A tangent, but all the "list of" pages on wikipedia seem to be missed potential for some neat data-manipulation tool. I wonder how hard it would be to scrape that sort of information easily. Too many times have I tried to figure out the right wording for wolfram alpha to get some neat chart, secretly wishing for a more low-level tool
I think that whoever created that classification system was the one who was really confused. If the list of all American novelists is too long, it can always be broken down by the initial letters of their last names.
Not to mention that some first names can be either male or female and that the genders of foreign names may be hard to figure out if you've never heard them before (there are plenty of American novelists whose families came from elsewhere). This would make it easy for Wikipedia editors to misclassify somebody.
"American Men Novelists" didn't exist until Thursday, after Amanda Filipacchi wrote the first op-ed. "American Women Novelists" has existed since October.
But there was more. Much more. As soon as the Op-Ed article appeared, unhappy Wikipedia editors pounced on my Wikipedia page and started making alterations to it, erasing as much as they possibly could without (I assume) technically breaking the rules. They removed the links to outside sources, like interviews of me and reviews of my novels. Not surprisingly, they also removed the link to the Op-Ed article. At the same time, they put up a banner at the top of my page saying the page needed “additional citations for verifications.” Too bad they’d just taken out the useful sources.
Childish behavior like this is much more damaging to Wikipedia's reputation than any critical article in the media. And as long as the editors of Wikipedia act this way, Wikipedia will never get a single cent from me, no matter how many banner ads they slap over the top of the page pleading for donations.
One thing that's not clear in this story is if by "editor" she (and you too) mean the random anonymous stranger who happens to edit a Wikipedia entry, or someone with more privileges/authority on Wikipedia. Because if this is about random strangers starting to edit her article, the problem might not be so much about Wikipedia but about people in general.
Yeah, because there's very little oversight on Wikipedia and just anyone can edit any page from an anonymous IP address without getting reverted in five minutes flat.
Seriously, there's no army of anonymous trolls out on the Internet capable of a sustained edit campaign on a single page that just about manages to stay within Wikipedia's rules. It's editors and their sock puppets.
More generally, I'm getting tired of people acting like anonymous trolls are a completely separate set of people from normal members of the community. Like it or not, they're the same people. We don't log onto a different account and suddenly become a 14-year-old boy that's scared of girls, we channel our inner 14-year-old boy. Sooner we accept that, sooner we can grow up.
From the talk page[1] it looks like it wasn't random anonymous strangers but an established editor who's taken offence to her having, "the gall to complain about her articles"
Keep in mind that's his _reaction_ to her article, after he removed links which were not in line with wikipedia reference link quality standards.
If you consider the context of what that editor is going through right now, his reaction makes more sense.
> Due to my policy edits in removing promotional materials from articles relating to Amanda Filipacchi, I have been harassed, stalked and threatened both on- and off-wiki. I have received death threats.
A feature Wikipedia could use is category intersection. Then you could view a list of pages that are in the "women", "novelists", and "Americans" categories, and no editor would have to curate that list. It's pretty easy to factually verify whether a page is about a woman, or a novelist. Taking human judgment out of the picture would eliminate many kinds of bias.
True. I think Wikipedia needs more advanced searching tools in general. For example basically every page on a city has its population and area. I should be able to narrow down cities with a certain population density (essentially creating my own temporary category) and then intersect with other categories or search those pages for a certain term in the article. The wealth of information is all there, it's a shame it's not easily filtered.
Agreed, though enabling searches of such depth might create a considerable computing overhead.
For example, there are lists of cities by population for most countries; if you could manually select a subgroup for -a- country and submit that as a search group along with other terms, might be within reach ... but to do that for -all- countries, imagine the complexity. Maybe when WP gets a few more million-core supercomputers.
On the other hand, that would be a -great- project for some enterprising startup.
The computational complexity is nowhere near what you'd think if data is available in nicely categorized and indexed form. Any random SQL database does this kind of thing for a living.
Looking through the talk pages, I found this interesting note:
This is an important subcategory, but Wikipedia's categorization guidelines clearly state that subcategories defined by ethnicity or gender are non-diffusing. As such, American women novelists should be listed here as well as in the American novelist category
Which implies that if the wikipedia editors were following the basic rules, adding the sex-specific categories wouldn't do anything to solve the "this list of novelists is too long" problem.
17 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 49.2 ms ] threadNot to mention that some first names can be either male or female and that the genders of foreign names may be hard to figure out if you've never heard them before (there are plenty of American novelists whose families came from elsewhere). This would make it easy for Wikipedia editors to misclassify somebody.
Childish behavior like this is much more damaging to Wikipedia's reputation than any critical article in the media. And as long as the editors of Wikipedia act this way, Wikipedia will never get a single cent from me, no matter how many banner ads they slap over the top of the page pleading for donations.
Seriously, there's no army of anonymous trolls out on the Internet capable of a sustained edit campaign on a single page that just about manages to stay within Wikipedia's rules. It's editors and their sock puppets.
More generally, I'm getting tired of people acting like anonymous trolls are a completely separate set of people from normal members of the community. Like it or not, they're the same people. We don't log onto a different account and suddenly become a 14-year-old boy that's scared of girls, we channel our inner 14-year-old boy. Sooner we accept that, sooner we can grow up.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Amanda_Filipacchi
If you consider the context of what that editor is going through right now, his reaction makes more sense.
> Due to my policy edits in removing promotional materials from articles relating to Amanda Filipacchi, I have been harassed, stalked and threatened both on- and off-wiki. I have received death threats.
For example, there are lists of cities by population for most countries; if you could manually select a subgroup for -a- country and submit that as a search group along with other terms, might be within reach ... but to do that for -all- countries, imagine the complexity. Maybe when WP gets a few more million-core supercomputers.
On the other hand, that would be a -great- project for some enterprising startup.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5623760
I admit I am curious how she feels about contests, prizes, scholarships targeting American women novelists. https://www.google.com/search?q=scholarships+women+writers+a...
This is an important subcategory, but Wikipedia's categorization guidelines clearly state that subcategories defined by ethnicity or gender are non-diffusing. As such, American women novelists should be listed here as well as in the American novelist category
Which implies that if the wikipedia editors were following the basic rules, adding the sex-specific categories wouldn't do anything to solve the "this list of novelists is too long" problem.