Novelists" a "demotion"?

I think so, and most agree this is problematic. Indeed, while the Wikipedia guideline recognized "specific relation" subcategories, instances of those subcategories should still be included in the parent category. In the example of heads of government "Both male and female heads of government should continue to be filed in the appropriate gender-neutral role category (e.g. Presidents, Monarchs, Prime Ministers, Governors General)."

Usefulness: Is being able to easily find "American Women Novelists" useful?

Indeed. As Liz Henry and Sarah Stierch have argued, attempts to delete/neuter pages about women novelists, scientists, and others are also problematic.

Technology: How best to implement the functionality we want?

Is it possible that instances of a subcategory could also show up alongside instances of a parent category? This isn't technically supported now and parent category pages would continue to be massive. Could we instead have tags (instead of categories and taxonomy) which are queryable (e.g., "show me all novelists who are also female")? This is the "Web 2.0" way of things, and can be done, but its not how Wikipedia is presently built.

Practice: Imperfect

I continue to be surprised Wikipedia works at all. Many Wikipedians often do their best, but it is very messy: sometimes there is little consensus and people do things in good faith without understanding the implications. This work can also be incremental and haphazard, giving an incomplete or confusing picture at any specific moment in time, or reveal a latent and distributed bias.

Given the technology on hand, I think it makes sense to create "specific relation" pages but ensure their content is not presented as segregated or less-than other content.

Internet Rules and Laws 2.0

2013-03-25T00:00:00-04:00

Godwin's feminist corollary: As an online discussion about sexism continues, the probability of a woman who speaks out being called a feminazi approaches 1.

Anita's irony: Online discussion of sexism or misogyny quickly results in disproportionate displays of sexism and misogyny.

I've long been fascinated by the varied "laws" and "rules" of life online. Indeed, in 1999 I compiled an extensive list of quotations that "capture the governance of memes as social norms on the Internet." In 2010, my book about Wikipedia and good faith collaboration made use of Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

In light of the maelstrom of discussion around Adria Richards this past week and the backlash against Anita Sarkeesian last year I've been struck by how gendered the laws and rules are. Many of the aphorisms I collected in 1999 are influenced by the libertarian take on "freedom" that I now question in "Free as in Sexist?". The "Rules of the Internet" emerged from 4chan culture and are written from the perspective of sexually-frustrated young men who have a penchant for (underage) porn. From any other perspective, there are other patterns to online conversation that are seemingly, unfortunately inevitable. Hence, I've coined a few laws of my own (though I'm sure their naming and specification could be improved.) Feel free to tweak or add your own!

Talking about "Free as in Sexist?"

2013-02-26T00:00:00-05:00

Recently I've spoken about my paper Free as in Sexist? in a couple of places. I was happy to return to Jerry Brito's podcast "Surprisingly Free" to discuss the gender gap, Geek Feminism, Finally Feminism 101, the Ada Initiative, codes of conduct and the benefits of balanced participation (i.e., I do not believe a better gender balance would "emasculate free culture and rob it of its vitality"). I also gave a talk based on the paper at UMASS Amherst (slides, video) and met some awesome people.

Joining the Ada Initiative Advisory Board

2013-02-14T00:00:00-05:00

One of the unexpected benefits of my research on geek feminism and the "gender gap" is to have met some fantastic people. I've been especially impressed by, and grateful for, Valerie Aurora's and Mary Gardiner's work at the Ada Initiative.

We work to increase the participation of women in open technology and culture by educating both women and people of all genders who want to support women in open tech/culture. Most of our work is free of charge and freely reusable under Creative Commons licenses. Our work is entirely funded through individual and corporate donations. -- What we do

I'm so pleased to have been invited to join their advisory board and look forward to contributing to their efforts.

Responses to "Free as in Sexist?"

2013-02-06T00:00:00-05:00

It's always gratifying when people read something I've written and point out shortcomings or issues that could be further explored. (This is far superior to not being read at all -- and even receiving empty platitudes.) I also wish I could amend a publication with links to those responses and the resulting conversation. Since I can't do that, I do want to recommend the following.

—

Sky Croeser points out that I conflate anarchism and libertarianism when I speak of a free speech ethic that favors potentially alienating speech over inclusive participation. I agree they are not the same. Her description of the difference is an excellent gloss of my own movement from identifying as a libertarian in my teens to an anarchist in my twenties.

Libertarians tends to privilege an extreme individualism, failing to acknowledge the role of structural oppression in creating inequality, and seeking to diminish (or extinguish) the role of the state in favour of more freedom for the market. Anarchists, on the other hand, tend to place individual freedom within the context of community, acknowledging the role of structural oppression, and critiquing both the state and the market as systems for allocating resources.

My intention was not to say they are the same, but to build upon earlier scholars who note a particular speech ethic that exists within both constituent strands of Net culture and the effect that ethic can have on participation. Indeed, as I note in the paper, it is kind of crazy to place the political ideologies of Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond alongside one another. But I think you can when you ask if their conceptions of "freedom" act similarly with respect to permitting alienating speech, or, at the least, in not recognizing this possibility. That said, I'd love to see a comparative analysis of the political philosophies of Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Mitch Kapor, Esther Dyson, and Jimmy Wales. (Following Fred Turner's studies of counterculture to cyberculture, I think there is an interesting east vs west coast divide.)

