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A fact from Woke appeared on Misplaced Pages's Main Page in the Did you know column on 13 January 2017 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that Bloomberg Businessweek asked, "Is Misplaced Pages woke?" A record of the entry may be seen at Misplaced Pages:Recent additions/2017/January. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Woke.

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Allyborghi (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Watkina, Abamzai, Ujwalamurthy.

Is "wokism" synonymous with "wokeness"?

Apokrif (talk) 12:29, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

"Critical social justice"

I have removed references to this neologism inserted in the lede; it was supported only by two dubious and polemic opinion sources. Going to need better sources than that to merit inclusion in the lede here. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 17:39, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Why was my revision reverted?

I realise that I accidentally removed some references but I hardly think my edits could constitute vandalism. I made some red links which I then hastily removed. 2A00:23C5:F983:C200:84A4:4CEE:9283:F52F (talk) 15:29, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Criticism section

§ Reception and criticism cites the opinions of Bill Maher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brendan O'Neill, Douglas Murray, Timothy Egan, Nick Cave(!), and the redoubtable David Brooks, among others. While these are all notable individuals in their own right, I'm not aware of any of them being considered subject-matter experts in race relations, civil rights, or the English language. Most are just pundits whose careers depend on their ability to deliver spicy takes, resulting in disproportionate media coverage of current controversies. I think this section could be pared down subtantially, at least by getting rid of the opinions that aren't mentioned in a reliable, secondary source. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:53, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Got rid of the sensationalist examples except for Cave's opinion which I find it to be unique. Espngeek (talk) 23:21, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Maybe, but the source is a music magazine and the tone of Cave's comments is heated and sensationalist. Overall I don't see how the source represents the most prominent viewpoints on the topic. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:22, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

@Hodgdon's secret garden: I've reverted your addition of more material about Maher for the reasons cited above. Please discuss here. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:08, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

The New Discourses source is just another opinion essay, of which there are innumerable, criticizing "wokeness" or use of the term "woke". That makes it a primary source for such criticism. To avoid original research and undue weight, we need independent sources that discuss the criticism as a topic in its own right. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:27, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

user talk:Sangdeboeuf describes New Discourses as "just another opinion essay." Something approaching Feature-article level coverage of controversial topics is often only achievable through balanced use of notable opinion pieces; otherwise, imbalance results in favor of the pov's of proponents of the theory or otherwise-controversial subject under review: in my opinion, ND's editor and principal author (who has co-authored more than one book-length treatment critical of the topic at hand) satisfies this requirement of notability for our purposes here. See wikiguideline Neutral#Bias in sources; the essay "RS may be non-neutral"; & wikiguideline "PARTISAN":

From Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view#Bias in sources: "...biased sources are not inherently disallowed based on bias alone, although other aspects of the source may make it invalid. Neutral point of view should be achieved by balancing the bias in sources based on the weight of the opinion in reliable sources and not by excluding sources that do not conform to the editor's point of view...."

Misplaced Pages:PARTISAN):

Misplaced Pages articles are required to present a neutral point of view. However, reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective. Sometimes non-neutral sources are the best possible sources for supporting information about the different viewpoints held on a subject.

Common sources of bias include political, financial, religious, philosophical, or other beliefs. Although a source may be biased, it may be reliable in the specific context. When dealing with a potentially biased source, editors should consider whether the source meets the normal requirements for reliable sources, such as editorial control, a reputation for fact-checking, and the level of independence from the topic the source is covering. Bias may make in-text attribution appropriate, as in "Feminist Betty Friedan wrote that..."; "According to the Marxist economist Harry Magdoff..."; or "Conservative Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater believed that...".

--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 17:06, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Except that New Discourses isn't an independent reliable source. It's akin to a personal blog - there is no evident editorial structure or masthead, and there is no indication of fact-checking or correction policies. New Discourses has no evident reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. This makes it a self-published source. The author of the piece, David Bern, does not appear to be a recognized expert on cultural issues - his bio simply calls him a "nonprofit CEO" and "critic of woke ideology" and his Twitter account has fewer than 600 followers. Unless there's substantial reliable secondary sources commenting on Bern's opinion, it's unclear to me why his primary-sourced opinion merits any weight whatsoever here. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 19:33, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Agreed regarding New Discourses as non-RS. Jlevi (talk) 23:44, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Please do note that Lindsay's work has been reviewed in prestigious media outlets including The Economist and The Times and various American news outlets. (Also, opinion pieces he's penned have been published in a variety of opinion magazines, too.)

Of course New Discourses is not "indie" of Lindsay, in that it's edited and largely written by him; however, WD is indie of eg the scholars-developing-CRT: which is what "independent" means in the context at wp:RSes (as opposed to what's being claimed this guidelines says). Yet, per WP:SELFPUB: "Self-published material is characterized by the lack of independent reviewers (those without a conflict of interest) validating the reliability of content. xamples of self-published sources include press releases, material contained withinmaterial published in media by the owner(s)/publisher(s) of the media...." // "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications."--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:05, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

As I replied to a nearly identical wall of text at Talk:Critical race theory:

City Journal is published by a conservative think tank.

... Taking a few examples from WP:FA § Culture and society, our articles on the Apollo 15 postal covers incident, Macedonia (terminology), and Same-sex marriage in Spain don't cite a single opinion piece, though the topics are/were definitely controversial.

... Most of the sources you linked are primary sources for one person's opinion or another. WP articles should be based mainly on secondary sources.

... no one is suggesting we exclude sources based on their POV. Due weight of opinions based on reliable sources is exactly what most editors here are going for, I think.

... Just because we can use doesn't mean we should.

... from what I know, Lindsay & Pluckrose's work does not meet requirements. They authored a polemic which seeks to debunk academic theories but was not itself academically vetted prior to publication. Their involvement in the grievance studies affair directly links them to the topic, meaning they are not independent from it.

... most of are not reliable for factual content. I already mentioned City Journal; The Spectator, Commentary, and World are opinion sources. OZY is a fairly new player in the media sphere; I'm not sure how much weight we'd give it. (And it explicitly calls Lindsay & co. "fringe".) Additionally, news coverage of recent controversies like the grievance studies affair is often disproportionate to their overall significance and should be handled cautiously.

... that's what opinion magazines do. They publish opinions, often controversial ones. That doesn't mean (non-expert) opinion is relevant for our purposes. CRT is but one of the many fields and schools swept up in Lindsay & co.'s anti-wokeness dragnet.

... independence from the topic is only one consideration; the other is a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.

... James A. Lindsay is a mathematician. Please show where his work in has been published in reliable sources ... (not counting hoax papers, obviously).

—Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:53, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

That is not what "independent" means in the context of RS.

Moreover, I fear that you are conflating "critic" and "expert." I would not dispute that James Lindsay is a critic of "wokeness/CRT/whatever." I would strongly dispute that Lindsay is an expert about those things. He has no academic background studying CRT, there is no evidence that he has published any peer-reviewed research on CRT or, honestly, any non-polemic work about CRT, and he has publicly declared that the social justice movement is his ideological enemy. Those are not the words and deeds of a disinterested "expert" in a field. No one would describe Michael Moore as an "expert" on conservatism - similarly, James Lindsay is not an "expert" on critical race theory. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 01:58, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

@Hodgdon's secret garden: I'm confused why you copied your lengthy arguments in favor of a James Lindsay source from Talk:Critical race theory to here. The New Discourses piece I linked to is by one David Bern; Lindsay is the founder (and editor?) of the site. Are you proposing to use a different source by Lindsay commenting on wokeness? --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 03:01, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

User talk:Sangdeboeuf, sure, there are a number of people who've criticized this topic; however, our dear Mr. Lindsay is the only person I know of who's embarked on a career solely as a single-issue warrior against---- well, what he's termed "Woke theory" (ah or the "Woke motto," "Woke movement," "Woke ideology," "Woke project," or "Woke critical consciousness," and so forth). Because of this veritable mantra -- by which he'd become notable -- I concluded that his skewerings (of <w>wokism wokeness awakening wokery the wokerati the wokish the wokous ah, okay, okay an awakened consciousness among the oppressed to no longer buy into this oppression) would be notable as well: just as the (otherwise liberal) columnist and public intellectual Mencken's opinions, about what he thought were the New Deal's overreaches in relation to certain democratic principles, were influential/of note in his day, despite these also not having been published in scholarly journals.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:12, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

There are lots of single-issue warrior out there who are not experts. Jenny McCarthy is notable as an opponent of vaccines. That doesn't make her a reliable source on them. Misplaced Pages didn't exist in H. L. Mencken's day, but if it had, his opinions wouldn't have been any more encyclopedic then. An encyclopedia article is not an indiscriminate collection of noteworthy (or newsworthy) opinions, but a summary of accepted knowledge on a subject. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:51, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

As was the case at Talk:Critical race theory, the blurb at the end of Lindsay's piece says: " is the founder of New Discourses and currently promoting his new book 'Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.'" I think that tells us everything we need to know. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:12, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

User:Sangdeboeuf, knowledge accepted by whom? WP doesn't limit its coverage to such a standard at all, unless reasonably varying points of view of what's to be accepted as knowledge are accounted for! For example, Lindsay-&-company's book related to our topic at hand is notable enough that it has its own wikientry -- of course, at which could be created a wikiarticle section dedicated to its chapter about critical race theory; and, since Lindsay has come, subsequently, to term CRT with what he calls "Woke" theory: at the point where Woke is used in that article, it could, and well ought, to bluelink -- here; yet, of course, your interpretation of guidelines would preclude this article from linking there. Such a regime would be unworkable to apply on Misplaced Pages across the board; by which token, it cannot function as a regime at all but only as an ad hoc rationale. Lindsay's a published philosopher whose numerous books have been reviewed in multiple independent sources, yet because he isn't credentialed at a Ph.D. level in, very specifically, a social "science" , your regime would count Lindsay's critiques unnotable. Yet in circumstances where you were to find a book convincing that had been authored by individuals of Linday's level of academic credentials, it wouldn't take too great a stretch of the imagination to believe you likely to suddenly discover some rationale to link to it.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:39, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:Purpose: The goal of a Misplaced Pages article is to present a neutrally written summary of existing mainstream knowledge; and What Misplaced Pages is not: A Misplaced Pages article should not be a complete exposition of all possible details, but a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject. By your logic, every Holocaust-denying racist notable enough for their own Misplaced Pages page should be quoted alongside mainstream scholars of The Holocaust. We don't give undue prominence to fringe views like Holocaust denial, anti-vax, flat Earth, or those of Lindsay & co. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:45, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Page lock?

