Jump to content

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-03-31/Special report

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Signpost
← Back to Contents
View Latest Issue


Special report

Wiki Loves (50 Years of) Pride

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Lane Rasberry

Wiki Loves Pride 2019 prepares to commemorate 50 years of LGBT+ activism

2019 is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots which inspired the first Pride parades

The Wikimedia community invites friendly people everywhere to participate in Wiki Loves Pride, the annual campaign to improve the scope and quality of our LGBT+ content. Edit articles, share photos, recruit your friends, and help your local LGBT community centre to organize a wiki editing party! Even though Pride Month is in June, the Wikimedia community starts celebrating early to publish content, prepare events, and to be ready to have discussions in 2 months when the celebration month starts.

2019 is special as the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the inciting event for the first Pride march. Pride marches now happen every year in many cities around the world. This anniversary is an occasion to reflect on what LGBT+ activism has done and what is still left to do. Older retellings of the Stonewall protest understated the contributions of trans people of color in being the first to speak out against oppression and the demographic which carried the burden of some of the worst discrimination. It is still true that in many places transgender and nonbinary people experience discrimination more often and more harshly than other demographics. For this 50th anniversary, consider that every city and every demographic has its own history of LGBT+ culture and activism, and edit Wikipedia to bring forward more of these stories and narratives.

The Signpost invites diversity

You can edit or write for The Signpost!

The Signpost published a misguided humor column in the February 2019 issue. The people involved in writing and publishing the article had good intentions and reputations for being advocates for the LGBT+ community. Because of this, the answer is not to discourage anyone from being bold in making news submissions, but rather to encourage our diverse contributor base to better respect all parts of our community. For people who want to discuss that column more, and how The Signpost can do better, there are channels for this. But another way to make your voice heard is to contribute to The Signpost. It always seeks contributors who will write journalism, interviews, and opinions on topics of interest to Wikipedia's community of editors. If you understand some segment of Wikipedia which is less known to others, then uncover the process in journalism to educate and entertain your fellow editors. Anyone who knows nothing about Wikipedia but who is willing and able to conduct and write an interview may contact editors in the usual channels, ask a few questions, and report their stories. Share the kinds of stories which you would want to read! Start by proposing your idea in the Signpost newsroom.

Anyone can edit!

Discuss anything Wiki LGBT+ at WikiProject LGBT Studies

Participate in Wiki Loves Pride by editing Wikipedia, submitting photos of your local pride parade, or improving the scope and quality of Wikipedia's LGBT+ coverage in whatever way is most interesting to you.

Discuss articles at WikiProject LGBT Studies

Anyone with questions about editing Wikipedia's LGBT+ articles can find peer to peer assistance at WikiProject LGBT Studies, which is the primary forum for curating LGBT+ content on English Wikipedia. Anyone who has ideas for better ways to present articles can do so there. If you are new to Wikipedia and you write some content, you can join the WikiProject by participating in conversations and sharing your edits on the talk page.

Anyone can organize your own outreach!

The theme for the March 2019 Art + Feminism campaign is "Gender + The Non Binary".

Consider organizing a wiki editing event at your local LGBT community centre or other queer-friendly space. At a typical event, a group of people meet for 1-2 hours in a place with computers and Internet access. The event host chooses a topic, such as "LGBT history in this community", and everyone in attendance shares information on that topic in Wikipedia. See WP:Meetup for some instructions. Consider replicating the outreach model of the Art + Feminism project, which set its 2019 Wikipedia editing theme as "Gender + The Non Binary". Consider using the instructions that Art+Feminism uses for their events, and if you organize an event, leave a notice of it on the Wiki Loves Pride 2019 page.

Anyone can join wiki governance and policy writing!!

Just as Wikipedia's articles come from the community of editors, so do its administrative committees and policies. You can join!

Aside from being an encyclopedia which people read, Wikipedia is also a place where writers, researchers, experts, and readers meet to collaborate in producing that encyclopedia. Part of making the encyclopedia is establishing the culture and guidelines that enable everyone to enjoy creating articles together. Just as anyone can edit Wikipedia articles, anyone can also participate in community organization and edit Wikipedia's rules and guidelines. Consider joining a Wikimedia community organization for developing outreach plans, strategies, writing guidelines, and policies of interest to the LGBT+ community!

Our major challenge is not countering abuse, but rather providing better educational resources and guidance to people for constructive collaboration on Wikipedia. One part of making things better is showcasing projects in the theme of the gender nonbinary through Wiki Loves Pride and other community groups that have positive things to offer. But just as everyone is invited to write Wikipedia's articles, so is everyone able to write policies which teach a culture through which we show respect to each other and foster diversity and inclusion. If you do not see yourself represented, then please speak up and represent yourself.

Community conduct

Everyone agrees that Wikipedia should be a place for friendly collaboration. On occasion, the great diversity of Wikipedia matches together people of different understanding and culture. Although they mean well, the conduct and interaction policies we establish either resolve or prevent anyone from causing or feeling offense or attack. Some people have behavior which is incompatible with community collaboration and Wikipedia best serves this demographic by encouraging them off-wiki and where they can find outlets where their contributions are a better fit.