I also agree with Croeser that I pass lightly over possible remedies to the problems I identify. This is a limitation of space and focus for any given piece. For instance, in discussing online communities I -- and others -- frequently make use of Jo Freeman's seminal The Tyranny of Structureless. However, the latter part of her essay on "principles of democratic structuring" has largely been ignored in the online context and much more can, and should, be said. For myself, I do plan to focus more on "geek feminism" interventions in future work.

—

Over at Geek Feminism Tim Chevalier has posted a thoughtful reflection. A hesitation I even have in discussion the "gender gap" is the implication of a binary, essentialist gender. Again, for reasons of space and focus, I removed my discussion of this, but I greatly appreciate and recommend Tim's perspective.

Then I try to imagine what it would be like for me if on top of all of this, I felt like I had to conform to a vaguely woman-ish gender role. I didn’t know I wasn’t female until I was 18, and didn’t know I was male until I was 26, but I never felt much pressure to be what girls or women were supposed to be. On the other hand, if I was a cis woman, or even more so, if I was a trans woman (since trans women get expected to conform to gender stereotypes for women even more so than cis women are when their trans status is known), working in the industry I work in, I would have an almost impossible set of constraints to solve. As Reagle shows, success and status in open-source (and even in non-technical "free culture" communities like Wikipedia editing) are correlated with adopting a (superficially) overconfident, aggressive, argumentative persona. Women get to choose between being socially stigmatized for violating gender norms, or being ignored or mocked for violating open-source cultural norms. It's a double bind.

Wikipedia and modes of encyclopedic production

2013-01-31T00:00:00-05:00

I'm happy to note that a pre-print of Jeff Loveland's and my article on encyclopedic production is now available. Originally it was toll restricted and I planned to post a pre-submission author's draft, but happily the "full text" is now freely accessible.

Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle (2013). Wikipedia and encyclopedic production. New Media & Society, (online preprint).

Wikipedia is often presented within a foreshortened or idealized history of encyclopedia-making. Here we challenge this viewpoint by contextualizing Wikipedia and its modes of production on a broad temporal scale. Drawing on examples from Roman antiquity onward, but focusing on the years since 1700, we identify three forms of encyclopedic production: compulsive collection, stigmergic accumulation, and corporate production. While each could be characterized as a discrete period, we point out the existence of significant overlaps in time as well as with the production of Wikipedia today. Our analysis explores the relation of editors, their collaborators, and their modes of composition with respect to changing notions of authorship and originality. Ultimately, we hope our contribution will help scholars avoid ahistorical claims about Wikipedia, identify historical cases germane to the social scientist’s concerns, and show that contemporary questions about Wikipedia have a lifespan exceeding the past decade.

Also, Rebecca Rosen has blogged about the article over at the Atlantic: What If the Great Wikipedia 'Revolution' Was Actually a Reversion?

postscript

It can sometimes take a long time and circuitous route for one's work to see the light of day. As evidence, I began thinking about Wikipedia in a historical context in 2005 within Jonathan Zimmerman's excellent Historical Research class and in a reading seminar with my fellow student Michael Zimmer and advisor Helen Nissenbaum. This work appeared as two chapters in my 2008 dissertation(now public). Chapter 2, on Wikipedia's antecedants made, it into Good Faith Collaboration (GFC). While I had converted chapter 3, on comparative modes of encyclopedic production, into a draft article, it fell by the wayside. However, in 2011 I was pleased that Jeff Loveland, a real encyclopedia historian, was kind enough to review GFC. Doubly so, since I had just read his excellent monograph An Alternative Encyclopedia? Dennis de Coetlogon's Universal History (1745). After some discussion, we decided to take on the question of encyclopedic production together. The collaboration, all over email, was a delight. However, the journey is not yet finished; it could take another year for the article to actually be printed and bound, and receive its final pagination.

The Nuance of the Gendergap Statistics

2013-01-30T00:00:00-05:00

I don't often work on quantitative projects, but since publishing Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Brittanica with Lauren Rhue I've come to appreciate just how difficult it can be to communicate findings unambiguously. Of course, had we found that Wikipedia had no biographies of women that would be straightforward enough. However, what we found was a bit more nuanced and I tried to capture that in a single sentence within the abstract:

We conclude that … Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica.

I worked on that sentence for a while, trying to communicate that these findings are with respect to proportions of missing articles and relative to Britannica, but it is easily misunderstood. For instance, Nathan Matias summarized the paper in a recent blog posting as:

Wikipedia covers more women than Brittanica, although the Wiki is more likely to be missing articles on key women.

I think the erroneous fragment "more likely to be missing articles on key women" is a consequence of poor communication on our part.