Would somebody please lock this page? Espngeek (talk) 22:47, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Expand coverage?

Misc. sources

1. January 22, 2021, UK-edition Grazia : "Fast forward a few centuries and the first recorded use of 'woke' in its politically conscious incarnation was via a N.Y. Times Magazine glossary of 'phrases and words you might hear today in Harlem' in 1962. The glossary was alongside an article on African-American street slang by black novelist William Melvin Kelley, and his explanation of 'woke' was the 'well-informed, up-to-date' definition the OED uses today."--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 22:50, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
2. Claire Vaye Watkins in Feb. 5, 2020 nytimes - ". . activist DeRay Mckesson was arrested while protesting the extrajudicial execution of Alton Sterling by the police. Mckesson broadcast his arrest on Periscope, where viewers around the world watched him handcuffed by the police in a T-shirt reading '#StayWoke,' the millennial iteration of an adage that has bolstered the black community’s freedom fight since the black labor movement of the 1940s, as Kashana Cauley explored in The Believer. Historically, the phrase stay woke, Cauley wrote, 'acknowledged that being black meant navigating the gaps between the accepted narrative of normality in America and our own lives.' Innovative grammatical constructions like 'stay woke' and 'wokeness' powerfully evoke the ongoing struggle for justice embodied in Black Lives Matter and the movements that came before it, as well as those that followed . ."
   --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:13, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
3. The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracits By John McWhorter: . . Third Wave Antiracism, more often termed 'social justice warriors' or 'the woke mob.' . . Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites' 'complicity' in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity towards them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct. . ."
4. Beyond Woke By Michael Rectenwald
5. Cynical Theories By Helen Pluckrose & ‎James A. Lindsay
6. Stay Woke: A Guide to Social Justice
7. The American Interest, Vol. 15, No. 3: "Beyond Black and White: Can Americans Unlearn Race? Morton Høi Jensen: In his lucid new memoir, Thomas Chatterton Williams channels Albert Camus and James Baldwin—and offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the tired racial dogmas of both Right and Left. . . If this innocence of experience made Losing My Cool, on occasion, a slightly moralizing tale . . his new book is a far more subtle, courageous, and moving achievement. Contrary to its title, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race is less preoccupied with the self than with the world that surrounds it, and in particular with the culture and politics of contemporary American society. / The difference between the two books is partly attributable to the short but significant span of history that separates 2010 from 2019, or the early Obama years from the early Trump years: a decade of police killings of unarmed black men; Black Lives Matters and “woke” anti-racism . ."
   --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 17:27, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

@Hodgdon's secret garden: may I ask your purpose for listing these sources here? A couple are opinion pieces; one is self-published; two of the books, Beyond Woke and Cynical Theories, are essentially polemics, while Stay Woke: A Guide to Social Justice is evidently meant as a parody. I'm not seeing too many sources here that meet the requirement of having a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Plus, most seem to be using "woke" as a buzzword meant to encompass a bunch of other things while being about something else entirely. Rather than describing the term or concept directly, they're mostly on the "use" end of the use–mention spectrum. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:15, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

User:Sangdeboeuf said "a couple are opinion pieces." How curious. Are you of the opinion that coverage given the topic of Woke involves only uncontroversial statements of fact (as a cherry-picked citation of wp:RSEDITORIAL gives the impression, somehow extrapolating from this guideline some kind of Wikipedian exclusion of the use of opinion pieces that doesn't exist)? Indeed, if you do possess this singular animosity about opinion pieces, please clarify how you can hold this position, especially in light of Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view#Bias in sources/Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources#Biased or opinionated sources's not only not denigrating use of opinion pieces in giving coverage to controversial issues but advocating their use. And also: wp:SELFPUB, about self-publication being a reliable indicator of what are the self-publisher-concerned's views.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 15:35, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Obviously the "coverage" of the term woke includes opinion pieces. But op-eds and blogs are primary sources for their authors' opinions only. To achieve balance, we should stick to secondary and tertiary sources. WP:NPOV and WP:BIASED don't say we should used biased sources, only that they're not forbidden. I'm not opposed to these sources because they're biased, but because they lack a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. The John McWhorter link is the one that is self-published. McWhorter is a linguist, but his essay is about anti-racist "ideology". That's not within his professional expertise as far as I know (aside from being a regular columnist on the topic, and columnists are not necessarily experts). —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:41, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

"while Stay Woke: A Guide to Social Justice is evidently meant as a parody." - You mean, as was "A Modest Proposal"?--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:28, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes. What does that have to do with this article? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:41, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

User:Sangdeboeuf said, "McWhorter is a linguist, but his essay is about anti-racist "ideology". That's not within his professional expertise as far as I know (aside from being a regular columnist on the topic, and columnists are not necessarily experts)." Ironically, "Wiki" means allowing "editing" by everybody, not just some credentialed faction. The wisdom of crowds and all. The Athenian genius as resides within the entire body politic as a whole. And, as we've noted, WP atomizes points of view, attributing them to sources, allowing each reader to take them into account before coming, in turn, each to their own. The corrective to the mass of humanity's being prone to believe myths and be mesmerized isn't some special priesthood of any sort, not even the exalted denizens of the corporate media and faculty lounge; rather, it's allowing a free exchange of ideas among the body politic as a whole, with our job not to spoon-feed readers of the most elementary primers but serve as a prism reflecting a fullest-possible selection from out of the intellectual byways of the world for the benefit of astute readers of the type who generally consult encyclopedias. We simply don't bar our encyclopedic coverage of the linguist(!) Noam Chomsky's political opinions on Misplaced Pages: someone ranked as the "most quoted" living, public intellectual in the world (in the dozen years prior to/including 1992, as tabulated in the "Arts and Humanities Citation Index." (Note: Misplaced Pages says, "Chomsky's status as the "most-quoted living author" is credited to his political writings, which vastly outnumber his writings on linguistics." ])! Only the wiki rump-faction purists-in-appeals-to-authority believe a more-Catholic-than-the-Pope regime of barring mention of, say, Chomsky's non-linguistic work, "improves" the encyclopedia. Such a practice differs from Tayyip Erdoğan (and minions)' appeal to their sanctioned journalistic and scholarly authorities only in kind, not in respective, philosophical essences (the random assumptions and prejudices as happen to predominate at the moment among whatever exalted subgroup that either English-speakers or the Erdoğan government rely upon, I believe, are susceptible respectively to mesmerization by certain mythical flights of fancy, just are regular folks).--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 17:15, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages editing is crowdsourced, not its contents. Due weight applies. When McWhorter's political writings attain the same influence as Chomsky's, then sure, go ahead and cite secondary sources analyzing his views in this context, of the kind that exist in profusion for Chomsky: —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:03, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

Friedersdorf's article — about scholar DiAngelo's framing of BLM or Woke movement/philosophy (with miscellaneous commentary by McWhorter & Thomas Chatterton Williams)

1. atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf (i.) : ". . As Kelefa Sanneh observed in The New Yorker this past August, in DiAngelo’s view 'fellow white people have all the power, and therefore all the responsibility to do the gruelling but transformative spiritual work she calls for.' / "I find it highly improbable that fair-skinned Americans will not only put whiteness at the center of how they understand the world, identifying with it so constantly that it governs their every interaction with people of color, but also regard themselves as racist, regardless of their awareness or intentions, and perpetually strive to atone for that unchosen sinful condition, even as they move from majority to minority demographic status in the United States. . ."
2. atlantic - (ii.) ". . a prominent strain of anti-racist thought in academia, corporate America, and beyond aims at something that has never happened in history: to convince a rising generation of light-skinned Americans that whiteness is both core to their identity and 'problematic.' In such circles, the statement 'There is only one race, the human race' is deemed a microaggression and white people are expected to have a self-critical, if not self-loathing, relationship to their racial group. / For two decades, the academic and author Robin DiAngelo has been paid by colleges, private corporations, nonprofits, and government entities to teach audiences a kind of 'whiteness studies.' She is treated as an expert by national networks and the public broadcasters NPR and PBS. . ."
3. atlantic - (iii.) " . . John McWhorter, the Columbia University linguist, put it to me, 'One of the most glaring holes in the logic of current "authentic" black thought is that one is to revile the old one-drop rule as racist, and yet to tar as a self-hating elitist the person who is of only partially African genetic ancestry who declines to classify themselves as "black."' To the extent that anyone offers a rationale for that position, McWhorter continued, 'it’s that while race is a biological fiction, racism is not, and must determine how one identifies oneself. As to how healthy it is to define oneself on the basis of others' ignorance and abuse … we are not to ask too many questions. Thomas 's work is invaluable in really digging into this Mobius strip masquerading as higher reasoning. . ."
4. atlantic - (iv.) ". . New York Times op-ed from the same year arguing that 'woke' discourse is 'in sync with' though not morally equivalent to the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides reduce people to abstract color categories, he wrote in the Times, 'feeding off of and legitimizing each other,' while those searching for common ground 'get devoured twice.' "
   --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:13, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Friedersdorf uses the term "woke" one time in a 4,470-word essay. The Atlantic piece is not primarily about the topic of this article, which is the the term "woke" itself, not DiAngelo's framing, anti-racist thought, or black thought. Use–mention distinction, again. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:30, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not a fan of using too many grindy culture-war opinion-pieces like this to begin with (especially ones, like this, that make very flashy, WP:EXCEPTIONAL statements without presenting any evidence or argument supporting them), but this one barely uses the term "woke" outside of that one line. --Aquillion (talk) 00:34, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Agree that this passing mention is not substantial enough an engagement to add anything. Jlevi (talk) 13:21, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

