Misplaced Pages

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Jimbo welcomes your comments and updates. He holds the founder's seat on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees. The three trustees elected as community representatives until July 2015 are Sj, Phoebe, and Raystorm. The Wikimedia Foundation Senior Community Advocate is Maggie Dennis.

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Gender balance

As the globe turns into International Women's day, you may be interested to know that the gender balance for new, preference identifying, editors has been showing a steady, if somewhat volatile, increase. The average percentage of new editors who currently identify as female in their preferences, over the last 18 months is 21.22%.

The graph shows a slightly different statistic: the ratio of female-to-male (new) editors, again using only those identified in their preferences. Here, of course, the ideological target would be 100%, rather than 50%, but the relationship is not linear.

While by no means certain, it is likely that this is an underestimate of the ratio, as females are taught not to gender identify on-line.

The provisional figures this is based on will be available on a Meta sub page shortly.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:20, 7 March 2015 (UTC).

About how many new editors identify preference? If it is 50% or even only 30%, these figures would likely be useful. But if it's only 5% or 10%, probably much less so. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:45, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

The % varies over time, peaking at round about 6% in 2012, and decreasing to significantly less than 1 today , strictly speaking of accounts, not editors. Nonetheless the absolute numbers are large enough that the central limit theorem enables us to draw statistically significant conclusions. Full figures are now available. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:01, 7 March 2015 (UTC).

This is certainly an interesting stat, and even if we find out it's biased it could be useful in practice (e.g. if the bias is constant as a %age). In general, looking for new ways to estimate participation of different types of users on Misplaced Pages should be encouraged: we need to know something about who our editors and readers are. But I don't buy into the CLT working here. The folks who answered would have to be randomly selected for the CLT to apply. It, of course, would be nice to have a story on why the selection method introduces a bias. I'm not sure I believe this particular story, but it might work like this: most male editors assume "male" is normal, so they don't see any benefit in self-identifying as male. The only folks who self-identify "have something to prove", so they might be a mix of militant mens-rights folks, feminists, and perhaps even men self-identifying as women (expressing frustration perhaps). In any case bias could be introduced by other means of selection of who reports.

Another means of estimating %women editors might be textual analysis. Women use different vocabulary than men. I'm no expert on this, but ... (with lots of assumptions regarding different ages, nationalities, etc) if you could analyze the text on user pages or user talk pages and split a sample of active editors into categories identified as women, as men, and likely a group that can't be identified by vocabulary. Of course you could get a lot of people angry at you doing this! My stats are getting rusty (and I've never worked with textual analysis) but it's probably done using discriminant analysis or factor analysis. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:40, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

To be clear: is the ratio reported in the graph above is F/M or F/(F+M)? MarkBernstein (talk) 23:05, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

The graph is, as captioned, and mentioned in the text, F/M - which I find the more useful figure. The average percentage of 21.22% is F/(F+M), reported here because that is the way the figure has been reported historically, and in which the WMF/Sue Gardner/Jimmy set targets. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:11, 7 March 2015 (UTC).

Just an aside about this, this is an article in today's Phnom Penh Post about Khmer Misplaced Pages and a campaign to get more women's and women-authored articles up.Skookum1 (talk) 03:03, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

(Website currently off-line, http error 522.) All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:10, 8 March 2015 (UTC).

• These numbers are in rough alignment with a recent stat given at the December 2014 WMF metrics meeting involving results of a survey conducted of 96,000 Misplaced Pages users in 11 countries of the so-called Global South — conducted in 16 languages (pg. 62). A total of 47,000 people ended up completing the survey, which ran both on desktop and mobile platforms. The survey showed that 21% of readers and 20% of contributors identified themselves as female (with another 2% declining to identify either as male or female and 1% selecting "other.") (pg. 64). There is definitely a gender gap but it appears to be something in the neighborhood of 80m:20f rather than 90m:10f. Carrite (talk) 05:13, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Cullen Let's discuss it 05:58, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

• There are a large number of edit-a-thons taking place all over the world this weekend. These are opportunities to do two things - welcome new editors in connection with International Women's Day, and write and improve biographies of notable women, and articles of interest to women. My wife and I will attend one such event in San Francisco tomorrow. (Sorry, Carrite, as I know that you distrust all that emanates from San Francisco). I have expanded one woman's biography today, and am drafting another woman's biography that I hope to move to article space tomorrow. Thanks, Rich Farmbrough, for the trend chart. The key is to welcome and assist new editors who are here in good faith, and also for experienced editors to edit in good faith to address our well-documented systemic biases. Cullen Let's discuss it 05:33, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

• I have always believed that welcoming and assisting new users is important, I am not convinced that it will make a huge difference to the gender balance, since we should retain a significant number of additional male editors - which of course is a good thing too.
• Addressing content issues is another matter, and, despite two pieces of good research, one where we still are in a state of ignorance. The proposed new "views per page" which attempts to distinguish between human and automatic page views will help with this.
• I hope to have a preliminary list of ODNB articles on women uploaded shortly - if anyone is looking for something to do, there will be many red-links and a lot of additional information avaiable onmost of the blue links.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 15:50, 8 March 2015 (UTC).

• Thanks [{Ping|Carrite}} for mentioning the "Global South" report, and you are correct that the editor numbers align generally with this result. There was a survey of Internet use in the US "way back when" (i.e. around the time of the WMF/UN University survey that gave the 12% figure still cited today) which showed that readership in the US was even split M/F (and that the figures WMF/UN had promulgated were skewed by selection bias, and should have been around 16%, IIRC).

Consequently it appears that we have two very different models, which I would interpret as follows:

1. In the GN women and girls are as confident in using and enabled to use the Internet and Misplaced Pages as men and boys in the GN, but much less confident in editing.
2. In the GS women and girls are significantly less confident/enabled to use the Internet and Misplaced Pages, but those that do are almost as confident in editing Misplaced Pages as men and boys in the GS.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 15:50, 8 March 2015 (UTC).

• Despite this, Misplaced Pages Gender Gap activists on the Gendergap-l mailing list continue to propagate the apparent error that the female editor level of English Misplaced Pages is "around 10% according to the most recent editor survey." To reiterate: no, that is wrong. The actual Gender Gap is approximately 80-20. Carrite (talk) 16:41, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Wow! Gee Willikers!! Hold on to your hat!!! The various studies agree female editor participation is somewhere in the teens? Well, damnit, just get those good ole GamerGate boys here, I'm a sure they'll have that gap down to zero in no time. AnonNep (talk) 17:16, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

This is exactly why the Gender Gap Task Force/Gendergap-l is not to be taken seriously. Instead of starting with serious analysis of the magnitude of the problem, followed by testing of ideas of how to solve it, followed by cost-benefit analysis of putting those ideas into practice on a large scale, we time and time again see a facile assumption of the Worst Case Scenario (ignoring contrary evidence), followed by gender war rhetoric and throwing of verbal petrol bombs, accompanied by grant-writing for money-money-money for unproven programs. WMF is complicit in this by allowing the GGTF/GG-l to put the money cart before the analysis horse. Carrite (talk) 16:45, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

My long standing recommendation for those who complain women aren't *statistically* editing enough, is for those men to stop editing. This has two benefits, first it is clear they have little of value left to contribute, either for the encyclopedia or for themselves and therefore it will move them on to greener pastures. Secondarily, the less they edit, the smaller that statistical gap will be helping to resolve their moaning. 62.254.196.200 (talk) 17:49, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

• It's not just the mailing list. The recent panel discussion at WVU used the 12% figure, this article cites 10% (and extrapolates that "over 80% ... are young, white, predominantly child-free men" actually 51% are over 30 for starters). Think Progress cites 13% "according to a recent study", presumably the UNMERIT uncorrected figures from 2010. It is not helped that out article Gender bias on Misplaced Pages has the 9/1/80 split in a misleading graph.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:32, 9 March 2015 (UTC).

If one accepts the premise that women feel less welcome than men then it is likely that there will be a selection bias in any group of people that self selects to reveal their gender. It is very possible that the ratio of female editors is higher than it appears due to men being more likely to self identify gender than women. Still, even if you take that into account a rise is still a rise. Chillum 17:20, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

I've never weighed in on this issue since it's of no importance to me, which is what I'm stopping by to say: "Who cares what percentage of editors are female?" Even if it is important--which I realize it is to many--you have no way to compile realistic statistics since so many editors do not reveal their gender. I sort of do--by saying I answer to "Grandma" halfway down my user page--but I'm generally referred to as "he." Doesn't bither me a bot. Who knows how many of us don't feel a need to shout, "Hey, I'm a woman; take note!" or, "Over 55 here, woot-woot!"

