Wikipedia:THREATENING2MEN
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-08-19/Op-ed
This op-ed is excerpted from an "open peer-reviewed" article that originally appeared in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. Academic references and footnotes can be found at that link.
| “ | When schools discourage reporting, they collude with many societal forces to cover up sexual violence. Sexual violence thrives on secrecy. – Jennifer J. Freyd, "Official Campus Statistics for Sexual Violence Mislead", Al-Jazeera, July 14, 2014 | ” |
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Spring 2014 was a long semester, marked by a campus-wide anti-rape movement that took off at the University of Oregon (UO). In the wake of a high-profile case, administrators callously and robotically rehearsed the "one time is too many" – a catchphrase that through its rhetorical singularity renders campus sexual violence an "isolated issue". Arguments that UO was somehow unique or unusual in its unsafe environment and unethical public-relations approach to public safety became rampant in public forums and the comment sections of online articles.
The idea of writing campus sexual violence into Wikipedia was born of these circumstances, growing out of a conversation with campus activists around the US about universities' efforts to keep campus sexual violence invisible. By increasing the amount of freely available information on the long history of campus sexual violence around the country, we could provide information for people looking to learn about the ways UO was not isolated or unique, but part of a network – and a structure – of gendered violence in US colleges and universities.
I spent some five hours creating the Wikipedia category Schools under investigation for Title IX violations, which included a short introduction and links to all 72 colleges and universities that the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced were "under investigation" for Title IX and Clery Act violations. Alongside this category, I devoted the better part of a week to researching and writing up specific circumstances about campus sexual violence into the English Wikipedia's college and university articles, drawing on sources ranging from national newspapers to student publications documenting campus sexual violence on the 72 campuses.
Within 12 hours of finishing, my many hours of labor were completely undone: information about campus sexual violence was removed from college and university pages because it was not "defining" of the institution (WP:UNDUE), was from an "unreliable" source (WP:RELIABLE), because the events were too recent to be understood as historically relevant to institutions (WP:RECENTISM), or because they were written in a "biased" tone (WP:POV). The category I created – an index of schools announced under investigation by the federal Department of Education as part of a precedent-setting move towards transparency – was nominated for deletion (consensus driven) and speedy deletion (administratively executed in cases of defamatory content). Citing the range of editorial reverts on content referencing campus sexual violence, a group of Wikipedians successfully deleted content about campus sexual violence through what I'll refer to as WP:THREATENING2MEN, drawing on what I refer to later as the hegemony of the asshole consensus.
Here, I want to use my experience of writing campus sexual violence into Wikipedia to shine a light on misogynist information politics (infopolitics hereafter) on the so-called "encyclopedia anyone can edit". By misogynist infopolitics, I mean the ways in which "factual information" is defined and consequently produced through struggles concentrated around defining, preserving, and protecting a form of masculinity based on male privilege and misogyny that is always already defined in relation to femininity-as-inferior. On Wikipedia, a misogynist infopolitics dictates that "factual information" pertains to but does not threaten a sense of masculinity situated in a social world beyond the confines of Wikipedia. This sense of masculinity can be enacted and protected by both men and women. Thus, rather than "ontologizing" gender in criticizing Wikipedia's gendered hostilities, or focusing on the positivistic "how many women equals equality" question that defines Wikipedia's "gender gap" civilizing mission, I focus on how misogynist infopolitics define Wikipedians' interactive habits, shaping the social environment in ways that make Wikipedians of many genders and sexualities hostile to information that challenges forms of male privilege understood to be endangered by institutional diversity initiatives.
I'm particularly interested in the ways that "ruling with reason" via WP:<POLICY> facilitates Wikipedians' misogynist attempts to maintain male privilege in the face of various Wikimedia Foundation initiatives to increase Wikipedia's diversity both in terms of content and users. For simplicity's sake, I codify "ruling with reason" as expertise, drawing on a long history of science and technology scholarship. Debates on talk pages and administrator boards, alongside those in edit summaries, are often not about the validity of information itself, but the metapragmatic dimensions of its inclusion as determined by Wikipedians with expertise. In the case of campus sexual violence, facts came under question not through debates about statistics and occurrences of sexual violence, but rather through debates about the value of including this "type" of content on Wikipedia as per WP:<POLICY>. In many instances, I was accused of bringing a "feminist bias" into an "otherwise neutral" or "objective" encyclopedic project—a process I outline below. This bias, according to many Wikipedians, compromised the supposed expertise of Wikipedians, and the value of the encyclopedia, in the eyes of an undefined evaluator with a god's eye perspective.
The expertise of Wikipedians on all things Wikipedia trumped any other form of expertise in knowledge production—such that knowledge about (and research on) campus sexual violence and its effects was never the real subject of debate. Instead, where Wikipedians are unable to compete on the terrain of facts and content expertise, they turn to hermeneutic arguments through a near infinite, always self referencing, system of WP:<POLICY>. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, these lawyeristic maneuvers are the most effective weapons for individuals who do not know very much about facts, as they allow Wikipedia editors to replace expertise about subject matter with expertise about Wikipedia's rules. The image of Wikipedia I describe in my article, through empirical grounding in my work writing campus sexual violence into Wikipedia, is a space where the primary focus is on the mastery of policy as a tool for domination – and not on the production of, or debates about, verifiable facts and actually existing knowledge.
Here, I want to note an important distinction between male privilege and misogyny. Where male privilege might be understood as a form of power granted to individuals based on assertions or assumptions about their gender, misogyny is the use of that power in acts of domination. While my ethnography of scientism and misogynist infopolitics analyzed the normalization of hostility in online "cultures" like Wikipedia, it also explores the boundaries and limitations of male privilege as seen by feminists and their allies. As a cis-gendered white man writing content into Wikipedia to raise awareness about the violent sexual practices of men at American universities, I naively assumed that I could assert my male privilege through "wikilawyering" and wiki-policies to even the playing field of what would be counted as "information". Through social interactions with other Wikipedians invested in the use of misogynist tactics to protect their sense of male privilege, I quickly learned that the translation of male privilege into a weapon against misogyny was (and continues to be) a failed strategy at best, an ineffective one at worst. Nonetheless, the experience of doing so is fruitful for understanding the gendered social environment left otherwise illegible to Wikipedians and outsiders.