If a topic becomes the subject of television-broadcast or print-published parodies, this too is an indicator of its currency and its notability and nothing i n the guidelines preclude the mention of such a thing within such a subject's encyclopedic coverage. With concern the term woke, Andrew Doyle is one such parodist. Yes, doing away with racism is a serious business(*) and it's understandable how folks might lack a sense of humor when approaching the subject in whatever aspect; that said: Misplaced Pages:What Misplaced Pages is not#Misplaced Pages is not censored. (Hmm: Weren't the Puritans noted for their utter lack of a sense of humor, too?)

Further, the "expanded" meaning that's become associated with the term woke -- for my quick, off-the-cuff, phrase offered as synonymous to this expanded context: "zero tolerance given anything deemed a microaggression" -- found in McWhorter's and other critics' claims about illogical features found in this expanded-meaning philosophy, such as the concept of anti-black prejudice being associated with mere possession of "whiteness," indelibly, are not "fringe nor "exceptoinal."

This article talks of woke in the context of "overall awareness about oppression(s)," while mentioning that it's also gaining much currency after the atrocious Goerge Floyd incident; it neglects space to any expanded usage such as the term's association yesterday's "politically correct" or the more recently "cancel culture."

A contingent think this narrow focus a feature, I think it a bug.

McWhorter and Chomsky are public intellectuals, both signatories of the "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" that Thomas Chatterton Williams spearheaded (Williams and McWhorter both oft commenting on black studies in "first-level" published sources).

(Incidentally, because a person reliable about his own beliefs (wp:ABOUTSELF), even any one of the three of them's blog posts can be used with confidence in filling in nitty-gritties of their respective beliefs -- per the guidelines, although editors, unfortunately, are free to apply their own, more stringent standards, I guess.

_________

(*)My own take: Woke is a religion/ideology---- as it must! There are illogical aspects to it, as there always are relating to even ersatz "religion," but such ideologies' premordial, prime, universal power is the only way to effect change in cultures: so my kudos to the whole "woke" agenda; but as no society-shaking earthquake comes off without engendering appropriate critique and "checks" upon its premises, I believe Misplaced Pages cover what relevant commentary there has been on the topic and its pool of associations.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:10, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

User Sangdeboeuf said that the McWhorter-quoting "Atlantic piece is not primarily about the topic of this article, which is the the term 'woke' itself, not DiAngelo's framing, anti-racist thought, or black thought. According to RSes, the term woke is of a broader meaning than what the article presently covers for it. As, for example, John McWhorter's August 9, 2016 Washington Post article, "Black Lives Matter Is 'Woke' to Old Problems — But Still Sleeping on Solutions" reads:

" In the parlance of contemporary social media discourse, Black Lives Matter is the quintessence of 'woke.'"

"oke-ness is a more complex business than the movement's platform drafting committee appears to realize, and it has its limits. Woke, in essence, serves a function that those of a certain age will recall the phrase 'politically correct' once did. 'Woke' is a black-inflected renewal of the assertion that there is a particular politics and worldview that qualify as enlightened, rather than as one position out of many. And, within limits, there is value to that kind of assertion — at some level, we must all proceed upon conviction, on pain of stasis. However, one must at the same time keep in mind that truth is elusive, especially with regard to issues of race and justice. Plus — and I assume we can all agree on this much — any standard of being woke, by itself, is just that. A woke-ness worthy of the name is about going from woke-ness to bringing about meaningful, and tangible, change. DeRay Mckesson participated, speaking about his 'less than pleasant' encounter with Baton Rouge police. And the truth is that in terms of focusing on that difference, as well as the fact that it’s hard to identify a single truth, Black Lives Matter’s new platform illustrates the dilemma facing the movement, whether it knows it or not. What we might call the practical limits of being, or staying, woke."

"A year ago, no one expected the movement to exert that much leverage in a presidential race. However, a problem with this platform is that it is unsuitably woke to the past. To be woke that slavery, Jim Crow and redlining had lasting systematic effects difficult to surmount is one thing. But in forging change, it is incumbent on BLM or any movement in the post-civil rights era to attend to what has — and hasn’t — worked in the past. Reparations presents the most acute challenge. This sounds sensible enough, but a thoroughly 'woke' person might say black America has already received reparations. They’re not called 'reparations,' of course, but that’s just an issue of terminology."

"BLM’s current platform is a great beginning, but its woke-ness quotient is insufficient for the call of the present. It isn’t as if generations of people haven’t had the same concerns that Black Lives Matter now does. And a great deal has been tried. Some of it has worked, too much of it has not. Part of being woke is having a sense of what can actually be done. Here, today’s revolutionaries must attend to the historical details. Not because younger activists should genuflect to their elders. Not because the movement can’t be progressive. And not because raising awareness has no value. But because the eventual purpose has to be changing lives: You can’t call for progress without checking up on what has impeded previous efforts. One must be woke to that reality, as well as the more grievous aspects of the black past. I am sure Black Lives Matter, with the energy and imagination it has shown thus far, can be, and stay, woke to a richer engagement with how we got from the past to where we are."

--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:29, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

1. thedish - "The Roots Of Wokeness: It's Time We Looked More Closely at the Philosophy Behind the Movement." By Andrew Sullivan: "we all act unknowingly in perpetuating systems of thought that oppress other groups. To be 'woke' is to be 'awake' to these invisible, self-reinforcing discourses, and to seek to dismantle them—in ourselves and others. / "There is no such thing as persuasion in this paradigm, because persuasion assumes an equal relationship between two people based on reason. And there is no reason and no equality. There is only power."

   "Here's a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes. / "Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory. What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity, by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose. It’s as deep a dive into this often impenetrable philosophy as anyone would want to attempt. But it’s well worth grappling with."

   "They claim that their worldview is the only way to advance social progress, especially the rights of minorities, and that liberalism fails to do so. This, it seems to me, is profoundly untrue. A moral giant like John Lewis advanced this country not by intimidation, or re-ordering the language, or seeing the advancement of black people as some kind of reversal for white people. He engaged the liberal system with non-violence and persuasion, he emphasized the unifying force of love and forgiveness, he saw black people as having agency utterly independent of white people, and changed America with that fundamentally liberal perspective."

   "The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest. Let’s do this."

2. martincenter review of Beyong Woke by Michael Rectenwald - "Many, perhaps most, Americans are just now waking up to the meaning of 'woke.' What does 'woke' have to do with looting, bricks, fires, and blood in Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis? One asks oneself, 'Am I woke (good)? Or not woke (evil)? How woke is woke, how much wokeness is enough, and who decides?' / "In short, woke implies a new state of elevated, more highly evolved moral consciousness. As such, wokeness requires a new vocabulary to express its new concepts. / "Woke language is full of terms such as 'toxic' (even 'catastrophic') masculinity, 'whiteness,' 'white privilege,' 'white fragility,' countless new pronouns and genders, 'systemic racism,' 'cancel culture,' 'social justice,' 'gaslighting,' and 'de-platforming,' most of which are casually or arbitrarily defined, if at all. Rectenwald defines 'woke' as 'the political awakening that stems from the emergence of consciousness and conscientiousness regarding social and political injustice.'"
3. thejewishvoice - "Like many other linguistic irritants the left has introduced into our cultural lexicon, 'woke' has become a household term seemingly overnight. It is generally understood to refer to some kind of Progressive state of self-righteous enlightenment, but what is its origin? How and why does one become woke, and what, if anything, lies beyond this condition? What are the philosophical underpinnings of this social justice religion? If you want to truly understand it and not simply dismiss it with an eyeroll, you can hardly do better than to look to writer, philosopher, poet, and former New York University professor Michael Rectenwald. Few contemporary scholars have researched the left’s totalitarian mindset more deeply, and elucidated it so thoroughly, as he."
   --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:45, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Andrew Sullivan's substack newsletter is nothing more than his self-published opinion. The Martin Center is a partisan conservative organization best known for trying to shut down the University of North Carolina Press (cancel culture run amok, no doubt). FrontPage Magazine (the original source of that piece republished in The Jewish Voice, as clearly noted at the bottom of the article) is a far-right outlet best known for peddling Islamophobic conspiracy theories and has been deprecated by overwhelming consensus. The latter two are both book reviews of a minor book published by a small radical-right publishing house which has apparently received little other notice in mainstream sources. What weight are we to assign to these sources? NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 19:56, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Hodgdon's secret garden: could you condense your arguments somewhat? These lengthy walls of text make following this thread difficult. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:08, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