The hostility I experienced as a new user had nothing to do with gender, but with newbie-biters. Most of the biters assumed I was male. Yopienso (talk) 20:15, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

As far as Grandma's question "who cares?", I think we should all care. If Misplaced Pages editors are predominantly young men, then our content will be predominantly focused on the interests of young men. We won't be a true global encyclopedia. We'll be leaving out many of the topics of interest to say, 75%, of the world's population.

Perhaps somebody can list or link the statistical evidence on Misplaced Pages's editorship. I probably haven't kept up as much as I should have. But I have the impression that there was an attempt at a census-type survey about 5 years ago, and a couple of attempts since, as well as some indirect type evidence such as Farmbrough's above. And my general impression of everything I've seen is that women make up about 10-20% of the editorship, with a large margin of error in any particular study. Stats is not something we can fake, or decide by argumentation or consensus. Solid work needs to be done. Is there any reason that the WMF does not do a proper survey of a proper random sample? Please forget the old "ask everybody" census-type approach. Trying to get everybody involves too many problems, e.g. selection bias, cost, and inability to resurvey every couple of years. Concentrating on a much smaller random sample of active editors would allow much more accurate work to be done. It would allow updates every year or two, so that we can see if we are making progress. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:27, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Please provide evidence that "our content is predominantly focused on the interests of young men." I find a great deal that is of interest to me; I just ignore the stuff I'm not interested in, as I assume the young men--and everybody else--likewise do. Yopienso (talk) 06:31, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Indeed, it's as easy to say our content is focused on Indian corporate spam.... we are not on paper, there is not limit to the potential 'size'.... subjects with no article (and admittedly, notable women are apparently underrepresented) is a far more meaningful concept than 'subjects with an article'.... the omissions are what we should care about. Revent 07:23, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Please name a notable woman who does not have a WP article. Yopienso (talk) 19:08, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

There's no need to shout, Yopienso. I think you may share a common misunderstanding about the composition of the Misplaced Pages community. We don't need more female editors because they will create more articles about notable females. We need more female editors because we need to reflect more than just the worldview of young white males. Women may not only have different views on what is important, they may also see things from a different perspective. You've been here for a long time - you know that the same facts can be presented in a number of different ways. If you want to have a neutral encyclopedia, you want to have as much diversity in the community as you can. (By the way, to answer your question off the top of my head, Misplaced Pages has no biography of Leona Beldini. I'm sure there are many many more, but that's not the point.) Cheers! Mr Muffler (talk) 19:44, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Do you think it's mere coincidence there was no response for 24 hours and then a response in half an hour when I raised my voice? But, thanks for answering!

I was responding to the claim "subjects with no article (and admittedly, notable women are apparently underrepresented)".

Leona Beldini, notable woman: a petty crook. Hmmm, I guess she may be notable for being bad. None of those crooks are notable (See the lists on the article page.) except those that were independently notable. Deputy mayors don't seem to cut the mustard.Yo Pienso (talk) 20:02, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

After so many editathons to add all the missing female scientists, artists, etc I imagine that there are far fewer missing articles than there were a few years ago. But that is only a symptom of the problem and correcting it does little or nothing to deal with the root cause (the gender imbalance in the Misplaced Pages community). As for deputy mayors on Misplaced Pages, I guess being deputy mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey is probably not as notable as being deputy mayor of New York City (like Rudy Washington) or a world renowned city such as Launceston, Tasmania (like Jeremy Ball). Anyway, you asked, so I answered. If you don't want to find out why Beldini is notable, I'm not bothered. Mr Muffler (talk) 20:25, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Back to the data

I'd like to go back to the data—many thanks to User:Rich Farmbrough for making it so readily available. Looking at the data, I'm struck by a couple of things. First of all, I'm not sure that a linear model really fits here. When I tried to reproduce the simple linear regression performed by Rich, the adjusted R was fairly low, at 0.6484. More intuitively, the data seem to show that female editorship (as measured by available metrics) was fairly stable around 10% until 2009, when it suddenly jumped to ~20% where it has remained. I added a smoothed spline (in red), which again suggests the relationship here is not really linear. These data don't lead me to believe that female editorship is steadily increasing; instead, they lead me to ask: what happened in 2009?

I went back to the data and truncated/removed all of the data points before 2004 (bottom panel). It's a bit arbitrary, but I think it's reasonable since a) the sample sizes before 2004 are tiny, and b) 2004 marked a huge increase in Misplaced Pages's popularity, readership, and editorship with attendant fundamental changes in the community. Interestingly, the linear relationship becomes much stronger with the truncated data, at least as measured by R, probably as a result of excluding a bunch of 0's from 2001–2003. But once again, the relationship appears to be bimodal rather than linear, split around the year 2009.

The final thing that jumps out about these data is that they suddenly become very noisy around mid-2013. The increase in unexplained variance is really quite striking, since variance was remarkably low up until 2013. I don't know why the data suddenly become so noisy, but this implies that we should be extremely careful about drawing inferences from short-term changes in this metric, since there's a very high risk of over-interpreting statistical noise rather than responding to actual trends.

I don't have much to add to the points raised above about the metrics. Obviously, we're making the very large assumption that the sample of editors who choose to self-identify is representative of the population of editors as a whole. I love the central limit theorem as much as the next guy, but I don't think that large sample size and the CLT can overcome inherent selection and response biases. Of course, there are no better data available, and I hugely appreciate the work that Rich and others have done with what we have—I just want to make sure we're interpreting these data with the appropriate caveats. MastCell  17:54, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I share your doubts about a linear fit, but since my graphing program (Excel if it was on my laptop, open office if it was on my desktop) gave that trend line for free I left it in. There appear to be two jumps. I have posited that the 2009 jump is related to the introduction of edit filters, which meant far less vandalism, and consequently recent changes patrollers being more relaxed. The later jump may relate to things like Teahouse, editathons, coverage of gender balance, etc.

The volatility is curious, but can perhaps be explained by class registrations and larger editathons. If a large number of students or volunteers are following a step-by-step process that includes registering gender, then the gender balance of that class will affect the month it is in. Possibly sock farms might influence them too, but I find that unlikely.

As to the question of whether these are good samples, it is difficult to say, but I can think of one systemic reason it may give a high F/M ratio (classes/editathons), and two to suggest it may be low (desire to avoid identifying as female, to avoid negative consequence, and lack of desire to explore all the preferences options).

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:01, 10 March 2015 (UTC).

This looks to me as if changes to the Preferences/User Profile entry form (or the relevant help file) may have had an effect. The following was added in early 2009:

"Gender: This option allows you to select a gender (male or female), or unspecified. This option is designed for languages where, unlike English, words, and therefore interface text, can change depending on your gender. As such, this option is not greatly useful for English users at present."

How was gender entered before that? The comment about gender being irrelevant for English can't have been very helpful, either. Does anyone know when it was changed to the present form, asking whether the user would like to be addressed as he/she etc. Wasn't there also a (somewhat discouraging) warning that the information would be public? --Boson (talk) 19:45, 10 March 2015 (UTC) PS: I see there is now a message (in small print) "This information will be public." I believe it used to (somewhere) say something like "... but not easily found". --Boson (talk) 20:18, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Good find. I haven't tracked down the source of the phraseology yet, search doesn't find it in a mediawiki page. I'm checking translatewiki, but there are 24k+ mediawiki messages! Design flaw somewhere I think. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:54, 11 March 2015 (UTC).

MediaWiki:Prefs-help-gender seems relevant, but the wording looks like the old wordning you refer to. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:58, 11 March 2015 (UTC).