As the comments to this revision of my essay may demonstrate, nothing makes Wikipedians more angry than a discussion of gender and feminism on Wikipedia. According to a BBC News report on sexism and the Wikimedia Foundation demographics survey, "The proportion of editors identifying as female hovers between 8% and 15%". Various stakeholders in Wikipedia fear that this gap has resulted in an online encyclopedia skewed toward a masculine bias, which has gradually become the basis (or zero-degree) from which all "legitimate" knowledge must be produced. As Adrianne Wadewitz wrote in 2013: "A lack of diversity amongst editors means that, for example, topics typically associated with femininity are typically underrepresented and often actively deleted." A recent international study of the gender demographics of Wikipedia articles about artists demonstrates this point, with women artists making up only 24% of all artists represented globally (see image at right).
In response to persistent problems around gender, the Foundation has attempted to address what they describe as a gender gap through both research and policy. This included establishing the Gender Gap Task Force, Gendergap-L, a mailing list for women and feminist Wikipedians, and a manifesto for change, each of which was overseen by Sue Gardner, the previous executive director. Her motivation, she wrote in the manifesto, was that Wikipedia needed to "help men understand the obstacles women face [as editors] and help them become better feminists." Filling the gender gap and making Wikipedian men feminists, she argued, would improve the overall quality of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia and a community.
Predictable outrage followed Gardner's statement. Critics argued that Sue Gardner was trying to "force content" into Wikipedia that "has a bias" by virtue of being "politically, not knowledge motivated." They posted statements like "Is Sue Gardner an Idiot" on Wikipedia Review. "Accusing Wikipedia culture of being 'trollish and misogynistic' is nothing less than a way to silence people who challenge mainstream feminism," one anonymous commenter wrote in response to another anonymous post declaring that "sexism = anything that challenges the misandry inherent in feminist discourse." "Closing the gender gap on Wikipedia" gave form to a wider crisis of masculinity taking shape across sites of knowledge production, one predicated on the decline of white male privilege through "diversity initiatives."
Where internet and forum comments respond to Gardner's assertions with emotional forms of outrage, protesting imbalanced forms of political power allotted to women and "political correctness," Wikipedians responded "rationally" through the Byzantine system of Wikipedia policies targeted at the alleged emotionalism and bias of Gardner's "gender war." This maneuver is important: while one commenter suggested that addressing the gender gap on Wikipedia was "politically, not knowledge motivated," the debate that ensued among Wikipedians was also not motivated by knowledge in terms of information. Instead, the debate focused on adherence to Wikipedia's various rules about what counts as knowledge according to those who control the rules' use and circulation. Wikipedians' focus, in other words, was on control via "ruling with reason", not the validity of the information itself.
Wikipedia's automated archiving provides an extensive on-site history that makes Wikipedians' maneuvers for (if not designs on) power highly legible as tactics for the preservation of male privilege. In multiple instances, for example, scientistic logic comes to trump the scientific evaluations of researchers examining the gender gap. "It is important to gather any such evidence," one Wikipedian wrote on the Gender Gap Task Force talkpage. "Because in general we don't know the gender of our fellow editors, it is not clear to me how we can establish a record of the facts." "The big objection to working to end the gender gap," another Wikipedian wrote on the gender gap mailing list, "has been that 'there's no proof it exists/is important/we can change it/etc'" – an objection that occurs in the face of extensive research on and coverage of the gender gap. In response to those citing this scholarship come accusations of WP:NPOV. "The scientists were biased." "The methods are erroneous." "There is no real research on the topic, just feminist bluster."
At the same time as questioning "scientific" findings for their underlying logic, Wikipedians defer to scientistic arguments in their justifications for including offensive content. Here, I borrow the concept of "scientistic" from Pierre Bourdieu to refer to the ways in which the language and rhetoric of science is mobilized in lawyeristic maneuvers to grant epistemic authority to acts of domination. Writing of one instance when some users claimed that the recurring photographs of failed breast augmentation in the mastectomy article were offensive, one Wikipedian argued "That's basic science: experiment and control." Pulling scientistic maneuver and the bias of science together, yet another user argued that "I really don't understand the reluctance evident throughout this project to deal in verifiable facts rather than feminist bluster." The result of these disruptions-of-scientific debate:
| “ | The article on Gender bias on Wikipedia was recently tagged as needing attn. due to non-NPOV. Points of contention appear to be proper wording to neutrally present the National Science Foundation study on gender bias on WP and whether or not to include men's right's organization assertions regarding sexism against men on WP. | ” |
Wikipedians argued that research on Wikipedia's gender bias – like those sources that document domestic violence and misogyny in other Wikipedia articles – are themselves "biased" and "invalid" because they don't include information about men. To demonstrate this bias, Wikipedians either engage in shallow methodological critiques or cite a litany of WP:<POLICY>. Notably, they don't add the so-called missing men to these articles. Nor do they engage with falsifiable research that demonstrates all of this is just "feminist bluster". It becomes clear that the intention is not to improve content (e.g. add the missing men or "proper" research), but to prevent the publication of content.