If a topic becomes the subject of television-broadcast or print-published parodies ... nothing the guidelines preclude the mention of such a thing – then please find a reliable, independent source for it.Misplaced Pages is not censored – this is not an argument for any specific content. Due weight applies.McWhorter and Chomsky are public intellectuals – then it should be easy to find reliable, secondary sources on McWhorter's commentary, just like with Chomsky.Any one of blog posts can be used with confidence in filling in nitty-gritties of their respective beliefs – Why should we care about anyone's beliefs? Due weight, again.I believe Misplaced Pages cover what relevant commentary there has been on the topic – relevance is determined by secondary and tertiary sources that cover the disagreement from a disinterested viewpoint. And it is definitely a disagreement. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:28, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Interesting phrase: "anti-woke"

I'll return with some "cites"--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:30, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

UK

1. anti-woke backlash https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/30/anti-woke-backlash-liberalism-laurence-fox
2. Britain's first anti-"woke" TV news channel https://www.businessinsider.com/britain-anti-woke-gb-news-ceo-interview-angelos-frangopoulos-2021-3
3. Is Anti-Woke Becoming the New Woke? https://areomagazine.com/2020/01/21/is-anti-woke-becoming-the-new-woke/

   ". . the woke, a loose conglomerate of online social justice activists who comported themselves like new Victorians, or McCarthyites, monitoring everyone’s behavior, words and art for transgressions against their worldview. The woke were the new fundamentalists. Their tactics were illiberal, damaging to a society that believed in the free exchange of ideas and free speech. They weaponized social media and were turning us into a surveillance society. In the name of democracy, freedom, reason and the Enlightenment, it was important to push back against this illiberal tribe. . . YouTube talk show host Dave Rubin . . A professor at the University of Calgary recently incited a mini anti-woke Twitter riot when he tweeted out a blasphemous joke: the claim that any student who cited Jordan Peterson in his class would fail. The new anti-woke (a group that has begun to be taken over by regular old-fashioned conservatives) mobilized the mob against him. . . Anti-woke outrage is now a brand . ."

4. The corner of the internet sometimes known as “anti-wokeness,” “anti-SJW” (“social justice warrior”), or the IDW (Intellectual Dark Web) has been in a state of war over today’s presidential election.   Some notable critics of the “woke left” (associated with identity politics and “cancel culture”) are embracing Donald Trump as a fighter against the blight of wokeness. Most notably, James Lindsay, co-author (with Areo magazine editor Helen Pluckrose) of the book Cynical Theories, has said that he will “unhappily” vote for Trump. Pluckrose strongly disagrees and has put together contributions from 14 critics of “social justice,” myself included, who argue that voting for Trump as a way to defeat “wokeism” is not only useless but actively counterproductive. https://arcdigital.media/anti-woke-anti-trump-a1439a88e4bf

   --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:38, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

"14 Critics of 'Social Justice'"

1. Pluckrose (listmaker)
2. Steven Pinker—author, Enlightenment Now
3. Thomas Chatterton Williams—author, Self-Portrait in Black and White
4. Conor Friedersdorf—the Atlantic
5. Irshad Manji—author, Don’t Label Me
6. Walter Olson—author/US legal commentator
7. Sarah Haider—writer
8. Paul Graham—programmer-entrepreneur
9. Matt McManus—poli-sci prof  author, The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism ". . I take a far softer line on critical theory than many of my colleagues here, I can recognize that many people don’t like it. They associate it with academic wokism or radicalism and may well see it as a serious threat to liberal individualism and meritocracy. Some may even see postmodern radicalism as a threat to reason and science themselves. Fine. We can have those debates later. . ."
10. Cathy Young—Reason
11. Tom Nichols—author, The Death of Expertise
12. Katie Herzog—writer-podcaster
13. Iona Italia—writer  subeditor, Areo
14. Alan Sokal—co-author, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science ". . I applaud Helen Pluckrose and Jim Lindsay for having written a book, Cynical Theories, that calmly dissects the anti-rational and anti-liberal ideology underlying it and argues, once again, for liberal values such as respect for viewpoint diversity and honest debate, and respect for evidence, reason and science. . ."--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:53, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

guardian - 'anti-woke' celebrities, such as

Piers Morgan

comedian Geoff Norcott

parodist Andrew Doyle

telegraph - "Laurence Fox . . actor and leader of the anti-Woke Reclaim Party . ."

washingtonpost - "Europe's Absurd and Hypocritical War against 'Wokeness’ Is Heating Up"
--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:05, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

US

mar 4 thehill - ". . anti-woke, anti–cancel culture agitators run the gamut, from civil libertarian critics of empire to self-styled neoliberals, middlebrow intellectuals to GOP opportunists . . speaking out against the woke cancel culture’s deleterious effects on freedom of speech and press :

1. "Alex Berenson
2. Glenn Greenwald
3. Bari Weiss
4. Matt Taibbi
5. Bill Maher (..ah well duh)
   Let's see:

1. Greenwald mar 9 tweet (just yesterday) : "It's literally impossible to satirize woke idiocy in a way that its practitioners will know you're doing it, because in their world, the most outlandish and idiotic uses of wokeism are cheered, so no matter how glaring you make the mockery, they still won't see it."
2. Weiss mar 9 city-journal essay : ". . Power in America now comes from speaking woke, a highly complex and ever-evolving language. . . children learn how the new rules of woke work. . ."
3. Taibbi feb 27 tweet : "Robin DiAngelo is to woke capitalism what Thomas Friedman was to globalization. Two prolific evangelists."
   --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:17, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

This is not an article about "social justice" or "social justice warriors". Not every use of the word "woke" in the media belongs in an encyclopedia article. Areo magazine calls itself an "opinion and analysis digital magazine" with Pluckrose as its editor. The only notable thing they've done as far as I know was to famously publish several articles by a fake psychologist, one of which essentially plagiarized author Michael Gurian. The one discussion on RS/N I could find describes Areo as very similar to Quillette, which is considered 'generally unreliable'. Arcdigital.media is evidently a branch of the blog-hosting site Medium. For our purposes the Pluckrose and Young pieces are basically self-published. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:38, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

The pieces in The Guardian, WaPo, and The Hill are opinion essays. City Journal is by a conservative think tank. Assorted tweets by some journalists are hardly significant. Once again I have to ask, what is the purpose of listing so many low-quality sources here? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:52, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

All of these columns and essays and tweets are very helpful in telling us what these people believe. None of them are very helpful in coming to any sort of agreed definition of the term, much less being able to define or label someone. Does anyone self-identify as "woke" and have an opinion on what it means? Because as of now, similar to "social justice warrior," it appears to have become a pejorative epithet applied and used only by opponents. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 20:42, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

The best and most even-handed analysis I've found yet is this Vox article, with this quote from a linguistics researcher: the term "woke" has been commodified in marketing to connote a host of associations to things like diversity, inclusion, and so on, in order to turn a profit by appealing to progressive sensibilities. Additionally, it has been plundered into conservative and right-wing discourse as a means of mocking and satirizing the politics of those on the other side of the proverbial aisle. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 21:06, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

A wikicontributor above said (seemingly not without a "tribal" tone of disparagement), "by a conservative think tank"

Sullivan: "I can see why people take this path of least resistance, but what we’ve seen is simple avoidance of the deeper issue of CRT’s profound illiberalism, a dismissal of it, or an anti-anti-woke position that sees opponents as mere hysterics (and maybe racists). And the CRT advocates have brilliantly managed to construct a crude moral binary to pressure liberals into submission."

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Greenwald: "Many peoples' defy the clean left-right dichotomy on which the professional media and punditry classes depend, the only prism through which they can understand the world.

Why identify critiques of woke il-liberality as politically "rightward"? Who says? (Just curious! I've got no axe to grind here: As self-described "crypto-woke," I'd register even to the so-called "left" – using this seemingly useful schemata of current popularity – of Mr. Matt McManus, just above.) In point of fact, a super-rough estimate of the politics of folks listed in this thread is 10% Conservative (<laughs> figuring Lindsay as being only one-half a person, because he claims political nonalignment outside his being anti-woke). The only Conservative well known in the US we come to above is in the next thread up at Sullivan, although an unorthodox one.

wp:BLOG: "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications."

Opinion-maker Sullivan has published all over, plus had a stint when young as editor of The New Republic 1991-1996; education, per Harvard Magazine: "first-class degree (equivalent to a summa) in modern history and modern languages at Oxford, where, in his second year, he was president of the Oxford Union, the debating body that claims to be 'the most illustrious student society in the world.' He won a Harkness Fellowship to the Kennedy School in 1984. He returned to Harvard in 1989 to write his doctoral thesis, 'Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott,' which won the government department’s Toppan Prize, for the best dissertation 'upon a subject of Political Science.' "; and his writing gig for the past two decades has been at The Dish, circulation 200,000.