It appears that these graphs misrepresent the proportion of women by at least(exactly?) two orders of magnitude. The graphs' claim that less than .25%, or one in 400, new users self-identify as female rather than male is obvious nonsense. Is this just an axis labeling issue?--Noren (talk) 16:03, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

You're correct that the y-axis label should read "proportion" rather than "percentage". These are proportions, so 0.2 = 20%, and so on. MastCell  17:40, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I think a linear model might be the best one to use here. While you could construct a more complex model which fits the data better there is the problem of over fitting the data. What I would probably do is fit three straight lines, upto 2009, 2009- mid 2013 and mid 2013 onwards. It looks like there are three distinct regimes to the data, making them not really comparable. Is there any reason for the jump in 2013?--Salix alba (talk): 20:02, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedians should come out of their closets

IMHO the main reason for gender disbalance is not the mythical hostility towards women on wiki (as 95+% of editors do not reveal their gender this factor could only affect less than 5% anyway). The main reason is peer pressure in the real world, there wiki editing is somehow acceptable for male students, barely acceptable for female students, weakly unacceptable for adult family men (considered a strange but harmless hobby) and totally unacceptable for adult married women with family and kids. The idea that a mother of a family spends a few hours a day not earning some wages, not attending for the kids, not tending the home but editing wiki - looks like absolutely atrocious to the society. We need good role model both males and especially females. And we especially need adult professional family males and desperately need happy professional adult females with families. How often have you seen a female wikipedian announcing birth of a child? We must press editors to reveal their identities. Unless special circumstances (e.g. life in a dictatorship couuntry, etc.) editors should work under real names. All Arbitrators/Checkusers/Oversighters should have their real life identity and basic bio revealed. All new admin applications should be accompanied by real names and biographies and, yes, I am sure most !voters would give women especially adult women with families some preferences. Alex Bakharev (talk) 07:41, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I'm sure that the 'men' who edit wikipedia are being fed grapes from lustrous virgins as we speak. Could someone remind me why I (p.s. as a woman) would want to reveal my gender when I don't want simply to please some gender identity demagogues of questionable competence and reputation? Why would I ask the same of a man? This suggestion is underthought and uninspiring. Perhaps the childish feminists of wikipedia, who seem to be self-guilt tripping white men need to man up and respect that one of the reasons they don't see many women editing wikipedia is because they wish to turn every woman into a juvenile. Nobody wants to be special objects. This is not acceptable, fundamentally anti-feminist and embarassing to everyone involved. 62.254.196.200 (talk) 10:06, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

If I could do it over, I sure wouldn't pick a gender-specific user id or otherwise identify as female. I've experienced the same issues that most people complain of, plus stalking, tagteams, mansplaining, and the endless accusations that my politics, because they are actually congruent with the demographic center's preferences instead of skewed to the right as the major political parties skew in their desperate attempt to garner campaign contributions from moneyed interests, are somehow out of the mainstream. Male-identifying users with my point of view do not, as far as I can see, have to deal with that bullcrap. EllenCT (talk) 16:27, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Ya lost me with use of the pejorative "mansplaining." Don't be "femhearing" me now... Carrite (talk) 16:51, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I added a wikilink to aid your comprehension. EllenCT (talk) 17:49, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Does that mean you wiksplained it? Formerip (talk) 19:19, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Do you (Ellen) think that if you would indicate that your technical background makes your understanding of clumsy wiki-syntax and arcane wikirules to be complete (wish I could say so myself) you would still be bothered with offering of help? Maybe you could benefit from some opening of your real life background. Alex Bakharev (talk) 02:22, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Alex, I don't mind being talked down to on technical issues because I realize how difficult it is to discern what an editor does not yet understand from a few limited interactions. The reason I use the perjorative to which Carrite objects is because of the several instances where enthusiastic opposition from editors with primary sources on content disputes where I've gone to the trouble to find literature reviews never have involved a single female editor, even when there were female editors on the other side of the issue. If you can show me how to get the guys to stop countering secondary sources with COI-sponsored primary sources, on Talk:Tax policy and economic inequality in the United States for example, then I would be happy to say more about my background and life experiences. But for now, I would simply prefer to not dignify those WP:COMPETENCE and/or WP:IDHT issues with continued engagement, because the enthusiasm without regard for the rules frankly makes me wonder what other rules they are willing to break to suppress the secondary literature's conclusions with which they disagree. EllenCT (talk) 16:49, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Ah, you missed something there, I'm well aware of the pejorative neologism "mansplaining." See: Pejorative. Happy to help. Carrite (talk) 02:09, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I ,for one, am certainly glad that I have not made anything about my real life identity very public. And given the lack of concern from the arbcom about the attacks on those wikipedia editors who did have their public lives targeted because of their Misplaced Pages editing strikes me as solid gold proof that I would strongly advise against ANYONE doing so, particularly women or people with children. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 17:07, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I think the project as the whole is hindered by unnecessary secrecy over identity of major contributors. Corporations spend billions on so called team-building efforts so to encourage their employees to share their informal lives. Most major charities do the same. They maybe ignorant but not stupid. Currently Wikiediting is seen as a shameful activity suitable only for primary school students (preferably male). This perception hurts the project greatly. Luck of positive role models (particularly adult women) hurts us internally. Difficulty in spotting conflicts of interests arising from the identity secrecy hurts us greatly. I am editing for almost 15 years under my real name, and only once regretted, then some idiot with IP geolocated 10 km from my home was making threats about me. Still under real name helped to clear my name over accusations of COI (some very painful), so in long run was beneficial. Alex Bakharev (talk) 02:22, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

You may consider anonymity "unnecessary". I consider my anonymity on Misplaced Pages the reason that my family has not been subjected to hateful death threats and SWATTING. When you share personal info with a co-worker you are not sharing it with the whole fucking world that is full of crazies who do things like target Misplaced Pages editors they decide they dont like.-- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 02:38, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

• I strongly oppose this principle, and would prefer if physical world factors were excluded from the consideration of Misplaced Pages editors. That was one of the original goals of cyberspace, if one can remember. To break down the walls of reality and replace them with an open space for everyone, regardless of factors that one cannot control, such as the imaginary constructs of sex, race, gender, and so forth. The internet has not worked out that way, but that's what it was meant to be, and what it should strive to be. This demand for people to make a decision as to whether they consider themselves a woman or a man is offensive and absurd. Many of us, for example, consider ourselves neither. What are we to do, then? This obsession with imaginary boundaries, to translate connotations attached to physical principles into the immaterial digital realm, seems to be an attempt by certain people to hold onto a stability of existence that simply does not exist. Neoliberalism really has accomplished its goal, hasn't it? That is, to balkanise the proletariat in every possible way. Instead of allowing the internet to become a space of pleasure in unity and commonality, it has become an expression of artificial difference, controlled by corporations and other unsavoury groups.

Regardless, I find this whole "controversy", if one can call it that, absurd. The neoliberal authorities that control this encylopaedia have no desire other than to balkanise the proletariat, even in a space that is meant to be based on collaboration. They struggle to enforce imaginary boundaries in a space where those boundaries lack visual representation. More and more, we see this battle playing out. The battle, itself, is exactly what the neoliberal authorities want to see. The more they can divide the proletariat, the less the proletariat can fight back against corporate capture. That's what the heart of the matter is. "Come out of one's closet", and be captured by the camera of corporate surveyors and data-mongers. One must recognise that one is in a corporate space, a space where one produces capital for the ruling class without reaping any benefits for oneself. The producer-consumer, the person who carries the burden of the neoliberal class. That is what this encylopaedia is, of course. A factory for content, data, &c., all of which is produced by unwitting participants for the sake of the gain of a few. We are kept occupied by both producing content and consuming it, and by doing so, entrench their dominance. That's not to say there are no other benefits to the project, and of course those are often the reasons that editors remain. However, until the proletariat can break down the imaginary barriers prescribed by the ruling class as a method of dominance, there can be no true freedom or unity in human singularity. It is our duty, then, to stop this continued balkanisation and madness. It is our duty to say no to categories that do not exist, such as "man" and "woman". It is our duty, then, to defend this space from further encroachment by corporate authorities. It may already be too late, but it does not hurt to be a martyr for one's cause. RGloucester — ☎ 19:38, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

• OK, Alex, I'll take the bait. Short answer: no. Long answer: Do we really want Wikipedians to be even more easily doxxed and targeted by online trolls? No.

And if the situation is as you claim and women are ashamed of editing here, requiring them to divulge their real identities would only exacerbate the issues. Many people edit here under anonymous names because they would be ashamed if their real identities were known. KonveyorBelt 19:45, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Why focus on editors instead of readership?