Like Latour's dissenter, who distinguishes himself from the critic by doubting everything that comes into question, Wikipedians call into question the addition of "gendered" – meaning feminized, or anti-masculinizing – information, because they have a stake in the metapragmatic universe affected by the pragmatic effects of such information, regardless of the authoritativeness of the knowledge and/or knowledge producer. Take, for example, the debate around the gender gap itself, reported in major national sources and supported by research funded by agencies like the US National Science Foundation. "Among the men and women with whom I am familiar," a disruptive editor on the Gender Gap Task Force wrote, "there is no gender-related difference with respect to their comfort with markup text. If there was no identified empirical basis for this conclusion, it appears to be a prima facie example of gender bias. (WP:NPOV)" WP:NPOV, here, signifies that the articles lack the proper grounding in a masculine disposition that can go without saying because it is assumed without saying in the public sphere of knowledge production. Hence, "research" on Wikipedia's gender gap is not a valid argument for an article or section existing because WP:NPOV, it is not our (men's) POV and violates our sense of WP:RECENTISM and WP:UNDUE, and WP:CONSENSUS Wikipedia is about consensus and not truth, so please respect WP:BRD. Despite (or perhaps because of) assertions that WP: are politically neutral and exist outside of the sociohistorical interactions, they end up absorbing, translating, and re-circulating epistemic forms of masculine domination on Wikipedia.
While "filling the gender gap" is a problematic approach to rectifying Wikipedia's misogynist infopolitics, as I discuss in the conclusion to this article, it does reveal the ways in which gender elicits widespread fights that no other category of difference – race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, or class – does. For example, within six hours of TMZ's release of the Donald Sterling tapes, in which the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers demanded that his girlfriend "not bring black people to my games," Wikipedians had included information and transcripts from the story – all before network news had a chance to report on the incident. Throughout the transcript of Wikipedia edits during this controversy, there were no debates as to whether the information belonged in the article. As one Wikipedian pre-emptively wrote,
| “ | There is nothing biased, nor is there a violation of WP:NPOV by using the term "controversy" in the section title ... [Another editor] makes a compelling argument for inclusion of the term and his argument is backed by reliable sourcing as well – which is a policy and not an essay. | ” |
The rapidity with which Wikipedians wrote Sterling's racism into Wikipedia offers a stark contrast to the response to additions regarding gender violence. Take for example, the Ray Rice domestic violence controversy. Although reliable sources existed regarding Rice's behavior, sections referencing it were repeatedly deleted and a debate ensued on the talk page and history regarding what constituted assault and/or domestic violence. Further debate ensued about the reliability of the surveillance video released of Rice punching his partner: "The video is not clear and it is not discernible whether he is trying to push her away or hitting her," – reasoning that prompted administrators to semi-protect the page from editing in "false accusations." Not once was the authenticity or reliability of the Sterling audio tapes questioned, despite the ease with which audio can be more easily manipulated than video. The articles and talk pages of contentious figures like Bill Cosby and O.J. Simpson bear a striking resemblance to this strange lawyerism.
Similarly, the history of the Elliot Rodger article (merged with the 2014 Isla Vista killings) reveals debates over whether he should be included in the category "violence against men" instead of "misogyny," whether the word "misogyny" should be used since he killed more men than women, and if there should even be a section entitled "misogyny" given the "bias" of the term. One editor wrote "it ["misogyny" appearing as a motive] smelled like someone waiting until everyone else has lost interest, and then trying to sneak in a POV change." Prior to that, the section referencing misogyny was anonymously deleted, sources typically accepted as reliable questioned, and an argument about whether misogyny constituted a motive occurred – an argument that was based on Wikipedia's definitions of neutrality, and not on reliable criminology sources detailing what a motive "is." In the interests of so-called "neutrality" and "objectivity," Wikipedians sought to deny Rodger's own assertions of misogynistic intent because they revealed the ways in which something else – male privilege – is at stake on Wikipedia. As with Wikipedia itself, it is by concealing the legible forms of misogyny that male privilege can thrive undeterred and – at least ideologically – undetected.
My work adding information about campus sexual violence was met with similar forms of interaction, where the only substantial replies – substantial in the sense that they are humored by other Wikipedians, or met with more policy citations – are those that contain further policy citations. Otherwise, a Wikipedian adding information opposed by policies is met with "Please follow Wikipedia policies." Alongside these arguments were constant references to scientistic discourses of "objectivity" and "verifiability," often without understandings of these terms outside WP:. Thus, while a scientistic discourse underlies the logical system of Wikipedian policies, it is an actuarial and lawyeristic episteme structured by a history of encyclopedic male privilege that confers expertise on Wikipedians as gatekeepers of legitimate knowledge. In the context of Wikipedia's gender gap, the use of policies to "rule with reason," is in essence a façade for maintaining a misogynist infopolitics fundamentally opposed to information threatening to male privilege both on and beyond Wikipedia – regardless of how well-sourced. In this sense, as I describe in the next section, the whole of WP: used to exclude and censor "gendered" and thus "biased" information is reducible to one: WP:THREATENING2MEN.
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Following a lengthy debate about the appropriateness of this information for leads, I began adding "controversies" sections as per consensus at WikiProject Universities. These were modeled after the long-standing information at the article for Occidental College, which has been a leader in campus sexual violence activism. Where information about campus sexual violence wasn't necessarily available in the "defining" part of the article, it was prominently displayed in the table of contents for each article. Based on consensus, I also created a category entitled "Schools under investigation for Title IX violations." Within two weeks, a group of Wikipedians nominated the category for deletion. WP:NPOV was central in the discussion that was meant to lead to a consensus – which is actually processed as a majoritarian vote, rather than a form of compromise. This type of consensus becomes a way of shutting out dissenting or different perspectives, rather than creating a "comprehensive" encyclopedia.
From these examples, it appears that WP:NPOV is an amorphous category, in which Wikipedians experience an affront to a poorly defined notion of objectivity. This amorphousness of neutrality and objectivity is not restricted to edits regarding campus sexual violence. As information about current Title IX investigations and previous Title IX/Clery violations at colleges and universities was deleted, Wikipedians protested a violation of a metaphysical neutrality that was not defined by benchmarks, but rather "feelings" that "political" information was not information at all. Because campus sexual violence disproportionately affects women, who are located within institutions traditionally gendered male, and because the experience of campuses as sexually violent social spheres exists outside of the predominantly masculine standpoint epistemology of Wikipedians, to these men, adding information about campus sexual violence "felt like" a front for "inserting politics" into otherwise neutral (not social) spheres of information. To "rule with reason" by feeling – and not by "objective" (i.e., external) benchmarks – seems to be an internal contradiction lost on these Wikipedians.