Many projects have a non-discrimination policy or a code of conduct. English Wikipedia has neither of these. Should it? Share your thoughts on these experimental proposals which could use your feedback.

Manual of style

The Guild of Copy Editors is a community of people who apply Wikipedia's Manual of Style to articles

The Wikipedia:Manual of Style is a collection of guidelines which the Guild of Copy Editors and other editors use to support uniform clarity and respect in Wikipedia's articles.

Develop English Wikipedia's gender identity guideline at MOS:GENDERID or review related discussion at "Manual of Style/Gender identity".

Increasingly, Wikipedia relies on structured data to categorize and report its content. Off-wiki devices, including personal assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google products, use Wikipedia and Wikidata content as the foundation of the general reference information which they provide in response to user requests. Learn about the issue and share your opinion with others in developing the Wikidata policy for gender tagging with structured data.

Join Wikimedia LGBT+

Wikimedia LGBT+, you can join!

You are invited to join Wikimedia LGBT+, a Wikimedia community organization, to organize and promote LGBT+ wiki programs and events! Like many wiki organizations, this one is scrappy and volunteer run with no budget or particular administration. Anyone who wishes to join may, and anyone can organize LGBT+ wiki programs. There's more! The Wikimedia Foundation is currently organizing the conversation around the movement-wide strategy. If anyone wishes to represent Wikimedia LGBT+ in the Strategy Liaisons Organized Group, then please volunteer to be the individual who represents all LGBT+ people who use or feel the influence of Wikimedia projects. Such representative opportunities in global conversations regularly occur both in Wikimedia and other international organized calls for comment, so join the group if you want to be heard.

← Previous "Special report"
Next "Special report" →
+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

BlueRasberry - thanks for this. Smallbones(smalltalk) 15:34, 31 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

+1 ---Another Believer (Talk) 16:05, 31 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Illustration of a "tick", as used to deride those with complaints about Signpost's "misguided humor column". Though no doubt this will be dismissed as another misguided joke.

Hi @Bluerasberry:. With regard to your words that make it appear that Signpost will officially "encourage our diverse contributor base to better respect all parts of our community", could you confirm whether the Signpost community still includes or has excluded the two people that just a few days ago wrote the following, and have never made an apology for these and other deliberately offensive and derogatory comments about those brave enough to stand up to them and object to what you now reframe as a "misguided humor column"?

  • "My point was that the same "gender warrior" types are making everyone miserable everywhere about everything they can think of, using the same "distort what you really said and claim you're saying something very different and that it's an attack on TG people" bullshit, and they're crawling all over Wikipedia like ticks [...] I care about reasoned writers being witch-hunted by censorious TG/NB "allies", a bunch of hypocritical busybodies – over things the writers didn't actually say or mean. It's just one example of the sorts of PoV crap that hits us in waves, of course, but it's one hardly anyone will dare to speak up about, because even doing so garners accusations of "transphobia" (it has nothing to do with that at all, but with calling TG-obsessed, cis-gendered extremist activists on their bullshit)." diff
  • "I find your rejection of my email to be an empty political gesture bowing to political pressure from braying sheeple. Thank you for letting us know that the WMF took this step." diff

Note that "TG" above is being used as an abbreviation for "Transgender" and "NB" for "Non-Binary".

If no lessons have been learned, then using the names of WikiProject LGBT Studies and the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group as if those communities are part of, or should be seen as supporting the Signpost immediately after the "misguided humor column", is empty political spin and a misuse of the reputation of these long established LGBT+ communities. LGBT+ Wikipedians and our allies should not be expected to be derided as "Sheeple", "Gender Warriors", "TG-obsessed", "extremist activists" or degraded as "Ticks".

Thanks --Fæ (talk) 18:00, 31 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thank you for at least describing the humour column in the previous issue "misguided", though I was certainly hoping for a more formal apology. I am definitely glad that the Signpost is still going strong and that you are using this incident (in a way) to encourage LGBT editors to contribute their perspectives to the newsletter. This article is good and I am glad very glad to be directed to some LGBT-related conversations that play on Wikimedia. I was unaware that Wikidata still has one property for "sex or gender" and that the situation there is still fairly awkward, so I'll definitely look into that! That all being said, I really would have liked a formal apology rather than an immediate defense on the authors involved in the incident... ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 10:04, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Aditionally, great ideas and input from the LGBT+ User Group at the 2019 strategy summit! T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 13:53, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thank you Bluerasberry for this exceptionally well constructed and well written article - and some credit is due also to Headbomb for his Copy editing. Quite clearly this is a piece about Gay Pride and Wikipedia's efforts to support LGBT objectively; it was not intended to be a further apology for a 'misguided' humour piece: The Signpost published a misguided humor column in the February 2019 issue. The people involved in writing and publishing the article had good intentions and reputations for being advocates for the LGBT+ community. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:19, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Explore Wikipedia history by browsing The Signpost archives.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2019-03-31/Special_report&oldid=1193878447"