"Why Is Wokeness Winning?" Andrew Sullivan Oct 16, 2020

--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 17:42, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Once again we are seeing a conflation of "critic" and "expert". Winning a Pulitzer Prize doesn't make someone an expert. Nor does being a magazine editor or head of the Oxford Union. Greenwald's & Sullivan's self-published opinions don't help us make any generalized statements about the term "woke". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:18, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Why identify critiques of woke ... as politically 'rightward'? Per Aja Romano in Vox: "It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right ... On the right, 'woke' ... is usually used sarcastically ... the increasing tendency of conservatives to use 'woke' as an insult". And Vox is an independent source on such usage, unlike the folks listed in this thread, who are merely examples of it. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:33, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Yet, such endorsement of Romano's expertise begs the question of how, User Sangdeboeuf, you apply wp:RS's sorting mechanisms to find her qualifications sterling enough to accurately report on woke semantics, as Vox cyberculture-beat reporter, yet find others', in like circumstances, leaden (as you've so done, above). Anyway, to answer the question you did ask: Because it would be preferable not to replicate unfortunate phrasing within Misplaced Pages's voice even when it's been directly taken from otherwise marvelous research on general usage of the term woke but that also, unfortunately, implies the fallacy: Should statements "Paleoconservative critics of 'woke' social justice use the term disparagingly" and "Critics of 'woke' il-liberalities use the term disparagingly" be true, it follows that "Critics-of-'woke'-illiberalities are paleoconservative-critics-of-'woke'-social justice" and vice versa.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:35, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

"Winning a Pulitzer Prize does not make someone an expert." To the contrary, a topic covered by a journalist is a secondary source with regard to that material, if the journalist is a respected one, it becomes considered more reliable and of higher quality. From examining many such sources, it's determined whether points of view on a topic are mainstream or fringe, whatever opinions we Wikipedian examiners ourselves may possess. Our article's remaining of the nature of polemic by unobjectively implying virtue to reside in woke ideology and virtue's lack in arguments opposing, it should accept edits so that both sides might be presented neutrally and rationally.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:57, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Harvard cognitive psychologist and a popular writer on language, mind, and human nature Steven Pinker says: Woke is a "convenient label for a kind of ideology that has been with us for decades but it has increased in its prominence particularly in 2020..." Also co-authored: The "best means of combating is the open exchange of ideas."

Psycholinguist-author of the 1994 book The Language Instinct (also see: "Steven Pinker#Awards and distinctions"), he thinks that designations of virtue and demonology are components of the psychology of religion also found in especially at either pole of political ideology, right or left, in which opponents' politics are demonized and fellow-adherents assigned virtue; his upcoming book (see publisher's blurb here) appeals for acceptance of rationality as developed in the Enlightenment and not uncritical embrace of a mythological mindset, despite myths' real facilities for bolstering ethical values, reinforcing a sense of identity, and effecting tribal solidarity (see publisher's summary: "The rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity and uplifting mythology by individuals can add up to crippling irrationality in a society.").

havard.edu/gazette - - Harvard Magazine: "Anecdotes Aren’t Data: Steven Pinker Wants Clearer Delineation Between Facts and Feelings"--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:57, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

I never said Romano was an expert. As I already explained, Vox is an independent source on such usage, unlike the folks listed in this thread, who are merely examples of it. Romano, as you've said, is Vox cyberculture-beat reporter. Insofar as Vox is reporting the news, with its established structure for fact-checking and editing, it's considered a reliable source. The opinion pieces you've cited are not at all comparable. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:43, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

An encyclopedia must itself reflect only a positive view about woke social progress because periodicals such as Vox do, while banning mention of any secondary sources that directly profess negative views about woke il-liberalities, since the general tenor of such "news" views is characteristic of the former, rending this opinion of woke social progress as of objectively true? No, basic principles of summarizing knowledge require such views as are found to be in the minority to be given space. Even such as the socio-political views of which the Economist is chock full cannot simply be reflected as objectively true if and when there are competing ones. This UK periodical, founded in 1843, predates the first US wire service by about half a decade, the latter's inaugurating the tradition of neutrality in journalism in that their news items would be run by subscribing periodicals with disparate editorial positions, yet even such wire service pieces contained opinions as circumscribed roughly by the need not to raise the hackles of any of these subscribers. An arguably more knowledgeable source for a sociopolitical coinage's meaning might be a professor who's a celebrated cognitive psychologist-trained linguist, Steven Pinker, who, as we've seen in this thread or the one just above, is wholly in the "woke il-liberalities" camp.

(Random sample): ". . This morning (October 26, 2014) I woke up in Oslo, after having addressed the Oslo Freedom Forum ... at least one speaker at the Forum singled out speech codes and other restrictions on expression in the United States as a worrisome development. . . The students at elite universities . . may be disciplined by an administrative board with medieval standards of jurisprudence, pressured to sign a kindness pledge suitable for kindergarten, muzzled by speech codes that would not pass the giggle test if challenged on First Amendment grounds, and publicly shamed for private emails that express controversial opinions. . ."
--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 23:01, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Your "random sample" has nothing to do with the topic that I can see. Campus free speech is a different topic. Where does anything in the Vox source count as a positive view, and why are we talking about inherently POV concepts such as woke social progress and woke il-liberalities? I think we're getting hung up on the use–mention distinction again. A bunch of blogs and op-eds using the term "woke" in whatever anti-PC crusade they're on doesn't constitute encyclopedic coverage of the topic. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 03:18, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Due your perception my random samples have got nil to do with woke – along with my sense it would be your preference – I let off from expounding on the big picture of, well, yes, what is obviously inherently, pov about the "woke" (as in any other) social movement, let me switch my telescope's ends for the granularity of – my less-often-preferred – wikipedantry. Or rather (I suppose under the sanctions @ wp:BRB), you've initiated a slow-motion quasi edit war (diff - diff - diff]), I'll concentrate on it in entirety, my proceeding exactly one item at a time.

TO START, PER wp:LWQ, best practice is, "where possible, link from text outside of the quotation instead – either before it or soon after." Next up, part of Romano's quote resorts in quite classic fashion to the psychogenetic fallacy of skirting merits or demerits of criticisms of "woke" in favor of dog-whistling, inaccurate-at-that, left-right tribalism. In fact, otherwise, in light of wp:WIKIVOICE: "Unless a topic specifically deals with a disagreement over otherwise uncontested information, there is no need for specific attribution for the assertion." What, other than this tone, would the requisite disagreement-about-Romano's-assertions be, that triggers her quoting? My reversion of the material, as a practical matter (and, again, pedantically speaking) is proof that the material is contested – if nothing more than by me: it's being preferable, per wp:YESPOV , to "Prefer nonjudgmental language. A neutral point of view neither sympathizes with nor disparages its subject (or what reliable sources say about the subject), although this must sometimes be balanced against clarity. Present opinions and conflicting findings in a disinterested tone. Do not editorialize. When editorial bias towards one particular point of view can be detected the article needs to be fixed."

If there are contradictory pov's involved -- such as, it's being apparent that Romano's characterization of critics' use-of-"woke" contains her editorial suppositions that in turn provide the impulse to quote her -- then, again per wp:YESPOV, it's preferable to "Indicate the relative prominence of opposing views. Ensure that the reporting of different views on a subject adequately reflects the relative levels of support for those views, and that it does not give a false impression of parity, or give undue weight to a particular view. For example, to state that "According to Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust was a program of extermination of the Jewish people in Germany, but David Irving disputes this analysis" would be to give apparent parity between the supermajority view and a tiny minority view by assigning each to a single activist in the field."

(For what it may be worth, as noted in my initial edit summary - diff , my sense of the part of the material-I-deleted's inappropriateness is Romano's defensively-accusatory tone, other than which there wasn't content not banal or a stereotype sloppily generalizing the entity, critics of "woke," as politically conservative.)
--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:02, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

I didn't respond to your 14:34, 11 March 2021 edit summary because it had qualities of a word salad, much like your commentary on this talk page. Please take the time to condense your thoughts and express them more clearly. Establishing relative levels of support for different views depends on published, reliable sources, not personal evaluation of some blogs and opinion pieces. Sticking to reliable sources is not editorial bias. Romano gives a specific example (rep. Matt Gaetz) and quotes two different experts to support the idea of criticism coming from the right. I don't see anything sloppy about it. Nor does it imply that criticism only comes from the right. I don't see anything defensive or accusatory in the tone of the Vox article. Could you give an example? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:55, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

I haven't seen any reliable, secondary sources that treat "woke" as a social movement, only assorted commentators using it as a term of abuse for what they perceive to be a social movement. Until we have better sources for this aspect, the article is and should remain about the term itself, its usage, history, impact, etc. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:18, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Semantic bifurcation?

User:NorthBySouthBaranof said, "Does anyone self-identify as 'woke' and have an opinion on what it means? Because as of now, similar to 'social justice warrior,' it appears to have become a pejorative epithet applied and used only by opponents."

The meaning has bifurcated: "Stay woke" and "woke" qua, in a positive sense, "remain awake to injustice" (a la Dr. West, arrested during protests in Ferguson, then eg alongside DeRay McKesson in LA, alongside Bree Newsome) – versus: "Woke" (almost never, "stay woke") qua, ditto, with negative connotations about the overall movement's allegedly cancel-culture aspects.

Sources for the former:

1. 2008 - " When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble It takes courage for folk to stand up."] — Cornel West, Hope on a Tightrope
2. October 15, 2014 salon - Rutger's Brittany Cooper: ". . This past weekend, protestors descended on Ferguson. I'm reminded of a verse: 'it is high time to awake out of sleep. (Romans 13:11)' In college, some youth government leaders used this verse with the slogan, 'The Awakening. Don't sleep.' These days, young folks have remixed it, proclaiming 'stay woke.' I am sitting with what it means that we have moved from 'Don't Sleep to Stay Woke.'

   For we have awakened from a long, fitful slumber. Lulled there by our parents and grandparents, who marched in Selma, sat down in Greensboro, matriculated at Black colleges, and argued before the Supreme Court, they convinced us to adopt their freedom dreams, impressed them into our bodies, in every hug, in every $25 check pressed into a hand from a grandmother to a grandchild on his or her way to bigger and better, in every whispered prayer, in every indignity suffered silently but resolutely in the workplace.

