New Signpost piece: ""
First of all, they've got the headline wrong. This was not a Wiki Education course, it was a Howard University course.
Here is a WikiEd course you can enroll in right now. https://wikiedu.org/wikidata/ It meets twice a week (Tues & Thurs) for three weeks, March 1-17, 9am-10am Pacific time. The cost is $800 USD for an individual or $700 each/ with group discount if you bring a friend. Here is a syllabus you can look at. https://wikiedu.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Wikidata_syllabus_generic.pdf They list 8 current staffers, including one tech person and one fundraising person. I seem to remember a few years ago they had a bunch of staff layoffs due to budget cuts, but I can't find it now. https://wikiedu.org/about-us/ They maintain an educational dashboard, which is also used by anyone doing an editathon, and a set of self-paced instructional modules. A few years ago the WMF tried to build a parallel outreach dashboard, but the last I heard, it had been quietly abandoned. I met a few of them at various meetups ages ago, when people were still having meetups, and they were very knowledgeable, and even had free glossy brochures they gave me.
They did get the harassment part right. The person who got harassed was someone named Wizzito. Wizzito did everything just fine, in fact very routine stuff. Wikipedia needs more Wizzitos and fewer Pokémon patroller types.
The instructor seemed inexperienced and did exactly what inexperienced instructors do. Twitter. Usually when they do this, they get, first, a lot of people who are dumbfounded at Wikipedia's arcane rules and goings-on, and second, a few experienced people who can explain it, and how to work with it, fellow academics they already know and trust. In this case the instructor got zilch, her "support" network just made things worse, but she is a black woman, so what is new. Someone has to pioneer these things, and she did.
If you have never heard of Howard University, it was an early historical black school. According to Wikipedia, "In its first five years of operation, Howard University educated over 150,000 freed slaves."
Maybe Howard Univeristiy can't afford the $800 training sessions, or maybe they can, and the positions are going to men. The current WikiEd offerings are about Wikidata anyhow, so even if she wanted training, where could she get it? Years ago, Wikimedia DC used to go over there every year during Black History Month and do free training, but they stopped getting invited. No one knows why. There were a few members who really looked forward to that event too. Let's see, the last one seems to have been in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/DC/Howard By now, Howard University could have had a whole campus conversant in this stuff.
It's just lucky that this group, whatever it was, had their Wikipedia article deleted, because after the Signpost article, it would have filled up with negative publicity very quickly. There is a whole lot of work to be done here, but by academia, not by Wikipedia. Let's hope someone with some PR sense can get involved with it before the next class project.
What about WikiEd? Should they have done something differently? Here are a couple of recent blog posts:
Not bad for an organization with 8 employees. Here's a challenge for all the Monday morning quarterbacks over at you-know-where. Take eight of your finest minds, the sharpest tacks in the box over there, and create the program you want to see. Then get some newbies from somewhere and test it out in front of everyone so we can see all their edits -- and yours. We are waiting for ya'll to do something besides throw rocks.
And of course Valereeeee should have helped the students. You always see men helping men learn how to edit. But when it comes to women editing, the teamwork seems to suddenly evaporate and they forget they are building an encyclopedia. And if you think it is not valuable to model concepts you are trying to impart, google Bloom's taxonomy.
So what about WikiEd defending the instructor?
Who is their client? Is their client Wikipedia, the volunteers, admins, and arbitrators who routinely throw rocks at newbies? No. Their client is the educational community. So, yes, they should have defended her. They really have no choice on that. Should someone have defended Wizzito? Absolutely. And I think they did. But we have already seen that WikiEd cannot do that, they already have their client, and it would be a conflict of interest. They can only respond to an issue after someone else takes the initiative.
Should the rules be changed because it is an underrepresented group? We all know that white males are exempt from the rules, so it is tempting to say why not ignore the rules in this case, the same as for everyone else. But so far, the Women in Red Wikiproject has resisted that, even as they continually point out the double standards. And I think they are right to emphasize rules and fairness. It's sort of a Ginger Rogers situation, doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.
Too many vocal people are taking the attitude that Wikipedia is a precious diamond that must be protected from all fingerprints. But what if Wikipedia's real product is not the encyclopedia itself. What if the real product is the process that produces the Wikipedia.
Imagine a world in which all the people who are now watching Joe Rogan's podcasts had learned to edit Wikipedia as a class project.
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