I don't understand why all the focus is on the low participation rate of women when it comes to editing. Above, someone quotes the statistics that "21% of readers and 20% of contributors" identify as women. Therefore, there is no gender imbalance when it comes to who decides to edit - women are not being scared away from contributing. The same percentage of them who come to Misplaced Pages to read become editors as do men. Recently the lunch conversation among my coworkers (in a high tech field) turned toward reading habits as kids. Nearly ever male reported reading an encyclopedia for fun as a child, but I was the only woman who did so. Obviously, this is only anecdotal, but along with the statistics, it suggests that if you want more women to contribute to Misplaced Pages, you first need to get more women to be interested in reading an encyclopedia. Deli nk (talk) 14:13, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

You may be absolutely right. Do notice, however, that the statistic you cite is for the "Global South", in the US, for example, readership (I beleive the question was something like "have you used Misplaced Pages in the past month?") from a large independent survey showed roughly equal numbers of males and females using Misplaced Pages. Of course the way it is used may also vary by gender. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 18:07, 10 March 2015 (UTC).

Thanks for the response. I'm a bit surprised at the disparity in the survey results, though maybe I shouldn't be if the questions were worded very differently. I'd be interested in learning more about the way Misplaced Pages use might vary depending on gender. Deli nk (talk) 18:23, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure which surveys other people are referring to, but I believe the main survey that showed roughly equal participation by men and women (as readers) was based on a representative sample of Americans (with an online connection and a landline telephone), which incidentally also asked about Misplaced Pages usage, and was carried out by an established social/market research organization (Pew), while all the other studies were based on "opt-in", self-selecting samples. Personally, I think it would be much, much better if the Foundation commissioned Pew (or another established organization that routinely performs research for people who bet money on the results) to perform a similar survey of Misplaced Pages readers and editors based on a representative population sample. Doing our own studies with self-selecting samples may be much cheaper but it seems a bit like looking for the lost key in the bushes, in the dark, when you know you dropped it in the road, under the streetlight. --Boson (talk) 21:27, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

PS: I would imagine it would be simplest to add a few questions (e.g. Misplaced Pages editing: frequency, topic and medium) to an existing omnibus survey on Internet usage. --Boson (talk) 11:41, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Confidential poll right here :)

Throw a coin twice, if the first outcome is heads then write down your sex, if it is tails, then if the second throw is heads write down "male" for your sex and "female" if it is tails. If the fraction of females is pf, and the fraction of males is pm = 1-pf, then the expectatio value of the the fraction of "females" in the answers is 1/4 + 1/2 pf, allowing one to estimate pf. Count Iblis (talk) 19:51, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

1. Female . Count Iblis (talk) 19:51, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
2. I am totally confused. Jehochman 02:42, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
3. My coin says either "Reply hazy try again" or "You may already have won!" Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 02:51, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
4. My coin landed on its edge. So...? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 02:55, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
5. I think my coin will land eventually, but I'm currently in a very low gravity environment, so this could take years. ϢereSpielChequers 09:24, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

   And then it will probably bounce a few times and land in a dark corner where it can't transmit the results back to you. Jehochman 14:49, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

   ^I saw what you did there Pedro :  Chat  10:29, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

6. My coin turned into a six-sided die, bounced a few hundred times and landed on Jumanji. Neutron (talk) 03:33, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
7. How far should I throw the coin? I'd like to get it back if possible. AtHomeIn神戸 (talk) 07:43, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
8. I can't actually be bothered to toss a coin. But, as far as I can see, the bigger the sample size, the more reliable the result will be, so I thought I should at least register a response. Formerip (talk) 08:50, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Discussion

I strongly approve of the motivating principles of this poll, but I question whether anyone can know how accurate it is if it's self-selected. Why don't you perform the same poll by asking on, for example, the talk pages of the most recent N editors including IPs, so you can use the responding proportion to evaluate significance, please? EllenCT (talk) 20:44, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Maybe the NSA could save us a lot of time, and just tell us the answer, already! All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:00, 11 March 2015 (UTC).

Good idea! Count Iblis (talk) 17:16, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

The only information this poll can provide is the sex ratio of respondents (assuming that people understand it, and give honest answers). It can tell us nothing about the ratio for contributors in general. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:04, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

That was my point. If you know the proportion of respondents, you can constrain their population statistics, but not if they are self-selected. I would gladly participate in this form of anonymization if it was taking place on respondents' talk pages. EllenCT (talk) 17:50, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

It's not confidential either. It reveals the respondent's sex with probability 3/4. 50.0.205.75 (talk) 23:25, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Spying and such like

I read the piece on nytimes.com here. It strikes me that on a routine basis, for the average, run-of-the-mill tin pot little African dictator not gifted with access to the NSA data (or even if given such access), it is far simpler just to pull the history page and track down the IPs of editors who do not have accounts, assuming said IPs geolocate to their country. Do you not think this is a far greater danger to the brave souls who you say "discuss their work on everything from Tiananmen Square to gay rights in Uganda" (leaving aside the OR and COI issues) and who "prefer to work anonymously"? If we can get a good idea of who someone is from an SPI investigation, possibly the Chinese government may do better?--Wehwalt (talk) 11:14, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I just want to say thank you for the birthday present. @Wehwalt: I think the issue Jimmy and Lila are talking about is not who's been editing but who's been reading. The former is by design easy for anyone to tell; the latter is data that, I'm sure, a lot of advertisers would love to have, much less government security services, and that we ourselves do not make easy to get. Daniel Case (talk) 13:15, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

While that is mentioned, of course, much attention is given to those who contribute, as in the quotes I mention above. Surely editing is an aggravated offense in the eyes of an oppressor?--Wehwalt (talk) 13:41, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Wehwalt. I've thought for a long time that we should replace each IP address with a consistent string of random numbers. It's a bit intrusive just publishing the IP address like that. Though it won't stop the NSA from collecting the IP address behind an edit and using it or passing it to a foreign government - which is Lila's and Jimmy's valid concern - anonymising IP addresses on Misplaced Pages sites would be relatively easy, and if we're paying any more than lip service to privacy concerns, we'd at least do that. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 14:17, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Of course, that would only protect anonymous editors from entities that don't want to look very hard. One that does can always find the space between the device used for doing the editing and the server where the IP address is encrypted, and look at traffic between those two points for the desired info (And there are a myriad ways to do this, not all of them technological—I wouldn't be surprised if, some years from now, we are once again shocked, shocked, shocked that a government agency we charged with clandestinely gaining access to foreign telecommunications has, after being spanked for ... doing exactly that, placed its own moles in perfect man-in-the-middle positions at major telecommunications providers.

But anyway—the best way to secure the privacy of editors under such regimes where they may not want it broadly known that they're editing Misplaced Pages is not so much to anonymize their IPs as to grant them IPBE and let them edit through Tor or whatever chain of proxies work for them. I have been involved with editors in places like Iran and China where we have done this. Daniel Case (talk) 15:16, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

You're framing this as either/or. Regardless of whatever else we do, we should anonymise IP addresses - not publish them for all the world to see. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:37, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I totally disagree with that. Let's get rid of IP editing altogether, not make it easier to sock and engage in POV editing with impunity through an anonymized IP. Carrite (talk) 16:35, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, yes Tim. Let's make every editor identify to the Foundation, too. What the heck; let's pay named experts to write the encyclopedia. Still, while we're waiting for that to happen, let's at least not advertise the IP address of every unregistered editor. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 04:02, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Do you contend that editors using an IP are more anonymous or less accountable than those who take a few seconds to create a user id? EllenCT (talk) 18:05, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

In many ways, IP editing allows more opportunities for unaccountable abusive editing compared to editing as a registered user. For example, if I made consistent inappropriate POV-pushing edits across many articles using my account, other editors would quickly take note and begin to address that behavior in order to put an end to it. However, my home IP address changes every few days, so if I did the same without logging in it would be much less likely that anyone would catch on. My IP address would provide significant anonymity (a Wikipedian couldn't do anything more than determine my rough geographic location within a large urban center). In contrast, someone looking at my account's years of editing history could probably determine (or at least guess at) quite a bit more of my personal information. Deli nk (talk) 18:20, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

+1 Daniel Case (talk) 18:25, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

If we anonymized IP's by some sort of one-way salted hash function, this would not completely solve the problem of making edits private,and would lead to additional issues

1. There are only 4 billion addresses in IPV4, scarcely more than the number of edits on WMF projects (a factor of 4 or 5 at most).
   1. It would be easy if you control your country's infrastructure to make an edit with every IP address assigned to the country, and have a complete map. There might be other less obvious methods, like fetching the talk page for each IP address.
   2. Failing that the hashes for a given company, university or state department would be trivial
   3. Even lacking this, the Birthday Paradox would quickly provide a stream of candidates for Room 101.
   4. Given the above we would have to consider if providing a false sense of security outweighs the benefits.
2. We would loose the ability to make range blocks
3. It would become much harder to do sock-puppet investigations
4. School blocks would become harder to work with
5. COI edits from political, commercial and advocacy organisations would be harder to spot

Note that we could not ameliorate these issues by having a class of volunteer users empowered to "see around" the obfuscation, because they would then become a pressure point for the whole system.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:46, 10 March 2015 (UTC).