Where WP:NPOV and accusations of "biased" standpoints often appear as an umbrella responses to "bias" – responses based on Wikipedians' metaphysical position that render particular social relationships as objects – they lack a temporal dimension. Thus, these responses are vulnerable to historical arguments and information, such as the long history of campus sexual violence in the United States. Wikipedians therefore attempt to use an "objectified" longue durée to justify the exclusion of campus sexual violence from Wikipedia pages. They do so through two arguments, WP:UNDUE and WP:RECENTISM. To add an important detail from the contemporary moment, that colleges and universities have been "put on notice" fails to take into account the long history of universities (see above quote regarding University of Chicago), and is clearly being asserted because of a minority viewpoint that believes it is important. "This was removed due to WP:RECENTISM and WP:UNDUE. If something comes from the investigation, then perhaps it makes sense to include it," a Wikipedian wrote in an edit summary for The Catholic University of America. Another Wikipedian argued at WikiProject Universities that "This controversy is not major in the scope of these universities' history." In short, the meaning of WP:RECENTISM and WP:UNDUE is supported by a history that Wikipedians write themselves, yet presume to exist as an object outside of their own creation. One Wikipedian sums this up in his explanation of why campus sexual violence did not belong on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill article, writing that:
| “ | As it is, this [campus sexual assault controversy] is a largely unnoteworthy [sic] case as it relates to the university as a whole, which is what this article is about. I'm sure over the 200+ years the university has been open, there have been literally hundreds of controversies far more notable than this one, so I can't see a reason why this [one] case would get its own section in the article.' | ” |
Indeed, this future-oriented argument has a name and associated Wikipedia policy: WP:10YEARS. "In ten years will this addition still appear relevant?" the policy reads. As one Wikipedian wrote, nominating the article on the Title IX investigation announcement made by the Office of Civil Rights in 2014 for deletion:
| “ | I do not believe that a list of schools under investigation has "enduring historical significance." True, this is the first time the schools under investigation have been publicly named, but what about all the schools that have been investigated in the past? What about those that will be in the future? | ” |
Transformed into a thing without creator, an object of history with no history itself, the exclusion of campus sexual violence from college and university Wikipedia articles itself becomes the reason for its exclusion from Wikipedia articles – regardless of the objective facts about campus sexual violence, or its long history. In instances when such a history is provided, it is deleted for "WP:UNDUE," because it is not recorded for other universities. When articles are provided to create such a history, as was the case in one instance, it was renamed by another Wikipedian, and then a third argued that based on the name it was not an appropriate article. When a Wikipedian claimed that the removal of information about campus sexual violence was disruptive, pointing to the existing article on "Higher Education Institutions Announced in Title IX and Clery Investigation," the Wikipedian erasing the content nominated the article on the investigations for deletion in order to justify future deletions of information about campus sexual violence from university and college pages.
The surface assertion here, of course, is that American colleges and universities do not have a long history of sexual violence because it is not present on Wikipedia pages. One Wikipedian suggests as much on the talk page for the Universities project, arguing that adding information about campus sexual violence creates an imbalance in information. "First, an investigation is just an investigation… I'm sure there have been many investigations over the years, but these would be highlighted just because they're currently in progress." With few exceptions (e.g., Occidental College), none of the Wikipedia pages for colleges and universities included on the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights list of investigations have information regarding campus sexual violence – despite some universities being found in non-compliance on multiple instances. That this information is missing reflects not simply an oversight but a missed sight: the lack of a point of view in which sexual violence is important to the histories of American colleges and universities. This is the very point of view occluded by WP:THREATENING2MEN.
Citing a veritable panoply of WP: is the primary tactic for "wearing down" political opposition to the status quo, and WP:THREATENING2MEN is forged in a battle that goes relatively unseen as men and women alike abandon the collaborative work of writing Wikipedia out of sheer exhaustion. Through wikilawyering, as it is referred to on Wikipedia, facts external to the social sphere in which WP:THREATENING2MEN is crafted are clearly in violation of WP:THREATENING2MEN. For many potential Wikipedians invested in adding "controversial" content about gender – again, for Wikipedians, meaning women – the uneven amount of time spent debating whether or not the New York Times or Department of Education are reliable sources via an obscure, self-referential and seemingly infinite set of policies is hardly worth the work of contributing – in part because there is no real contribution made by these debates, in which consensus is reached through one-sided decisions to erase "biased" information. That consensus process is a crucial piece of the hegemony of the asshole consensus.
Hegemony, as Antonio Gramsci describes it in the Prison Notebooks, is a concept that involves a wearing down of the opposition to the point of political resignation.
Where the endless citation of policies constitute the erosive dimension of hegemony, the consensus process promotes and facilitates resignation to the hegemony of the asshole consensus on the part of many users - both those intentially oppositional and those who "go with the flow." Asshole, here, is a theoretical concept and not (simply) a pejorative: assholes, Aaron James argues in his book Assholes: A Theory, are driven by a sense of self-entitlement that is justified by pragmatic reasoning in the face of moral or epistemic debates. In order for the hermeneutic circle that constitutes WP:THREATENING2MEN to remain tightly sealed, and thus the self-entitlement of Wikipedians fully realized, there is a strong need for social forms of enforcement, or what Antonio Gramsci has called relations of force: symbolically violent forms of interaction that seek to demonstrate the necessary and sufficient conditions for public participation in Wikipedia.
The social benefits and/or costs of Wikipedia's reliance on consensus for producing authoritative qua factually accurate information has been widely debated in terms of reliability. What is often missing from this debate, however, are the terms on which and through which consensus is produced. Where the exhausting circularity of WP:THREATENING2MEN chases off a majority of potential Wikipedia editors, my experience of writing campus sexual violence into Wikipedia revealed the extent to which those that remain are anything but free to contribute in ways they see fit – and are often subjected to implicit threats or explicit acts of harassment. Rather than concentrate on the disjunction between ideal consensus and its failed practice, this section examines Wikipedians' practice of consensus making, particularly as it revolves around forms of coercion via anticipation, paranoia, and experiences of harassment that were intended to fortify the masculine subject position that forms the conventional zero-degree of knowledge production on Wikipedia. Yet, the binary between harasser/harassed does not reflect the complex reality of Wikipedia's environment. What makes Wikipedia unique, or what makes Wikipedians a unique type of asshole, to re-summon Aaron James, is their combined ability to force everyone around them to resign to being an asshole too as a strange survival strategy.
