feedyourdeadnametothevoidfish:

nose:

the todd howard thing was fun for a day lets stop now and not do this again because wikipedia is actually like a fantastic website thats completely free and a lot of people voluntarily contribute to and moderate the website for no pay and we shouldn’t make it harder for them

yeah but maybe lets not act like Wikipedia editors are all virtuous heroes when every decent editor I knew was bullied and harassed off the site by aggressive dudebro culture like a decade ago

#maybe things have changed now idk #I’ve not really paid attention since 2006 #there’s a lot about that site that stinks

In my experience a lot has changed in 12 years, yeah. Wikipedia has spend A LOT of energy tackling it’s dudebro culture and although it’s by no means a perfect place now and the majority of editors are still white men, but the difference between now and 2006 is big.

What I particularily like is seeing Wikipedia openly communicating about it’s efforts to be better and the challenges that poses in an environment that is as lightly moderated as possible. 

They started out simply trying to recruit more women to become editors and organizing editing events for women and when that didn’t work they admitted that they failed (not like ‘results were less than satisfactory’ but like ‘we completely failed’), and then reviewed what wasn’t working and decided that they needed to make the wikipedia culture safer first and to create a culture in which not only hard sciences and tech stuff was considered ‘encyclopedia worthy’.

They didn;t magically solve that in a few years and they keep admitting that the problem of tech geek male culture runs even deeper than they previously anticipated, but it’s an open learning process that they clearly put effort into and communicate about, which I find a joy to watch.