That sentence in our abstract is trying to communicate the following: Wikipedia's domination of Britannica in biographical coverage is greater for men than for women. We found this in a comparison of percentages and a logistical regression. First, "while Wikipedia had nearly twice the number of female biographies than did Britannica (113 to 60), it had over two and a half times the number of male biographies (673 to 254)" (p. 1145). That is, Wikipedia trounced Britannica with respect to both men and women, but did so more so when it came to male biographies. Second, in a logistical regression, "Male and Unknown, have non-significant coefficients, suggesting that the influence of gender may not be consistent across both reference works. In contrast, the Male in Wikipedia coefficient is significant, providing evidence that gender contributes to the subject’s degree of coverage on Wikipedia" (p. 1147-1148). We then attempted to summarize this in the conclusion as follows:

While Wikipedia has more biographies of women than does Britannica in absolute terms (Table 1), Wikipedia tends to be less balanced in whom it misses than is Britannica as seen in the percentages of missing articles (Table 2) and the positive and significant Male coefficient in the logistic regression (Table 3)

So, two more comprehensible ways we might put this are:

Wikipedia dominates Britannica in biographical coverage, but more so when it comes to men.
Britannica is more balanced in whom it neglects to cover than Wikipedia.

The new scholasticism

2013-01-25T00:00:00-05:00

John Wallis' (short and accessible) thesis Destructive Editing and Habitus in the Imaginative Construction of Wikipedia challenges my perspective of Wikipedia as an actual community; a community in which stable, friendly, and collaborative relations can exist. He prefers to view Wikipedia as an "imagined community" of impersonal combatants in which the powerful use a discourse of "neutrality," "verifiability," "vandals," and "trolls" to maintain its structure. He writes "There is very little friendliness or light-heartedness, or even sustained relations of fellowship between any two editors. Editors tend to meet on discussion pages as strangers and make no effort to improve their relationship" (Wallis2012deh, p. 9). Of course, Wikipedia is a big place, and you see different things depending on where you look. Given Godwin's law (we come to see others online as Nazis) and Wikipedia's Zeroth law (it shouldn't work in practice) I thought it important to look at and identify what I call good faith collaboration.

Wallis' point of view is a worthwhile and interesting perspective. Yet, what I found most interesting is a new scholasticism. In this view a work's contribution consists exclusively of interpreting an interesting phenomenon in the light of dead philosophers. When I read such a work, I'm left with the feeling that I didn't actually learn anything new about the world. Perhaps this is why I'm not a very good academic. At heart, I consider myself a geek and a hacker: excited to learn about things that work, to critique and to improve that which does not, and to share the results with others.

Perhaps this scholasticism is part of what I sometimes call "the whiteboard and the shelf." As a (Web) engineer, the most important thing in my office was the whiteboard on which I could happily collaborate with my peers on a solution to a technical problem. Of course, perhaps a solution already existed, but our solution would no doubt be better! This failing is the "not invented here syndrome." Conversely, when I was working on my Ph.D. I realized I was coming down with "citation paralysis" syndrome. I felt that I was not able to think and express a thought without first checking the literature. My most important asset had become the book shelf and bibliography.

I like to think I no longer suffer from the "not invented here syndrome" but I am ashamed when I (meaning well) stop creative thought with a reference to the book shelf (i.e., a "citation slap down.")

So why did Wallis' piece prompt me to think about this? I've rarely seen the new scholasticism stated so directly: Wikipedia offers nothing novel, at least to the anthropologist.

A large proportion of the studies that have been specifically devoted to Wikipedia (and it has been particularly attractive to quantitative sociologists and communications theorists, because of the abundance of raw data) quote at some point a paradigmatic maxim known as the Zeroeth Law: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work". Wikipedia is taken to be an impossible case, and its concrete materialisation therefore constitutes grounds for immediate and surprised investigation. Chieflythe factors most shocking to researchers are Wikipedia’s decentralised coordination, its attraction of willing participants, and its refusal to decline into mess of destructive in-fighting. Decentralised governance is hardly a cause for awe among anthropologists (perhaps this is why they have stayed away), and all of these points are not in truth the distressing anomalies they are made out to be. (Wallis2012deh, p. 32)

Indeed, Wikipedia is fully comprehensible by philosophers (however great) that had never even seen it.

The imaginative construction of Wikipedia is a highly familiar process driven by forces of power/knowledge and division of labour documented by social scientists in the 70s and in the 19th century respectively; it is not a new phenomenon. In some respects it rests on a "network" frame but it is always fleshed out by political and other discursive practices of different kinds, many of which are amenable to Bourdieuian theorisation. (Wallis2012deh, p. 38)

Granted, Bourdieu was brilliant. And I'm sympathetic to those that challenge ahistoricism. Indeed, in the book I wrote "A hazard in thinking about new phenomena — such as the Web, wiki, or Wikipedia — is to aggrandize novelty at the expense of the past. To minimize this inclination I remind myself of the proverb 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.'" I then used nineteenth century history and Quakers to frame and explain Wikipedia! But Wallis' quotes seem all-together bleak.