No one thinks this would "completely solve the problem of making edits private".

• Regarding your point 1.1, "It would be easy if you control your country's infrastructure to make an edit with every IP address assigned to the country, and have a complete map. There might be other less obvious methods, like fetching the talk page for each IP address." Does Malawi or Somalia have that capability and competence? What about actors who don't have that control but who are capable of coercing an ISP or its employees, or capable of performing a non-CU sock-puppet or COI investigation (those Wehwalt mentions above)?
• Regarding your point 1.2, "Failing that the hashes for a given company ... would be trivial", how so?
• Regarding your point 1.3, "Even lacking this, the Birthday Paradox would quickly provide a stream of candidates for Room 101" Really? How?
• Regarding your points 2, 3, 4 and 5, these objections could be resolved by adding a new user right to the admin kit that enables an admin to "see around" the hash to the IP address. I don't understand your objection, "...because they would then become a pressure point for the whole system." Can you explain the last clause? What does it mean?

It's reasonable to weigh up the privacy and safety of our contributors against the comfort of this site's admins, but I see no real inconvenience to the admins here. Your initial point - it's not the complete solution to all privacy concerns - is valid, but it's no reason not to do it. It's akin to Misplaced Pages moving from http to https. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 05:37, 11 March 2015 (Add https comment 06:40, 13 March 2015 (UTC))

Rich is generally correct here - any organization, regardless of size, can easily crack a fixed hash insofar as it is concerned. A mother can individually write down the hashes of all the IPs her computer gets from her local network, a company can make a database of all the IPs in its block, and the NSA will trivially make a dictionary of the world. It would be possible to make a trackless hash if it is cryptographically secure and incorporates the millisecond of the edit; but then a user can't tell one IP from another at all, so you might as well not show any data about who made it. I have the suspicion that WMF doesn't do that (have simply "Anonymous" as the user credit) because they are trying to cut down on the endless stream of IP tracking requests they must get from miscellaneous bureaucrats all over the U.S.

If there's any 'moral' to be taken from the leaks we've seen, it's that if somebody has really been protecting your privacy, either they're hacked and deluded, or they've had to shut down, or they've been thrown in jail. WMF, on the other hand, has moved its servers to Northern Virginia, next to one of the proposed sites for the new FBI headquarters. I commend the WMF for suing; but I would not be at all surprised if they can't tell us why. (Not that everyone in WMF would know, of course)

I should add that I don't recall ever hearing a solid, you can count on it limit to the information being recorded. As we know, it turned out that IPs of people reading articles were being recorded after all, even though we know the potential abuses of that. And the 90 day limit as I recall was a vague aspiration, not a genuine guarantee. So far I've heard no clear, unambiguous statement that those records have ever actually been destroyed, really don't exist, from any time period whatsoever. (cf. , : "we keep it for the shortest possible time that is consistent with the maintenance, understanding, and improvement of the Wikimedia Sites, and our obligations under applicable U.S. law. Non-personal information may be retained indefinitely."; in the universal language of privacy policies, IP addresses are non-personal information. Just because it can send you to jail doesn't mean it's personal!) Wnt (talk) 01:32, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I think the reason that the 90 days is "weaseled" is because of backups, decommissioned servers, data in use for a piece of statistical work, and so forth. Provided it is treated like fruit, almost all is thrown out when it gets old, and anything that turns up a little mouldy from being missed is deleted, I don't see that as a major problem. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:45, 11 March 2015 (UTC).

This discussion and others here seem to only focus on privacy concerns and spying; but what about info-war on social media. Military’s ‘persona’ software cost millions, used for ‘classified social media activities’, RawStory, 2011 and more are out there; that's just about the US security forces, there's others to do with the Canadian Conservative Party and police/p.r. company meddling/trolling in Canadian news forums, and lots on Epoch Times about China's similar info-war campaigns. It's disingenuous to presume that Misplaced Pages is immune from that; in fact aas one of the easiest sites to manipulate and get away with massively distorted content and POV editing, it's thoroughly infected and there's plenty of circumstantial evidence in numerous topic areas that many governments and corporations infiltrated Misplaced Pages long ago.

And I've learned the hard way lately that there's nobody at WMF whose job it is to control policy violations such as NPOV (in particular) but there's not a few staffers whose job it is to conduct "behavioural controls" who will refuse t to discuss NPOV matters as "not their job" and they "must" keep editorial content separate from behaviourally-defined claims against editors who do try to take on teh sea of POV and SYNTH/OR horsecrap that's flooding Misplaced Pages; "behavioural problems" and POV campaigns are intrinsically linked, and while it does say in NPOV and the POV fork subpage that such tactics are recognizable as a means to "push POV" i.e. to push disinformation; all I'm getting is a mix of shrugs and sloughing-off any responsibility for NPOV from those who attack me instead for "not playing nice" while never looking at the core POV issues that provoked personal attacks against me from admins who are apparently immune from having to abide by "behavioural guidelines" themselves.....shooting the messenger, and blaming the victim, are the oldest propaganda techniques in the book; as is newspeak, which more and more avbuse of guidelines and policies sounds like, along with numerous NPA-oriented essays like WP:TRUTH, WP:DIVA, WP:TLDR and more; ways to shut people down and to pervert words to mean something other than what they do. Hard-wired into Misplaced Pages and more and m ore instruction creep and editorial harrassment rather than informed discussion/examination of the POV/SYNTH content that nobody in the higher-ups and those others who have gathered fake authority around them wantz to deal with; and will condemn anyone who raises the issue as "paranoid delusions".....another line from the manual of infowar perversion, as it 'conspiracy theories. The conspiracy is in-your-face, especially when any mention of such activity results in condemnations come straight out of the 'how to manipulate social media' manuals that are known to be around.Skookum1 (talk) 06:28, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you

Jimmy, please allow me to simply thank you for your lawsuit against NSA spying. Dude, you rock! Jusdafax 16:59, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks are due to a lot of people, of course. This was led by the legal team at the Foundation, fully supported by the board, and only ultimately made possible by the community that built the encyclopedia in the first place. :-)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:14, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is a good idea, while I am all for privacy (see above section) I am very much against WMF advocacy in areas that do not directly affect the WMF supported projects. It is absolutely a matter for EFF and the ACLU, and, arguably Amnesty. But the bringing of the WMF into this suit, and especially in the name of the community, seems of limited value to the project, and quite possibly harmful to the standing of the project and the WMF.

I certainly do not recall any consensus building process.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:32, 10 March 2015 (UTC).

Please see Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station#Controversy over French language version of Misplaced Pages article and the related discussions (mostly in French) at fr:Wikipédia:Bulletin des administrateurs/2013/Semaine 14. If anything similar has been going with the NSA or FBI, the Foundation is most likely completely unable to describe it, let alone consult with the community on the way to proceed. Your tax dollars at work! EllenCT (talk) 21:02, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Not my tax dollars! (Though there was sales tax on the mains adapter I bought in Washington, so maybe my tax dollar singular.) ACLU and others v. NSA seems completely different. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 00:55, 11 March 2015 (UTC).

Yes, thank you Jimmy. The stranglehold that the N.S.A. seem to have is absolutely ludicrous, good grief we should be able to edit without fear of persecution. The stranglehold they have at the moment is doing not only Misplaced Pages but the whole internet a great disservice, it's stopping freedom of expression for one. It would be a great victory if we won this!--5 albert square (talk) 01:13, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

The French example reminds one of Holmes' comment about the Scotland Yard "Brightest thing about them is their buttons." All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:39, 11 March 2015 (UTC).