In the consensus process, Wikipedians do not vote or jury, but rather engage in a "rational" and "civil" conversation about the value of information based on adherence to Wikipedia's policies. The success or failure of consensus has different results depending on the level of conversation. For deletion, for instance, positive consensus results in the deletion of the content under debate. In the instance of the category of "2014 Announcement of Schools Under Investigation for Mishandling Campus Sexual Violence," consensus was defined through a majoritarian process where people "voted" for removal because of violations of WP:THREATENING2MEN, with one person – me, the creator – "voting" to keep the category. Like other previous contradictions, the fact that consensus was reached by voting was lost on these Wikipedians.
This, then, constitutes the asshole consensus: consensus about the exclusion of information produced out of a collective, metapragmatic investment in WP:THREATENING2MEN, rather than meeting Wikipedia's goal of being the most comprehensive encyclopedia on Earth. Yet the asshole consensus is not totalitarian, nor necessarily a conspiracy, but, rather, a complex hegemonic structure that is produced out of erosion and resignation. On multiple occasions, I received messages of support via email and Wikipedia's messaging service. As one messenger wrote, "This work is really important to me, and I wish I could help. But if I do these guys will flip all of my revisions. I'm sorry." Another discussed how important this information could be. "We should definitely document all of this history and add it. But I can't. I get enough shit for writing about women mathematicians. I won't even weigh in on the debate because of how toxic it is." As Joseph McGlynn and Brian Richardson write about the experiences of whistleblowers at colleges and universities, individuals use forms of moral support in private, exacerbating – if not participating in – the public alienation of dissenting voices.
In some cases, the coercive nature of consent was such that individuals who had previously sent me messages of support then publicly supported the deletion of information. This was most typically the case when individuals expected to weigh in (either because of their status as editors working on college and university pages, or because of the particular place or article being written) at first resisted doing so because of their support for the inclusion of this information. When they did register opposition, they focused on the failure or challenge to Wikipedia policies, and not the content per se, for removing content or voicing support for removal. Their deference, to return to James, disregards the importance of information. Framed both by a moral argument for equal representations of experiences at universities and a moral argument for writing "comprehensive histories" of colleges and universities, these editors defer to pragmatic guidelines that are made to appear external to, and not implicated in, the social relations of force deployed in debates about including information about campus sexual violence.
In short, the hegemony of the asshole consensus has the power to transform everyone into an asshole. But the blame does not lie with every user. I discuss the conflicted motives of some Wikipedians in order to remind us that Wikipedians' motivations are complex webs of practice that are not reducible to a misogynist intention in all cases. Still, we should not discount the impacts of these complex behaviors – however ideological, however resignatory – in producing and maintaining a hostile environment on Wikipedia.
Fixing Wikipedia, to bring these threads together, will fix the gender gap; throwing women into the gender gap will not fix Wikipedia. Making Wikipedia better requires not simply the addition of women, but the creation of a space of multiple points of view. Doing so will first require a major cultural shift amongst Wikipedians. Given the centrality of WP:THREATENING2MEN – that entirely self-referential system of pragmatic justifications that transforms everyone into an asshole – the best start may be to stop arguing about Wikipedia's policies for inclusivity, or at minimum, reduce the number of policies to a set of concretely defined criteria. In light of the fact that individuals abuse the WP:<POLICY> system as a means of policing and censorship, while ignoring the policies that encourage collaboration, if Wikipedia were to require that debates occur on the terrain of facts, rather than in the adversarial terrains of "law" and "lawyerism," that would go far in confronting the misogyny facilitated by WP:THREATENING2MEN and the hegemony of the asshole consensus.
Transforming policies would also serve as an epistemological rupture, through which Wikipedians would be forced to leave behind the various pretensions and habitus generated through its current toxic culture to reformulate what Wikipedia represents — a space where facts are grounded in multiple points of view rather than censored when they deviate from a single monolithic one. In order to establish healthier habits and traditions, the Wikimedia Foundation would have to actively cultivate a climate of respect. Culture, Raymond Williams would be quick to point out, is derived from cultivation.
To conclude, the broader significance of this article lies in making legible the recursive relationship, the "cultural" collusion, between misogynist technologies of seemingly neutral policies and the silence those policies are used to enforce in sites of knowledge production where men understand/perceive male privilege to be under attack. In this way, the online community of Wikipedia is homologous to many colleges' and universities' bureaucratic responses to campus sexual violence. Arguments for stricter sanctions on and control over rape-supportive subcultures, particularly athletics and Greek life, are met with responses regarding "limitation of resources" and "best interests of students." Faculty members who step out of line are frequently described as "difficult people" who are unable to "understand how the rules work" – an argument often made by discrediting empirical evidence or personal experience through lawyeristic, actuarial arguments about scientific validity, as is done on Wikipedia. These are events that sound all too familiar to those of us who edit articles and create content about gender, race, colonialism, sexuality, poverty, and oppression on Wikipedia. Wikipedia exists as a microcosm – perhaps an amplification – of a cultural moment when campus sexual assault is coming to the fore of societal consciousness in domains traditionally controlled by men. What is needed is an end to WP:THREATENING2MEN and the hegemony of the asshole consensus in all of its institutional manifestations.
- Bryce Peake is an Assistant Professor of Media & Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; his research focuses on media praxis, ethnography, and the history(s) of science and technology.
- The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should use our opinion desk.