   ". . We have awakened from sleep. Cornel West has re-emerged, the one who we tried not to listen to, the one who is -- despite all of our collective quibbles and begrudgements – right. This moment is about all of us. About what kind of America we want to be. About what kind of America we are willing to be, willing to fight for. About whether we will settle for being mediocre and therefore murderous to a whole group of citizens. About whether there are other versions of ourselves worth fighting for. Don’t sleep. Millennials, it seems, are the ones we have been waiting for. Fearless and focused, the future they are fighting for is one I want. It is high time to awake out of sleep. Stay woke."

3. August 25, 2015 yesmagazine - "Strategies to Make Powerful Social Change – Starting With 'Stay Woke'": ". . Bree Newsome. I will never forget her. She climbed up the flagpole at the South Carolina Statehouse in June and took down the Confederate flag. lements I can identify in Newsome’s recipe for homemade freedom: 1. Stay woke. Newsome’s actions were a response to Gov. Nikki Haley’s unfulfilled promise. Anger is the appropriate feeling to have when our boundaries have been violated. Newsome reminds us that the purpose of anger is to generate the energy we need for self-protective action. 2. Get up early. . . 3. Deeds, not pleas, bring change. . . 4. Use what you have. . . 5. Speak the language you know. . . 6. To go far, go together. A South African proverb says: 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.' . ." — Mistinguette Smith
4. March 5, 2021 truthout.org/Cornel West (interviewed by Emory University philosopher George Yancy): ". . as Michel Foucault used to say, every history of the past is a history of the present and vice versa. You’re in but not of this empire, you're in but not of this white supremacist society, trying to be in but not of this predatory capitalist society, you’re in but not of this patriarchal, homophobic society, but you know all that’s inside of you, too. And that is part of the paradox, the white supremacy that is inside of me. I grew up within a patriarchal empire, so I’m going to have the patriarchy in me. So, I have to fight that every day. That’s part of learning how to die. That needs to die daily in order for me to emerge as a stronger love warrior, freedom fighter and wounded healer. alk about identity these days will not mean much at all if it is not rooted in integrity and high quality and solidarity. You see, racial identity and gender identity could just be weaponized for another middle-class project that would reproduce neoliberal politics that will unleash Wall Street greed, generate high levels of poverty, no accountability of the elites at the top, and everybody walks around with a smile, because you got some Black folk and Brown folk at the top. And it just means that the class hierarchy is more colorful, and the imperial hierarchy is more colorful, but people are still suffering."
5. February 20, 2021 theneweuropean - playwright, novelist, critic and broadcaster Bonnie Greer: "Stay Awake to the Right's Weaponisation of Woke": ". . 'Why would anyone not want to be awake?' Indeed. But for those on the right spectrum, wokeness implies the opposite: a kind of unthinking, automatic, sleepwalking into a left wing way of being. But that's not where the term started. This is the same with woke's sibling, 'political correctness'. I have always been amused by the right's appropriation of the term 'politically correct'. As I recall, it was a term of satire back in the day, something we university students from the late 1970s and early 1980s used to mock... ourselves: it’s a joke.

   But woke is, of course, African American jargon which goes back further than recent years. Further than political correctness. And its meaning is quite beautiful. It means being awake to not only the possibilities of escape from inhuman conditions, but of being awoke to the Divine. To transcendence. It is also about being awake to nature, to the sky and the trees and the air. Those of the enslaved who could, escaped using a series of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. One of the ways to chart the route north and therefore to freedom, was to keep the constellation Polaris in your eye and in your mind. Escaped slaves, travelling along the route, had to move at night. To get out of the South and to freedom they were told to stay awake – to be woke – and to 'follow the Drinking Gourd'. This is another term for the Big Dipper, that large asterism which consists of seven stars of the constellation Ursa Major. Four define a bowl, three define a handle: the drinking gourd. Within it is Polaris, the North Star, the pointer to freedom. I can remember being told by elders to 'stay woke', i.e. watch how I proceeded through the world, how I treated people; how I was treated. I had to always remember who I was; where I came from and what that all meant in the scheme of things. Now woke is a term of abuse, flung around by those on the righta way to delegitimise and hold back the inevitable tide of history towards a more multi-ethnic world with new definitions, new history."
   --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:12, 11 March 2021 (UTC)--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:33, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

harvardcrimson, yesterday - woo hoo! "Cornel R. West, Steven A. Pinker, and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. signed on as founding members of a new nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to defending academics’ freedom of expressionThe Academic Freedom Alliance." Pinker said "freedom of opinion at universitiesis 'indisputably under threat.' 'Much of the intellectual repression comes when there is a noisy group of activists who pressure university officials who just don’t want trouble.' . . 'Penalizing someone for holding a minority viewpoint “corrodes the credibility of the university' "

chronicleofhighereducation - ". . Jeffrey J. Poelvoorde, an associate professor of politics and the sole Orthodox Jewish faculty member of a small college in South Carolina. Poelvoorde refused to attend mandatory anti-racism training in the wake of the George Floyd protests — he was the only one of his colleagues to refuse. 'My quarrel is not so much with the content of these materials the administration would impose on us, but rather the coercive imposition itself,' Poelvoorde wrote in a letter to administrators at Converse College. / " 'They told him they would fire him, they would revoke his tenure,' George told me. 'He stood up to them, we came in and provided legal and moral support, and after a whole lot of Sturm und Drang, they completely caved, backed down, and exempted him.' /. . "only a change in the cultural atmosphere around these issues — a preference for open debate and free exchange over stigmatization and punishment as the default way to negotiate controversy in academe — could resolve the overall problem. / "The Princeton University political historian Keith E. Whittington, who is chairman of the alliance’s academic committee, echoed Strossen’s point. The recruitment effort, he said, aimed to gather 'people who would be respectable and hopefully influential to college administrators — such that if a group like that came to them and said "Look, you’re behaving badly here on these academic-freedom principles," this is a group that they might pay attention to.' /" '. . two tenured professors speaking about what they know about,' said, noting that the debate was a perfectly civil and collegial exchange of views between himself and Harris — though continually interrupted by students photo-bombing the proceedings with signs bearing denunciations of the very existence of the debate. / " '. . Let us declare with Frederick Douglass, "There can be no right of speech where any man … is overawed by force and compelled to suppress their honest sentiments." ' "
--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 21:29, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

• "Education: Tavis Smiley". Jet magazine. Vol. 106, no. 3. July 19, 2004. ISSN 0021-5996. Cornel West put it this way: 'You can't lead people if you can't love people. And, you can't save people if you can't serve people.'
  --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:58, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Use vs. mention

Under § Reception and analysis we are told that Obama criticized "woke" culture (by which he meant "calling people out on social media"), that Bunyasi and Smith say striving to be recognized as "woke" (i.e. "educated around issues of social justice") is "self-serving and misguided", and that Beaud and Noiriel fear "contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses" (in the words of a New York Times journalist).

These are all on the "use" side of the use–mention distinction, inasmuch as they show people using the term "woke" to refer to something that somebody doesn't like. They are not about the term itself, any more than someone saying "I hate oranges" is about the word "orange". The issues in question deal more with callout culture, social justice, postcolonialism, etc. Labeling any of these issues a matter of "wokeness" is inherently subjective and judgmental.

Misplaced Pages is not a dictionary; this article shouldn't be an indiscriminate list of media usage or a clearinghouse of people using the term "woke" to criticize or to praise. I suggest removing the material in question pending sources that actually relate it to the subject of "woke(ness)" as a term. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:36, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

wp:WORDISSUBJECT: Sometimes "a word or phrase is still at first blush about a topic other than the word or phrase itself/ but the word or phrase is a "lens" or concept through which the topic or closely related set of topics are grouped or seen. When this occurs, the article often focuses on the "lens" and may not be the main coverage of the topics which are viewed through it. World music, Political correctness, Homosexual agenda, Lake Michigan-Huron and Truthiness illustrate this." This would appear to be the case for Woke, as well. Cf. this section at Political Correctness:

Right-wing political correctness

"Political correctness" is a label typically used to describe liberal terms and actions, but not for equivalent attempts to mold language and behavior on the right. Economist Paul Krugman, writes that "the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which – unlike the liberal version – has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of "Newspeak": to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order." Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute defined the right's own version of political correctness as "patriotic correctness".

--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:59, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

This doesn't address the use–mention distinction or the POV issues I raised. If we are to cover other topics through the lens of "woke", we still need more than passing mentions or trivial usage. The above NYT article is an example of a source that uses "woke" almost as a throwaway description before going into detail on a bunch of unrelated topics. Obama using the term in a speech is also a perfect example of disproportionate news coverage. I doubt this off-the-cuff remark will pass the ten-year test. The two sources in the quoted paragraph from Political correctness are opinion pieces – not a good example to follow IMO. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:23, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

• Let me start over again. First off, the "Use-Mention" page linked to reads like an inkblot test or alchemists' cookbook (or, maybe, a diviners' manual? . . . OK: I'll brb after my breakfast, then I'll address the rest of the concerns mentioned! . . . )--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:03, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm back. I'm going to offer a mea culpa at the very bottom of the lowest thread on the talkpage.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:05, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

"Woke" is pretty much just a pejorative at this point, and J.D. Vance demonstrated it neatly

JD Vance, he of "Hillbilly Elegy" tweeted this evening, We should eliminate the university degree requirement from the officer corps. It’s dumb to make people get a BA before becoming officers anyway, and it may just make the military leadership less woke.