Jimbo, I would like to thank you for the lawsuit. Thank you and the foundation for this, I respect all of you guys for being a voice for freedom in the internet. And for the record, the program does affect Misplaced Pages. --AmaryllisGardener 01:55, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Wow, let's step back a bit... "stranglehold that the NSA seem to have"... oh yes, I forgot that the NSA has been banging down Wikipedian's door and dragged them away to a concentration camp and gassed them. When they do that to a single person then yes, I'll agree the NSA has affected someone's life. Please, oh please, anyone on Misplaced Pages tell me how the NSA (or any govt "spying") on an American's lives has impacted anyone's life, and please limit it to first hand experiences not "in the news" or "my friend". This idea that some how it is in the US Constitution that the NSA or FBI or anyone (other than the CIA) can not spy on Americans is ludicrous, spying is constitutional as long as the correct legal procedures are followed, which is described and limited by statute, as far as the Constitution is concerned it is open-ended. (The CIA is banned by US law from operating within the US thanks to a holdover of J. Edgar Hoover's protecting his FBI turf, so yes, if they are spying on you, there is a legal problem). Personally, I think Americans are overboard on their belief in their right to privacy and limiting government. A government, as long as it isn't killing people, should be absolute in its authority, the government IS the state. But I'm an old school autocrat. And actually I'm a registered Democrat and EXTREMELY liberal before I start getting hate messages of being Republican or such.97.85.247.26 (talk) 03:09, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

While I don't agree with the WMF being involved in the suit (except as an amicus curae, perhaps) there are significant issues concerning the first and fourth amendments. NSA are also apparently allowed to pass information to other agencies, effectively breaching the "general warrant" protections. Also it is clear that the NSA is not squeaky clean, their log of internal infractions is extensive to say the least. I believe that there was recently some issue over their failure to keep their data secure too...

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 03:37, 11 March 2015 (UTC).

Hmm, I didn't know that people had to die before a lawsuit can be filed. And we know that when concentration camps for the people targeted by the NSA start popping up that a lawsuit will fix everything then, right? No, filing lawsuits before people are actually affected is making use of a strategy called "nip it in the bud". --AmaryllisGardener 05:03, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Anybody can register as a member of the Democratic Party. If you are an "old school autocrat," you are not a democrat, plain and simple — it is a contradiction of terms — nor do you reflect the values of the modern Democratic Party (as opposed to the conservative ruling party of the Deep South before Republican realignment). Go ahead and love and trust Big Brother, that's your right, just don't do it in my name. Carrite (talk) 12:26, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm more concerned about how much foundation resources will be poured into this endeavor. To the extent the NSA is an impediment to growing the encyclopedia vs. other impediments, it seems rather small and American-centric. The argument in the Op-Ed that the Egyptian author who is afraid the NSA will give information to her government begs the question of which government she fears. Wouldn't WMFs effort be better spent challenging Egyptian law in Egypt so that it's no longer a crime rather than worry that it may find its way through the NSA? The other issue is that a FISA challenge has already failed at the Supreme Court regarding U.S. citizens abroad, let alone non-U.S. citizens. While it might be a noble principle, it doesn't seem to be a practical legal strategy if the Supreme Court considers it settled law. The recent decision to regulate the internet as a Title II utility may even make it more difficult if the government can mandate hardware/software interfaces like they did for pen register/tap and trace. I'd expect that law enforcement and NSA will seek regulatory standardization and compliance through the FCC now that it is a utility and the fight would be better saved for another day. --DHeyward (talk) 06:49, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Jimbo, sorry if this has been covered elsewhere, but who is paying for the lawsuit? Is this being paid for by the WMF in whole or part? Mr Muffler (talk) 19:54, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

My understanding is that the ACLU has taken the case on pro bono, so the bulk of the costs will be with them. There are of course some staff costs on our end, in terms of our legal team, communications team, etc., but I don't have an estimate of those numbers at the present time. I can say that this is not going to be a major deviation from our budget. (I'm not even sure it is a deviation at all; I'm just being cautious.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:09, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

This is the first good thing the ACLU has done in a long time. --AmaryllisGardener 14:31, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Really? I guess the ACLU bringing earlier cases challenging government spying was not a good thing then? Or, y'know, its decades upon decades of support for things like voting rights for minorities, freedom of speech protections, opposition to discrimination...heck, just go read their article; they've been involved in practically every major civil liberties issue in the U.S. for over fifty years. For anyone reading this, if you want to support the ACLU's actions, go donate. As stated above, the ACLU is the primary party paying for this case. --71.104.75.148 (talk) 22:15, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

I never heard anything about that lawsuit. --AmaryllisGardener 22:20, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

I'd also like to thank you and the WMF for filing this lawsuit. I contribute to Misplaced Pages because I believe in making the net sum of humanity's knowledge available to all, and it infuriates me to no end that the NSA is spying on and scaring away people who looks up or contributes information to Misplaced Pages. Spirit of Eagle (talk) 05:03, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Rich has asked for "FIRST HAND examples" of (government) spying. It's the ABUSE of authority that is the danger. Otherwise, there is nothing to hide. Agree totally with Rich regarding his amicus curiae idea. My 2 cents! SSZ (talk)

Nitpick, it's curiae, genitive of curia.--ukexpat (talk) 13:06, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

I made the correction:) Any more correction in those docs here? Are you an alumnus or alumna of NSA? (joking) but feel free to use them in Court in support of your case. it is all STATISTICALLY PROVEN (and has not been disputed by the FBI who has received them)..

My laptop has a life of its own now with the cursor moving in all directions. The computer works fine including the antivirus! Very strange.... a coded message from NSA anyone? lol SSZ (talk)

Tracking of readership

I'm starting a new section for clarity. Jimmy Wales (or a technical person from the WMF), would you please explain precisely what data the WMF collects about which pages a) unregistered users and b) registered users visit, at what times they do so etc. Thanks, BethNaught (talk) 08:03, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Every page has a link to the "Privacy Policy" at the bottom, and it has a vague statement on the matter. That's the best that is possible because organizations don't want to commit to precise details then find that some internal problem meant IP logs were kept for a week longer than advertized, or similar. However, that is not relevant to the discussion above which concerns the fact that government-level snooping can easily track which IPs access which URLs at what times. That data would be retained indefinitely and is completely out of the control of whoever runs a website. Johnuniq (talk) 10:11, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, using HTTPS with variable length padding supposedly would make it more difficult for governments to do it that way, though I have my doubts. In any case, privately collected data is much, much easier to use in proceedings - when Texas is prosecuting some unfortunate victim after the precedent of Justin Carter for so-called 'threats' during a gaming session, it's a lot easier to present a list of every time he or she looked up something about guns or explosives if the data was (supposedly) released from a Misplaced Pages database by a hacker, unnamed police infiltrator with admin powers, or by "accidental posting to a public server". Saying "we were cc'd this from the NSA's secret database" is bureaucratically embarrassing. This is even more the case for prosecutions outside the U.S.