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Untitled
waving handsexpressing our opinions here will change nothing, unless, as I wrote, someone is willing to scrutinize it in a critical reply submitted for publication to Ada. Staszek Lem (talk) 21:59, 20 August 2015 (UTC)Your irony is misplaced. WP:RS criteria include objectivity. And if you look into the WP:RS noticeboard, you will notice that objectivity of some sources is routinely challenged, i.e., the issue is taken seriously. What is more, we even know that "reliable" may be in an honest error. Wikipedia text is not cast in stone. Errors may be corrected, bias may be fixed. Staszek Lem (talk) 22:40, 20 August 2015 (UTC)Stricken (sorry, jumping to conclusions base on incomplete information.) Staszek Lem (talk) 22:49, 20 August 2015 (UTC)Deletion of category for Schools under investigation for Title IX violations
Policies, WP speak and Women artists
Thanks for using that graph about the RKD database showing the women artists and accompanying it with the quote about 24% women on Wikipedia. Since the graph shows clearly that the best matching percentage is only about half that, then it is clear that Wikipedia does better than the RKD at including biographies (or at least Wikidata items) about women. In fact Wikipedia is twice as good. That said, 24% seems lagging, but this has to do with a gendergap in the arts world. Wikipedia cannot fix any existing gendergap, but it can help to stop them being amplified. A gendergap is amplified for example when a museum opts to spend all of its purchasing power on modern artworks by men. This may not even be a decision made by the museum directly, but indirectly, by stipulating that only prize-winning works should be purchased, and no prizes are awarded to women that year, etc. Looking at the history of this particular case, namely the history of sexual violence in US universities, I can imagine the amount of pushback this got at each turn. Most Wikipedian editors are students or just-graduated and looking for a job. In both cases they are highly motivated to keep their alma mater pages in order. If you had selected the topic of deaths relating to alcohol abuse at universities or just fatal accidents due to stupidity during "rush week", a yearly phenomenon which happens alas to ALL genders, I don't think the outcome would have been different. Wikipedia is not good political arena, though I would agree that it is one. It is just very tricky to maneuver within the confines of the Wikipedia policy system. I am ashamed to say that I agree with some of the quotes that you repeat here by Wikipedians. Sorry about that, but I think ALL of your work would be welcome on Wikidata, and we should probably make a Wikidata project to do just that. Jane (talk) 16:44, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
GGTF
One small point, I thought that the WP:GGTF was a community initiative started by @SlimVirgin:, not a WMF one started by Sue Gardner. ϢereSpielChequers 19:42, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
Off wiki criticism
The article rightly pointed out that one of the critical comments was on Wikipedia Review, but while it linked to motherboard.vice.com for the quote "Accusing Wikipedia culture of being 'trollish and misogynistic' is nothing less than a way to silence people who challenge mainstream feminism,", it didn't name that site in the text. It would have been better if it had been clearer that this criticism was also elsewhere on the Internet, as currently written this could be misread as criticism from within the Wikipedia community. ϢereSpielChequers 20:06, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
Cherrypicking
The author has constructed a lot of generalities out of a handful of incidents and quotes, and ignored other facts that are hard to fit into the narrative. For example, he also created a List of American higher education institutions with open Title IX sexual violence investigations. This, too, was subjected to a deletion debate, but in this case the keep and delete votes were almost evenly divided. Ultimately the nominator withdrew the nomination without prejudice and redirected the list to Office for Civil Rights, where prose coverage of the investigations could be developed, offered to help develop it, and had no objections to the eventual creation of "a decent article on Title IX sexual violence investigations." At the time, the author seemed content with that decision. Wikipedia is not monolithic. RockMagnetist(talk) 06:29, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
And how many edits did you contribute to those articles? Zero.It appears that Wikipedia policy is no barrier to coverage of this issue- if you understand why it is there and how to work with it.RockMagnetist(talk) 16:24, 21 August 2015 (UTC), which you have contributed 6 edits to. While you were dreaming up slogans like "hegemony of the asshole consensus", other Wikipedians were getting things done.RockMagnetist(talk) 17:00, 21 August 2015 (UTC)UNDUE
Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), and categorization
This op-ed was a difficult slog for me to read, as I'm not sure it adequately summarized the point(s) it was making. So I'll just comment on two of my takeaways from it. (1) Regarding the idea that men dominate Wikipedia so as to suppress coverage of topics like campus rape, see Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). This topic was featured on Wikipedia's main page in the "Did you know?" section. This is a controversial topic, as demonstrated by its extensive talk page archives, but the "men's club" here has not suppressed it. (2) Regarding categorization, yes, Wikipedia:Defining applies here. I created Category:Facebook groups, and successfully defended it from a deletion attempt. Note, however, that it has less than a dozen members. I don't do Facebook, but my understanding is that it has thousands, if not millions, of "groups". However, only a handful of notable organizations are WP:defined by this characteristic. For example: "Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE) is a Facebook group..." I'm thankful that, as yet, there are no colleges which are so well-known for the frequency of rape on campus that we define them by that. Wbm1058 (talk) 19:46, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
General comments
Uncivil
In an earlier discussion on this page, I made an ad hominem attack on Thebrycepeake, and I was surprised at myself. This is something I studiously avoid doing in Wikipedia (not to mention real life); I believe strongly in the core policy of civility. I came to realize that it was a response to the extended incivility of this article. It is one massive failure to assume good faith. When editors disagree with an initiative by Thebrycepeake, it is because the information threatens male domination. When they cite policy, they are using "scientism" to mask their ignorance of fact. Deletion debates become opportunities for the majority to impose their will on a minority. And by extension, Wikipedia as a whole is subject to a "hegemony of the asshole consensus." There is no real evidence for these claims; they are constructed out of a mixture of mind-reading, rhetoric and guilt by association. It positively invites an uncivil response.