Notably, I'm not sure literally anyone in history has described American military leadership as "woke." And the beyond-credulity use of the pejorative is what's attracting attention.

Max Kennerly notes, Right-wingers spent so long in their own echo chambers they forgot why they appropriated the word "woke" as an insult in the first place. Now their use is so meaningless that a jar of mayonnaise with a Yale Law degree thinks "woke" is "anything learned after secondary school."

Robert Schlesinger: I ... didn't think I'd live long enough to see the military brass criticized as being too "woke."

Jamelle Bouie: i have no idea what “woke” is even supposed to mean anymore

Jacob Silverman: "military leadership less woke"?? I think most of these reactionaries use "woke" as a catchall insult/descriptor that earns nods from a certain in-group but it doesn't have much meaning anymore.

The Atlanta Voice (Black newspaper): Conservatives have turned the word "woke" into a rallying cry against everything that's become socially accepted while being against promoting diversity of critical thought.

Other comments: every day on the website we learn an exciting new definition for what "woke" means. today we find out it's woke when you despoil and slaughter your way across the globe in a massive orgy of blood.

Interesting context and interesting timing. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 03:47, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

It is an interesting discussion, but needless to say we can't really do anything with a twitter conversation. There actually aren't many sources in the article discussing its use as a pejorative, and a quick Google Scholar search doesn't turn up anything obvious - there are lots of sources that plainly use it that way, but it would be more useful to find decent-quality secondary sources covering that usage. I suspect that part of the reason there isn't much coverage is because that sort of usage is mostly indistinguishable from the way they use a wide variety of similar words (eg. , one of the few papers I could find even acknowledging that use, describes how we will examine how extremists attempt to reclaim work from the (white) Western Canon (such as Shakespeare) from those they consider ‘woke’, liberal, and left-wing, with the clear implication that the terms are used, by the online extremists they're discussing, in a very similar or even interchangeable manner. There isn't really much to say about that - culture-war types turning any word that refers to their ideological enemies into epithets isn't exactly news or particularly meaningful in and of itself. --Aquillion (talk) 12:09, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

I did come across a piece by Jamelle Bouie that mentions this: "These days, it’s a term of abuse — a shorthand for puritanical political correctness, a pejorative wielded against liberal elitism." However, it's an opinion column, so I'm hesitant to give it much weight. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:48, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, my impression (after spending a while going through Google Scholar looking for scholarly sources) is that that sort of usage is one of those Very Online things that looms large in the minds of a few culture-war-invested talking heads and people who follow them, but which isn't treated particularly seriously by actual experts. We do note its existence (Since then, journalist Aja Romano argues that woke has evolved into a "single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory"; among American conservatives, the term is often used mockingly or sarcastically. Linguist Ben Zimmer writes that as the term has gained mainstream acceptance, "its original grounding in African-American political consciousness has been obscured".) but I don't think we should give it more weight than we do currently. Truthfully the co-option of "woke" language by brands trying to improve their image has a lot more coverage among high-quality RSes. --Aquillion (talk) 22:02, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

A regular thread about whether WP should give coverage to "commentators' having used woke as an identifying term for anti-racism methodologies"

Edited

I've removed the RfC here and replaced it with an informal request to for help about a suggested topic for treatment.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 15:43, 15 March 2021 (UTC)--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:57, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

The article is presently about "Woke" (in its adjectival sense). It's suggested it be enlarged to include pertinent material more-so about "woke-ness" (which Cambridge University defines as a mainly US informal noun meaning "a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality").

Independent coverage such as this article in Vox arguing that "Republicans are trying to outlaw wokeness," which adds that "Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of politics at Acadia University, calls it 'The New War on Woke.'" Elsewhere RS discussions abound that concern woke-influenced sensitivity trainings in government and business human resources departments. Should these be thought tangential our Misplaced Pages entry's coverage of woke or not? If yes, I suggest something like the following for possible inclusion.

As of the early 2020s, works of such thinkers on race relations as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin J. DiAngelo, Carol Anderson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others, had come to cultural salience in the U.S. After various company human resources departments began featuring some of these works' thought within employee sensitivity training courses, certain scholars and commentators used woke as an identifying term for to their methodologies, including Jonathan Chait, John McWhorter, Wilfred Reilly Raluca Bejan and others. In January 2021, a confidential "anti-woke" help line was founded in the U.K. by the scholar Helen Pluckrose, known for her critique of wokeism: a Discord server that fields such calls as those from employees concerned with some allegedly overwrought features within diversity training programs, and aims to "help people convince their employers to allow them to reject racism from their own philosophical, ethical or religious beliefs and not highly theoretical and political one."

Sources

^ Harris, Elizabeth A. (5 June 2020). "People Are Marching Against Racism. They're Also Reading About It" – via NYTimes.com. Iqbal, Nosheen (16 February 2019). "Academic Robin DiAngelo: 'We have to stop thinking about racism as someone who says the N-word'" – via www.theguardian.com. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/cancel-culture-and-problem-woke-capitalism/614086/ Sanneh, Kelefa. "The Fight to Redefine Racism". The New Yorker. "How anti-racism is a treatment for the 'cancer' of racism". PBS NewsHour. 8 July 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/05/dear-white-people-please-read-white-fragility/ Wuench, Julia. "First, Listen. Then, Learn: Anti-Racism Resources For White People". Forbes. Chait, Jonathan (16 July 2020). "Is the Anti-Racism Training Industry Just Peddling White Supremacy?". Intelligencer. "Linguist John McWhorter Says 'White Fragility' Is Condescending Toward Black People". NPR.org. McWhorter, John (15 July 2020). "The Dehumanizing Condescension of 'White Fragility'". The Atlantic. Reilly, Wilfred. "I saw identity politics tear the Occupy movement apart. Economic leftists must ditch wokeness". USA TODAY. Bejan, Raluca. "Robin DiAngelo's 'White Fragility' ignores the differences within whiteness". The Conversation. "Opinion: Reading 'White Fragility' and canceling your friends won't make you an anti-racist". The Independent. 3 July 2020. https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/541089-wake-up-america-laughter-is-healing Walden, Celia (17 February 2021). "Why I started an anti-woke helpline" – via www.telegraph.co.uk. "On Activist Scholarship: An Interview with Helen Pluckrose". 16 December 2020.

Of course, wanting to avoid, per WP:FORBESCON, material that's self-published, I do note that one of the above citations is to Raluca Bejan, a published academic who teaches in the school of social work at Nova Scotia's public university Dalhousie, which piece was published in the Conversation, a publication of her own university.

About the rest: the New York Times's Elizabeth A. Harris on its books-and-publishing beat, the Guardian's Nosheen Iqbal is its women's editor, the Atlantic's London-based staff writer Helen Lewis has written a book on the history of feminism, the NewYorker's Sanneh Kelefa's beat is primarily race and culture, PBS NewsHour's Amna Nawaz is an Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist, the Washington Post's opinion-piece writer Jonathan Capehart analyzes politics, Forbes contributor Julia Wuench has expertise in emergent leadership training, columnist Jonothan Chait of New York (magazine's) Intelligencer writes about US culture and politics, NPR "Morning Edition" journalist Steve Inskeep has received awards including for his reporting on complexities of electoral politics and race, Atlantic contributor John McWhorter is a linguist and social critic at Columbia, USA Today contibutor Wilfred Reilly is a political scientist at Kentucky State, The Independent opinion columnist writes nonfiction/fiction and teaches at UC Irvine, The Hill opinion contributor Dennis M. Powell is a management consultant, the Independent's Celia Walden's beats include women's issues and social etiquette.

The small number of the opinion pieces above are suggested as being appropriate under wp:PARTISAN: "Sometimes non-neutral sources are the best possible sources for supporting information about the different viewpoints held on a subject. Common sources of bias include political, financial, religious, philosophical, or other beliefs. Although a source may be biased, it may be reliable in the specific context. When dealing with a potentially biased source, editors should consider whether the source meets the normal requirements for reliable sources, such as editorial control, a reputation for fact-checking, and the level of independence from the topic the source is covering. Bias may make in-text attribution appropriate, as in 'Feminist Betty Friedan wrote that...'"; and also see WP's Neutral-Point-of-View page at wp:YESPOV.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:24, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