Incidentally, a fun application of IP address release, whether from reading or posting, comes in the context of ISIL. Apparently they have started to take an interest in what citizen journalists post from Raqqa, and have used a malware approach to track down and kill people by their IP addresses. It should be within Misplaced Pages's technical capacity to kill some Iraqis, or even start a minor civil war within ISIS, by falsely crediting some IPs with "insider" statements about conditions in the Islamic State, or perhaps as readers of "pornographic" material etc. if that information were to become public, perhaps first getting some expert military advice to choose beloved relatives of relatively powerful people within the city. Wnt (talk) 13:03, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

My question stands. In any case, the reply could be given as to what the WMF intends to do, notwithstanding errors. Please don't derail the thread - this is not supposed to be part of the above discussion but tangential. I am perfectly aware that intelligence agencies can monitor visited URLs (possibly limited by HTTPS) and that is not what I was asking. BethNaught (talk) 13:07, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I am not personally at the present time close enough to the technology to be able to answer this question with the full accuracy and comprehensiveness that it deserves. My understanding, which should be checked against better sources of information, is that the privacy policy allows keeping access logs for up to 90 days, but that in practice retention time is much shorter. The data which would be collected in this context would be stuff like: time stamp, ip address, browser string, url. As John points out, the length of time specified in the privacy policy is longer so as to guard against accidentally breaking the privacy policy with a failed batch job, etc. But I don't know all the current details. Like you, I'm curious, and so hopefully someone from the Foundation can point us to more complete information!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:06, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks

Firstly, I'd like to thank for this. Secondly, I think more needs to be done. I think you underestimate the power you have. You are the spokesperson of the people Jimbo. Don't you ever forget it. We are counting on you to help entrench our liberty and justice. You could start by being more assertive. Kuwii hinugu yiri (talk) 17:54, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you from me too. Well done. --Amble (talk) 16:24, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

About the lawsuit

Jimmy,

I suspect I'm in the extreme minority, but I strongly wish that you and the Wikimedia Foundation had not filed that lawsuit against the NSA. I generally don't oppose what the NSA does, but that isn't why I'm against this lawsuit. It makes me rather uncomfortable to see the Wikimedia Foundation, which is supposed to be building neutral free knowledge projects, getting involved in political advocacy. I opposed The Day We Fight Back and I would have likely opposed the SOPA blackout had I been editing back then. It's even more unsettling to see the news media saying that Misplaced Pages is filing the lawsuit, which implies that the community—whose neutrality is even more important than the Foundation's, since they write the content—is backing this, though I recognize that this mistake is probably not your fault.

I've seen people claiming that this is about anti-censorship or whatnot, but I don't see it that way. I've been editing for nearly three years and have not seen any attempts by the NSA to censor any content here. The community by and large seems to be very good at avoiding censorship cf. WP:Articles for deletion/Gerry Hutch. There's the incident with that French military radio station two years ago, but I don't see removing classified or illegal material as censorship, but rather common sense. So I can only conclude that people think that the NSA tracking readers and doing nothing with that data is somehow skewing the wiki. I say it isn't. The activities that people generally do when building a neutral encyclopedia are not the sort of activities that the NSA would take interest ipn. Thus, the data is simply...data. As an xkcd character says: "Data is imaginary. This burrito is real.". --Jakob (talk) 18:25, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

This is a fundraising stunt. Waste money on a doomed from the start lawsuit, and hope to recoup multiple back in donations.Two kinds of pork_Bacon 18:31, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Maybe I can start a new game. Every time someone says that they shouldn't have filed the lawsuit, I'll donate 5$ to the WMF. If only I had enough money... --AmaryllisGardener 18:37, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

You're up to $15. Seems to me Misplaced Pages should get its own house in order regarding poorly-sourced trivia in BLPs before it goes after the NSA for its effect on individuals' lives. Townlake (talk) 20:05, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

@Townlake: Like I said, if only I won the lottery. If you're concerned about the WMF making wrong decisions, then complain about the superprotect nonsense, that's a real issue. Of course nobody here cares about that, because you don't hear about it in the news, and the only people that seem to care about it are small wiki admins like me. --AmaryllisGardener 20:22, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Wasn't there a huge uproar over superprotect that resulted in the WMF removing it? That seems to me to a bit different from "nobody here cares". And yes, I know the German Misplaced Pages was largely the center of the controversy, but it got plenty of discussion here on en, including some on this very page. --71.104.75.148 (talk) 23:37, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Hmm, so what do you think the WMF, as opposed to the community, should do about poorly-sourced trivia in BLPs? If only there was a software feature that the WMF could use to enforce their approved version of an article... The WMF can call all it wants for changes to BLPs, but it's up to the community to buy into those ideas and actually implement them, unless you want the WMF to start taking an editorial role. And anyway, "problem X exists, therefore do nothing about problem Y until problem X is fixed" is a form of the perfect solution fallacy. One might as well say, slavery still exists in the world (including the U.S.), so why are you wasting time talking about problems with some website? --71.104.75.148 (talk) 23:37, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

It is the WMF's responsibility to do something about Misplaced Pages's BLP issues, because the community has proven incapable of doing so. At some point the WMF will need to install adult leadership, and acknowledge that its administrators, who in fact have the most important police powers here, can't pretend they're simply janitors. As for your "perfect solution fallacy," what I was pointing out is that it's rather silly for Jimbo to cry "NSA is unfair to living people!" while he continues to revel in his role as a founder of a site that hosts thousands of inaccurate BLPs about living people. Call that whatever fallacy you like, I guess. Townlake (talk) 02:02, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

(And now my third indentation level...) Isn't the whole idea behind the NPOV policy that no person is free from bias, but when writing articles people should strive to consciously avoid that bias? To me this idea that "Misplaced Pages is neutral and therefore the community should not advocate for anything" is stretching the policy into something it was never meant to mean. All it means is that Misplaced Pages's editorial content should be neutral. Revising the warrantless wiretapping article to say "it is bad and should be stopped" would be violating the NPOV policy. I see no problem with the Foundation, or community members, saying "we personally oppose this"—we even have a community newspaper that regularly publishes opinion pieces. To take an extreme example, if a government were to consider banning Misplaced Pages, I would hope that the WMF and the community would publicly oppose that, not say "we must be neutral, and thus we have no opinion". And indeed, the WMF has taken some steps, such as improving HTTPS access, to make it easier for people to access its projects in places where the government censors them.

Next, the concern that I think many people have is that the U.S. government's surveillance of the Internet can have a chilling effect on the project as well as its users. If reading or editing certain articles is likely to invite government scrutiny, that is going to influence behavior. Just because the government is not telling the WMF that it must censor certain content does not mean that nothing it does can have an effect on the project. It is also of note that the NSA shares its information with many other countries' intelligence agencies. To put it bluntly, I feel you are thinking, "I live in a developed nation with a tradition of civil liberties, and I'm not a bad guy, so I don't expect the NSA's surveillance to affect me." If you were living in a country like Egypt (whose government has intelligence ties to the U.S.) I think you might feel a little differently. And now I have some bad news for you: the projects host a fair amount of information that is classified. The details of the NSA (and other intelligence agencies') programs are classified, and we would not know most of them had Snowden not leaked the information. Leaking something does not un-classify it, so if you think all classified information should be removed from the projects, there are quite a few deletion requests that need filing. --71.104.75.148 (talk) 23:37, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

You're on the money about en.wp's fetishisation of the notion of "neutrality". It's bonkers. For instance, we recently decided against including photos from the Charlie Hebdo marches on the front page because it might have been perceived as taking sides, and instead ran the ITN box for that period without images. You couldn't make it up. What's more, your analysis of why NSA surveillance may be a risk to the project seems at least reasonable to me.

I think it's an issue, though, that WMF seems to be pursuing a quite specific political agenda with regard to Internet freedoms, which is not an area that lends itself easily to black and white thinking, and appears to be doing so without much regard to whether or not they have the support of the projects in their various positions. This is problematic as a question of accountability, because this lawsuit will presumably cost money, and WMF didn't earn that money, we did. Formerip (talk) 00:16, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Some more thoughts: I fully expect that one of the government's arguments in this case will be that the specific details of the surveillance programs in question are classified, and thus should be suppressed as evidence. Then, they will argue, once that evidence is removed, there is no evidence of any harm to the defendants, so the case should be dismissed. Joseph Heller would approve.

And it's not necessarily true that NSA surveillance won't affect you. U.S. government officials have previously lied to cover up the fact that they were motivated to investigate a suspect by information provided by the NSA, using a tactic called parallel construction. The known cases appear to involve phone records, not Internet activity, but the precedent is there.