For a glimpse of male hegemony in action, consider discussions at WikiProject Universities on University Sexual Assault Investigations in Lead, where staunch hegemonists like @SarahStierch express doubt that the material belongs in article leads or in its own "controversies" section; or Editing Infoboxes, where another gang of oppressors questions its inclusion in the college/uni infobox template. Yet, on reflection, these people don't sound very frightening. They don't challenge the accuracy or value of the information; they simply question the way that Thebrycepeake wishes to present it. And they frequently propose alternatives such as creating a separate article on the investigations and linking university articles to it, or incorporating the material into the history section for each article. Indeed, that has been done in University of Chicago, while in Occidental College it is part of a multi-issue Controversy section.
The real problem is that Thebrycepeake wants to broadcast his information with a megaphone, and when his desires run counter to what he calls WP:<POLICIES>, he blames the policies. Consider, for example, the question of defining characteristics of a subject. To quote WP:CATDEF,
In the category deletion debate, Thebrycepeake says, "The fact that the President's own taskforce NAMED (for the first time EVER) these institutions, and that the news has widely broadcast this naming, further makes it a defining feature for a lot of current and future occupants." Unfortunately, the other editors are not able to articulate the crucial flaw in this reasoning, falling back on statements like "it doesn't have the long-term and wide-ranging significance to be defining." But the real point of WP:DEFINING is clear from the examples it provides:
When the University of Chicago is named in an article on the President's task force or on sexual assaults in colleges, the investigations are the subject of the article, so they are not defining. If, however, U of C were commonly referred to in other contexts as "The University of Chicago, a university under investigation for Title IX violations," it would be defining. But, of course, it isn't.
I have not been involved in any of these discussions, but it seems to me that most participants were trying to honestly assess the information and the best way to present it; and they believe that Wikipedia policies are there for a good reason. They don't deserve this smear. They have proposed reasonable alternatives, and there is no evidence that Wikipedia policy is any barrier to implementing them. RockMagnetist(talk) 19:03, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
Scientism and the other
The op-ed seems to take an issue with scientism on Wikipedia, definining it (I am paraphrasising here) somewhere along the lines of an unjustified use of scientific arguments and terms to silence critics and dissenters, strengthening one's own political views with scientific authority and thereby claiming objectivity, and, on top of it all, being blind to the various forms of injustice and discrimination that are created in the wake of objectification and neutralization. While the above text makes those things sound as if the devil himself had devised them for this site, it should be clear that in most of the cases, these things are absolutely normal and essential for Wikipedia. Even Thebrycepeake, if he is serious about his work here, will have to engage regularly in these kinds of activities: We cite a physicist's textbook to silence those who claims that jet fuel can't melt steel beams; we counter claims that there is no racism in western societies with statistics of the job market; and we make a clear distinction between points of view that deserve to be presented in a well-balanced fashion and those who don't deserve that kind of privilege. And if we follow our conscious, we are doing this by being faithful to our sources, the issues we write about, and what we hold to be true and just.
But of course this is not what Thebrycepeake protests against here. What delineates scientific from scientism, it appears, is that the latter is phony and hollow, and that its proponents either bluntly lie about their real motives or (even worse!) are oblivious to the inherently mysoginist, sexist, hegemonic, or what ever you would like to call the forces that make them act in the ways which are criticized in this opinion piece. They are borrowing from science an authority they don't deserve, making them the actual opposite of what they claim to be – neutral, objective, fair, pragmatic, and so on. But here we might hesitate for a second: Isn't this article doing the same thing by citing renowned scholars who allegedly support the author's point of view? Isn't erecting the ideal of a fair and balanced account that manages to include everyone's views, claims, and needs and then pitting it against the messy reality of everyday Wikipedia guilty of the same sleight of hand that accuses others of their bias and their obvious personal interests, while firmly situating oneself outside such political quarrels? Doesn't the op-ed, by shifting away from the countless wikilegal, wikipolitical, and wikitechnical arguments brought forth by countless Wikipedians who hardly qualify as "Men™" (at least not any more than Thebrycepeake himself) towards the issues and arguments the author deems the most important commit the very same crime of ignoring problems that actually matter in the here and now in favor of dogmatized slogans, phrases, and claims which only bear the cloak of feminism?
I have to admit that I do have a problem with the way a number of STS scholars are cited in this op-ed. And it is not merely the fact that this text does not seem to have a problem with quoting both Latour and Bourdieu for its agenda, two authors whose theories and political stances are so radically opposed to each other with regard to this op-ed's theses that I find it hard to believe its author has thoroughly engaged with their relevant writings. For an article so ostentatiously bearing the banner of a critical approach to unquestioned truths, I think it could do a better job at exposing itself to the shortcomings, risks and blind spots of its own approach. Others – Wikipedians, Men, hegemonists, ignorants, formalists, etc. – cannot cease to fail in their quest for truth and neutrality, because they are mistaken from the very start. The author, on the other hand, or who ever it is who speaks through this lines to the readers, does not seem to live the dangerous life of being prone to error or having to learn about his or her own mistakes. I think this way of telling a story is bit too lazy, at least for our times who seem to have their difficulties with perspectives who claim access to an infallible truth.
After Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto I thought at leasts feminists were immune to falling into this kind of trap. But maybe that's also a bit too presumptuous from my side, as I have written pieces like this one myself, albeit I hope it's been some years by now. I can understand the rightful indignation of someone who's seen their hard work erased without sufficient explanation and whose complaints have been overheard, ignored, ridiculed and in any case misunderstood. The only reasonable way of resolving ignorance and misunderstanding, however, is not by hailing some kind of world where the differences from which they stem are finally – once and for all – done away with. Sacrificing this world, how ever inconvinient and troublesome it may be, for a utopian vision which feeds from exactly those false and phony transcendent truths STS has been criticizing for roughly fifty years now cannot be the answer. An encyclopedia where women and men finally get the same amount of kB for equality's sake may be anything, but it sure as hell will not lead to the end of history. Yes, crying out against injustice must be impossible, and that includes questioning the value and adequacy of certain norms, rules, and arguments. But that requires situating oneself within the landscape that is about to be renegotiated and accpeting the risk that, in the end, it might also be ourselves who will have to change or acknowledge our mistakes – and not solely those who we have conveniently bxed as "the others".--Toter Alter Mann (talk) 22:40, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
Some comments
I think it is unfair to actual victims of violence against men to apply the term so carelessly. Gender-neutral violence, sadly, usually affects men more. To me, violence against men is violence against someone because they're male or assumed to be male (women/non-binary assumed to be men can be victims of VaM and vice versa). It is a real thing but it doesn't apply in the Isla Vista case.