• Procedural close: the above statement is not neutral and brief as per WP:RFCNEUTRAL and there has been no prior discussion of the text in question as per WP:RFCBEFORE. Failing that, oppose as off-topic and WP:UNDUE. As I said when I removed the text from the article, The linchpin of this paragraph is a WP:FORBESCON – essentially self-published – the rest are primary sources or unrelated to the topic. Bejan's commentary and the rest aren't about the term "woke". "Wokeism" is undefined and POV. See § Use vs. mention above. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:55, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Hodgdon's secret garden's opening statement is not showing up on the list of active RfCs, I suspect it's too long for Legobot to handle. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:06, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose, not sufficiently supported by the sources cited; most of these sources don't even use the term "woke", which is a bare minimum to be relevant. Out of the sources, the NYT, Guardian, Capehart, Wuench, and Nymag ones don't use the term "woke" at all (the latter two are also opinion pieces that you're trying to cite to establish facts.) The Atlantic one uses it a sense that directly contradicts the one you're arguing for in this paragraph. The sources for Chait, McWhorter, and Bejan likewise don't use the term 'woke' and cannot be used (this actually involves WP:BLP issues because you're implicitly attributing to them controversial positions that aren't supported by the sources you used.) The final Pluckrose one doesn't use 'woke', either, and is published in an unreliable source besides. In fact, out of the cites here, only three of them use the term "woke" in the sense you're trying to establish; two of them are low-quality opinion pieces by non-experts, and one of them is an article about a hotline that ultimately only uses it in passing without going into any depth on it, and essentially implies that it's grandstanding by another culture-war talking head with a lot invested in the topic - the amount of focus you're devoting to the existence of the hotline, which is largely trivia, is plainly WP:UNDUE here. You say that you want to use a small number of opinion pieces, but in practice you are hinging the entire section on what they say, while using unrelated non-opinion pieces to try and make their argument in the text via WP:SYNTH. Finally, I don't see what source you're using for the term "wokeism", which would clearly require a high-quality non-opinion source to state as if it were definitely an indisputable thing in the article text, the way you're using the word here. --Aquillion (talk) 21:58, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Procedural question. I hope that respondents, if they would, might comment (in light of wp:EDIT's "wp:PRESERVE section) if they believe that any of these sources might support appropriate content that could belong in a fully-formed article on woke? Thanks. -- The Requester of Commentary Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 22:51, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
    • The reasons for not relying on opinion pieces have been explained on this page ad nauseam. As for the paragraph in question, you boldly added it, I reverted it. There's nothing significant to preserve. Instead, WP:BRD applies. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:56, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
• Firstly, I agree with Sangdeboeuf that this should be closed and revised because I honestly don't understand what I'm being asked to comment on. But reading the proposed text, I agree that it should be excluded. It seems to be unacceptable synthesis of sources where the text proposes a new hypothesis ("wokeness" as a scholarly methodology) unsupported by any actual citation. — Wug·a·po·des​ 01:23, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
• Exclude - There doesn't appear to be any sort of consensus or agreement on what "wokeness" is, and the best we can apparently conclude from the available sources is that's a pejorative applied by opponents of progressivism and social justice to a wide variety of things they oppose. Using sources which don't use the word "woke" to support claims about living people being "woke" or responsible for whatever "wokeness" is, is dishonest and violates fundamental policy on living people. Specifically, not a single source in the proposed addition connects Coates or Anderson to "wokeness," and Kendi gets two passing mentions of his name without detail. This is clearly prohibited synthesis - you can't just take what someone says and declare it to be "wokeness" because you say so. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 02:08, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

• I withdrew the formal RfC which apparently wasn't loading in favor of a request for help, of less formality, about whether to give encyclopedic coverage to the suggested topic and, if so, how to do so.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 15:43, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

"MEA CULPA"!

Yes, as promised, I'm going to offer a mea culpa – below! – but, first, I want to explain myself (and, with apologies, if I seem prolix):

In two articles in Vox, Aja Romano's and Sean Illing from their separate vantage points looking, respectively, at culture and politics, have determined that use of (a.) woke in each venue has been co-opted by the right wing as a shorthand for---- I'll resort, here, to my sampling some of its constituents, as (in quote of our own Misplaced Pages article) b. identity politics, c, cancel culture, d. race-baiting, e. political correctness, f. internet call-out culture, and g. virtue signaling within society's general h. culture war.

I think all of these items b. through h. are likewise used by folks on the right-wing, too; and, I think Romano and Illing both err a bit in their implying of woke's provenance, though— Easy enough to do: the eight are all phenomena of the left-wing, so, one might overgeneralize criticisms of the left-wing as having sole provenance in the opposing wing; however, this hypotheses doesn't seem to align with the facts readily available to view from even the most cursory of observations. Rather, it is people from pretty much all political persuasions, when critiquing some combination of these phenomena, who have been using woke as a shorthand when they do so. Editors who are headline writers. Journalists needing a quick and/or punchy way of expressing their critique or referring to those spoken or authored by others. Commentators of whatever stript. As an entirely random example, Harvard's Dr. Pinker, when asked about what he thought of woke culture, said, it's a "convenient label for a kind of ideology that has been with us for decades but it has increased in its prominence particularly in 2020"— And, note that, in Pinker's branch of the Academy: if Conservatives aren't as "rare as black swans," they aren't common; and, in fact, Pinker happens to be outspokenly very politically liberal (and – also – an advocate of "combating the open exchange of ideas").

But, hmmm— Who came up with the idea of representing any one or combination of b. through h. as "woke"? Maybe a single person did it; maybe several or many did it unbeknownst to each other; it doesn't matter, though, because how the development of language works is that when someone comes up with a useful term, it gains currency through its utility. Woke has such currency because of this utility: namely, a one-syllable summation of related things describable in various ways by seven other multi-word phrases. This currency exists, at the moment. It's a common feature of language development that growing and/or allegedly "uppity" social phenomena or movements receive nicknames that are and/or were originally derogatory: "flaming" "queers," teetotalers," the "Methodists," the "Quakers," the "Mormons." One option for a group thus shorthanded-in-its-being-critiqued is to so-called reclaim the term on their own terms: This is how the Q got into LGBTQ, of course. Teetotaler, I guess, is jokey for the Temperance movement and now seems usually used with self-deprecation to mean "abstemious." Methodists figured the term was as good as any (if not, perhaps, better than others) and simply adopted Methodism to talk of themselves. Quakers (more correctly: Friends) term themselves the former designation, but informally. Mormons (Latter-day Saints) once accepted their own use of this formerly-given designation in more informal contexts but have come extremely recently almost completely to deprecate its use among themselves.

It appears that such a deprecation may be afoot with regard woke, as well: By saying its use is by Conservative, maybe those critiquing b. through h. who are not Conservative, thereby, will be scared off and then come up with an alternative (say, should it become successfully tabooed as a vulgarism, perhaps even sometimes resort being made to "the h-word"!).

Which is to say: I doubt any informed person has trouble making out what Pinker was referencing, ideologies' being social movements (for example, a candidate runs for a seat and, when she begins to gather support, political scientists begin to use the term momentum in their analysis of the burgeoning "movement" of people – with of people a synonym for "social," obviously!). Pinker talks of an ideology increasing in provenance especially in 2020. Any reasonably observant watcher of the social scene would agree with him here; and, a review of commentators-on-society (including editors creating short headlines) during the past year would indicate this.

Well, but, then— I came to this Misplaced Pages articles talkpage–– and I find that people hereabouts don't believe there has been any such social movement! At first, I thought these contributors were engaging in wikilegalistic or pedantic gamespersonship and that they were (as were Romano and Illing!) simply going about their business – out of some kind of ill-begoten, "socially-conscious" motives – of their attempting to accomplish the objective of deprecation of this by-now-only-too-common term.

OK: Now, I'm getting to my mea culpa— (!)

I now know that my leeriness about other-editors-here's motives to have been illogical. Since I myself believed woke to be a used and useful shorthand for any combinations of b. through h., I thought any talkpage commenters hereabouts would do so, as well; but, it turns out that there seems to be pretty solid ground for them to doubt this shorthand even exists. Probably a lot of people know what it means but never use it. Prof. Pinker, for example, only referred to the word by nature of his having been asked by an interviewer about it, but Pinker actually omitted the use of the word, himself, even when he otherwise-directly addressed its use. What does this tell us? That the word actually is considered impolite enough that – whereas everybody knows what it means, I'm sure – it appears that very many people would be to use it, at all, themselves in their own language, let alone openly. Hence, if Misplaced Pages were to have an article on this catchall or rubric for critiques of any combination of b. through h.———

Per wp:NEO:

"rticles are often created in an attempt to use Misplaced Pages to increase usage of the term. Care should be taken when translating text into English that a term common in the host language does not create an uncommon neologism in English. As Wiktionary's inclusion criteria differ from Misplaced Pages's, that project may cover neologisms that Misplaced Pages cannot accept. Editors may wish to contribute an entry for the neologism to Wiktionary instead.

"Some neologisms can be in frequent use, and it may be possible to pull together many facts about a particular term and show evidence of its usage on the Internet or in larger society. To support an article about a particular term or concept, we must cite what reliable secondary sources say about the term or concept, not just sources that use the term (see use–mention distinction). An editor's personal observations and research (e.g. finding blogs, books, and articles that use the term rather than are about the term) are insufficient to support articles on neologisms because this may require analysis and synthesis of primary source material to advance a position, which is explicitly prohibited by the original research policy.

"Neologisms that are in wide use but for which there are no treatments in secondary sources are not yet ready for use and coverage in Misplaced Pages. The term does not need to be in Misplaced Pages in order to be a 'true' term, and when secondary sources become available, it will be appropriate to create an article on the topic, or use the term within other articles.

"In a few cases, there will be notable topics which are well-documented in reliable sources, but for which no accepted short-hand term exists. It can be tempting to employ a neologism in such a case. Instead, it is preferable to use a title that is a descriptive phrase in plain English if possible, even if this makes for a somewhat long or awkward title.

wp:Non-judgmental descriptive titles

"...In some cases a descriptive phrase (such as Restoration of the Everglades) is best as the title. These are often invented specifically for articles, and should reflect a neutral point of view, rather than suggesting any editor's opinions. Avoid judgmental and non-neutral words; for example, allegation or alleged can either imply wrongdoing, or in a non-criminal context may imply a claim 'made with little or no proof' and so should be avoided in a descriptive title. (Exception: articles where the topic is an actual accusation of illegality under law, discussed as such by reliable sources even if not yet proven in a court of law. These are appropriately described as "allegations".)

"However, non-neutral but common names (see preceding subsection) may be used within a descriptive title. Even descriptive titles should be based on sources, and may therefore incorporate names and terms that are commonly used by sources. (Example: Because 'Boston Massacre' is an acceptable title on its own, the descriptive title 'Political impact of the Boston Massacre' would also be acceptable.")

That is all.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:57, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

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