Other point: the idea some have that the WMF has historically not taken any political stances is wrong. There is one political issue in which the WMF and community has long been involved: copyright. The very requirement that all content on WMF projects be free content (outside of narrowly-defined fair use exceptions) is, I think, much more political an idea than many contributors realize. This may be because many come from the technolibertarian set and have already bought into the idea. It effectively ties the projects into the whole copyleft/free software memeplex, which is basically opposed to copyright as it currently exists. Go read the GNU Manifesto if you doubt the radicalism inherent in the idea; Stallman, the author, popularized the idea of copyleft, and it's not an accident that Misplaced Pages started out using the GNU Free Documentation License. And the WMF has taken actions in the arena of copyright, joining an amicus brief in Golan v. Holder, endorsing lobbying efforts to reform European copyright laws, and hosting content that in many ways pushes at the boundaries of copyright law in areas such as the whole monkey selfie thing, freedom of panorama, and reproductions of 2-D art in the public domain (the Foundation officially endorsed this, even). The last two things are notable, because they are particularly controversial: ask anyone in the museum field. Many museums hate this since it cuts into their revenues—have you noticed that a lot of museums prohibit photography? The reason none of them have sued the WMF over it is most likely because it would be a public relations disaster for them, given the good press the WMF enjoys. So this stuff exists; most people just aren't aware, because it doesn't generate front-page headlines like "Misplaced Pages sues NSA" does. And the free content requirement has effects on the project's editorial slant. There are plenty of things we can't include because they're not freely licensed; this contributes to systemic bias. For instance if you look at articles on computing, images outside of articles on specific non-free software (like Microsoft Office) will likely be of free software like the GNOME desktop, even though that's not representative of the software that most people use. If you wanted to place neutrality above all else, one of the first things you would do would be to throw out the free content requirement. --71.104.75.148 (talk) 01:16, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

There is a difference between neutrality and the neutral point of view. We oppose fringe views, quackery, pseudoscience, superstition, and popular misinformation contrary to the secondary reliable sources, strongly in favor of (possibly opposing multiple) mainstream views. To the extent that government eavesdropping actively prevents editors from being able to compose an accurate encyclopedia, as Wales and Tretikov clearly explained in their NYT op-ed, that eavesdropping precludes the neutral point of view. The idea that Misplaced Pages has to be some kind of Switzerland, as friendly to homeopathy as addition, and as open to government eavesdropping and censorship as government documents, is just plain wrong. There's no way to sugarcoat it. EllenCT (talk) 04:41, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

I completely agree. NPOV is not a suicide pact, and I do not believe that we should just sit back and allow programs like SOPA or NSA mass surveillance to effectively shut down Misplaced Pages or scare away our readers and editors. Furthermore, if we are going to blindly enforce NPOV in everything we do regardless of the consequences, then we should probably take down all of our firewalls and security programs. After all, these programs are really biased against hackers. Spirit of Eagle (talk) 05:42, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 11 March 2015

• Special report: An advance look at the WMF's fundraising survey

• News and notes: WikiWomen's History Month—meetups, blog posts, and "Inspire" grant-making campaign

• In the media: Gamergate; a Wiki hoax; Kanye West

• In focus: WMF to NSA: "stop spying on Misplaced Pages users"

• Traffic report: Misplaced Pages: handing knowledge to the world, one prank at a time

• Featured content: Here they come, the couple plighted –

• Op-ed: Why the Core Contest matters

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Arbitration topic ban appeal — is sexual assault a "gender-related controversy"?

Jimmy,

I write to formally appeal to you the absurdly overbroad nature of the topic ban imposed upon me by the Arbitration Committee. The Committee has now apparently decided that sexual assault and campus rape are "gender-related controversies" and thus I am indefinitely topic-banned from editing anything related to it — any person who has been sexually assaulted, who has discussed sexual assault, who has written about sexual assault, who has prosecuted a sexual assault, who has portrayed a sexual assault victim on stage or screen, who has studied sexual assault... and this would seem, by extension, to extend to any creative work about sexual assault. ArbCom has effectively declared that victims of sexual assault have become involved in a "gender-related controversy." Is that your intent for this project?

This strikes me, and a number of others, as both a ludicrously overbroad remedy which is unnecessary and entirely unrelated to the Gamergate controversy, and as an extraordinarily-punitive remedy which imposes upon me the burden of examining every single article I edit to be sure that person or topic cannot be connected to sexual assault. Does the ban extend to The Vagina Monologues, Oprah Winfrey, A Time to Kill (1996 film), Lady Gaga, Teri Hatcher, Tyler Perry, Nevada Barr, the University of Idaho, the National Organization for Women or Maya Angelou? Am I required to file a request for clarification before editing each one?

Moreover, what relationship do these articles in any way bear to my alleged "transgressions" relating to Gamergate, and what encyclopedic purpose is served by this ban? What message are you and the Committee sending by banning me from editing articles about people, and women in particular, who have been the subject of repeated and vicious attacks or attempts at overtly-negative and hostile portrayals on the encyclopedia, when everything I have done has been in defense of the encyclopedia's basic policies relating to depicting these people fairly and in a manner that respects their humanity. I await your response. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 04:44, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Is Jimbo a current member of ArbCom? I did not know that. Cullen Let's discuss it 05:30, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

I have been denied the right to appeal to the Arbitration Committee for a period of one year. It is up to this project's founder now. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 05:43, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Why not wait out the year, which is now ten months? Cullen Let's discuss it 06:02, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Construing the Gamergate topic ban so broadly as to cover anything from Elizabeth Smart to Lena Dunham to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (three articles which have literally not the slightest thing to do with Gamergate) is patently ludicrous, that's why. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 06:08, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

@Cullen328: Wait, so he was explicitly told by a member of the Arbitration Comittee that he could appeal to Jimbo at any time, and now when he is doing so you are complaining about it? That's...inane. Revent 09:09, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Rape is not about gender, it's about power. Yet another idiotic decision by Arbtwits. 80.62.197.89 (talk) 06:36, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Call them "Arbtwits" if you so choose, IP editor 80 and so on and on. But those "twits" stood before the community, with all their edit histories under scrutiny, with lots of competing candidates, and the community elected them. I, for one, followed those recent elections very closely, and am of the opinion that the community made generally good decisions. How often has the community endorsed your ability to judge others as "idiotic"? Cullen Let's discuss it 07:21, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

I think you are right to request clarification of where the limits of your topic ban lie, but I think it obvious that the two articles you mention first, sexual assault and campus rape are squarely within the topic ban. The first is in the category 'Gender studies' and the second is in the category 'Rape' which is in the category 'Gender-based violence'.

Applying the same sort of test to some of your hypotheticals might be a very useful guide for you. Most of them are not in categories relating to gender. This guideline may not be perfect, but should help you steer clear of trouble.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:22, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

And here is the crux of the issue. I have edited neither article you refer to. Rather, I have edited a biography of Lena Dunham, someone who has incidentally written about being a victim of sexual assault, with my edits being principally to remove unfair and slanted depictions of that subject, including edits from an editor who declared that the article subject was "vile and repugnant" and who declared their intent and purpose in editing the article to ensure it depicted the subject's purported "misdeeds, tawdriness and lies". Am I prohibited from editing the biography of any person who has ever been the victim of a sexual assault? Is the fact that a person suffered a sexual assault and discussed it to be considered a "gender-related controversy"? If so, then yes, all of the above articles mentioned might at some point be construed by someone to involve a "gender-related controversy," because all of the above articles involve discussions of sexual assault or might do so at some future point (writers who have written about sexual assault, for example).

Contra your statement, Jimmy, the only "gender-related" categories which Lena Dunham is in are "American feminists" and "Jewish feminists." Are you saying that the mere act of being a self-identified feminist makes that person part of a "gender-related controversy"? Am I prohibited from editing the article of literally any person who declares themselves to be a feminist? NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 10:41, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

I do not see how do make that assertion -- "feminism" per se is "gender related" beyond a doubt. Writing about a person where "feminism" is not involved is not, however, gender related. In the case of Dunham - yes -- a person barred from gender topics may not edit any claim related to gender issues. Collect (talk) 11:47, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

List of Members of the Administration of George W. Bush who are strongly associated with Project for the New American Century

Asserts through SYNTH that anyone who signs a single letter supported by a group is automatically "strongly associated" with the group. This is all too reminiscent of a practice where people who signed letters for "Communist fronts" were then labelled as "Communists" which I regard as not in keeping with Misplaced Pages policies and principles. In fact, I consider the compiling of such a list to be contrary to WP:BLP and WP:NPOV off the bat. To be "associated" with any group should require an active desire to be so labelled, not merely signing a single letter. And, in my opinion, this applies to any group, religion, etc. whatsoever - we do have "freedom of association" and having Misplaced Pages define a person to be "associated" is hubris on the part of Misplaced Pages. In fact, it was what was done with Americans of Japanese descent who belonged to any "Japanese-related society" in WW II, or to Germans who attended meeting of the Liedertafel societies - this is likely less of a "bad group" but we should not allow Misplaced Pages to define membership or association in any group. Collect (talk) 11:43, 13 March 2015 (UTC)