I am female, I was assigned male at birth and have stereotypical male body parts. I shy away from the label "transgender" because I find the trans community too exclusive. I don't get into gender politics on Wikipedia or edit gender-related articles often because I'm afraid. The environment of gender on Wikipedia is extremely hostile and I don't think I'm qualified enough to speak on gender issues. I am learning to break free from that.
I agree with that Wikipedia policies are exclusive. Knowledge is biased to who writes it and we are seeing that our sources of knowledge exclude the knowledge of minority groups. Of course women and men aren't psychologically different but being treated differently leads to a different PoV.
Sorry if I misunderstood the article. :( Andrea Carter (at your service | my good deeds) 05:03, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
Controversy in leads
It's a pretty high bar to include mention of any controversy in any lead paragraph. The controversy generally needs to be a major or defining event for the subject at hand, not just one thing that happened to an otherwise large, complex, or old subject. The removal of these was probably well justified and had nothing to do with any gender issue. Gigs (talk) 20:05, 27 August 2015 (UTC)
This editorial missed the forest for the trees
What's happened here is that someone tried to expand, categorize, and restructure a whole bunch of articles in a skewing way, that focused, laser-like, on something that's really a vague, open-ended "investigation" the basis and parameters of which are unclear. When reasons were given why this exact approach isn't appropriate on WP, rather than listen to the reasons and reapproach the issue by writing an article about the investigation(s), their scope, and the targeted institutions (i.e., salvage the work), the writer instead declared WP full of hegemonic assholes, abandoned the work, and parlayed the "experience" into a one-sided journal paper instead. I kind of feel WP was used, and the entire situation is a false dichotomy setup: Either the author gets her way, in every single way, or WP is a wicked place to be publicly shamed. There were so many other ways to handle this.
The sad thing is that there really are a WP:BIAS problem and a WP:GENDERGAP problem, but this editorial missed both of them widely, and devolved almost immediately into an incoherent conspiracy theory. Just because not every imaginable approach to coverage of campus sexual violence is an encyclopedic approach doesn't mean that some good ol' boys' club of misogynist douchebags is in control of Wikipedia and is censoring the issue from our pages. What really happened was someone was trying, however inadvertently, to inappropriately use Wikipedia as a soapbox, meanwhile the actual facts they sought to include should actually be included, just in a more encyclopedic, less tabloid, manner. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:30, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
This kind of doublethink and cognitive dissonance is found throughout the piece. To just pick a paragraph at random: Peake, in criticizing WP's consensus decision-making model says "This ethnography is not without its quantitative supporters", and cites previous work he feels is enthnographic in nature, but the works he cites are not actually research in that field but two papers by largely the same researchers, on computer-mediated work collaboration; to the extent they have a social sciences component, they seem to be sociological and microeconomic (particularly concerned with distributed organizational ergonomics), not culturally anthropological, i.e. ethnographic. Since when do Wikipedians form an ethnic group or anything like one anyway? WP is a self-selecting affinity group. A sentence later Peake turns this "ethnographic" criticism on it its ear, and says of his own counter-argument "Through an ethnographic approach, however, I am able to go one step further than these quantitative studies to demonstrate ..." [various things he can't prove]. So, what is this? An ethnographers against ethnographers war? While Peake has some educational background in anthropology, I do, too. I'm not detecting anthropological thinking at work in this editorial; it's a socio-political communications (i.e. PR) piece; like Peake, I coincidentally have a degree in that, too, so I recognize it when I see it (especially having been a professional activist for about a decade). An ethnographic approach is certainly not evidenced by a claim of "scientism" on the part Peak's "asshole" opponents. Last I looked, anthropology is a science. And it doesn't require a focus on science to decide whether something is a defining quality of a university, for either lead or a category, anyway. No untoward veneration of science is required to assess whether some vague "investigation" is encyclopedic material or of indeterminate importance. It's absolutely the wrong approach to ethnographic methods to generalize from observations of outlying members of a group to assumptions about every member of a population.
The frustrating thing is, this is all a total distraction from the real bias and gender gap problem on Wikipedia. There is no "WP:THREATENING2MEN" factor at work here, except on the part of a few isolated individuals. Men are not generally threatened by women or feminism (even if some outlying weirdos with mental issues are). Rather, the gap and the bias come from "WP:NOTINTERESTING2MEN". Males in the aggregate tend to be self-absorbed and simply WP:DGAF about things that aren't "guy stuff". There's a reason that WP is dominated by coverage of sports, video games, rock stars, hot actresses, machines, warfare, business leaders, and other traditionally "dude"-leaning interests. It's not because men hate women and want to keep them from writing articles on other things or minimize their proper representation within those topics, too; most of them simply can't be bothered to notice or care. It's not even male privilege, it just male collective narcissism. It's not a conspiracy (and it does not posit one about women), it's just systemic apathy commingled with willful ignorance, a combination that, when it becomes self-congratulatory, we call stupid. There is, surely, a Wikipedia douchebag factor at work (closely related to that found in the gaming community, the free software movement, academia [at least in the sciences], and business, but it's just Y-chromo jackassery, not a vindictive political movement. It's a thick wall to knock down, but hammering on the wrong one doesn't help. I'll close with Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 05:59, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
Correction needed
Hi Bryce. It has been brought to my attention that you wrote this article in 2015, and that it cites a diff of one of my edits. Unless I'm missing something, you either used the wrong diff or misquoted me. Here are the diffs:
As you can see, there is a total disconnect between your description of my thoughts and my edit summary. Did you use the wrong diff? If there's another explanation or some other diff and or quote(s) of me in that article, please clarify it for me. Thanks. -- BullRangifer (talk) 17:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)