Daily Archives: January 17, 2021

(Paris) Wikipedia is still the greatest digital common good that the internet has delivered to us: the free online encyclopedia, one of the last dinosaurs of the libertarian and participatory internet, celebrates its 20 years with several challenges to overcome.

Posted on January 15, 2021 at 8:55 a.m.

Yassine KHIRIFrance Media Agency

A small miracle at the time of the triumph of the GAFAM and the Internet merchant, as described to AFP the historian Rmi Mathis, ex-president of the association Wikimedia France.

Founded on January 15, 2001 by the American Jimmy Wales with a non-profit goal, Wikipedia aims to bring together the knowledge of the planet on a single online platform thanks to millions of voluntary contributors.

The success was immediate. The first site was developed in English, German and Swedish Wikipedia followed in March 2001, and soon after ten more including French, Italian, Chinese, Russian and Catalan.

Looking to the future, Jimmy Wales hopes Wikipedia will spread to developing countries: It is really important that the next billion people coming on the internet want to contribute. The founder, interviewed by AFP, dreams of an institution that lasts so long [] than the University of Oxford.

PHOTO DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS, AFP

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

The seventh most visited site in the world, Wikipedia has more than 55 million articles published in 309 languages. The content of each site is independent: no translations, but original contributions, sometimes supplemented by robots from public data.

Contrary to the traditional encyclopedia written by recognized experts, this collection of knowledge compiled by amateurs, often anonymous, has attracted innumerable criticism and hostility from certain academic circles.

When we know in more detail how Wikipedia is monitored, the articles are written, and the community exchanges, we can still consider that there is an overall level of reliability which is important, estimates Lionel Barbe, master of conferences at Paris-Nanterre University.

There remains a problem of diversity in the sources and themes addressed, with blind spots on subjects linked to developing countries. In question, the profile of contributors, mainly from the United States and Western countries.

The fact of wanting to build an encyclopedia does not attract just anyone and the people who are there are often CSPs, urban, graduates, supports Rmi Mathis, author of Wikipedia: Behind the Scenes of the Worlds Largest Encyclopedia (First Editions).

80%, or even more, it is white men who write Wikipedia articles, explains to AFP Marie-Nolle Doutreix, lecturer at the University of Lyon 2.

We went from 15% to 18.6% of biographies of women in French Wikipedia, says Natacha Fault. Founder of the Les sans pages project, aimed at combating gender imbalances.

But the gender gap will never be filled, because the reality is that the achievements of women have been very little documented throughout history.

Despite everything, at a time of the triumph of GAFAM, the online encyclopedia is a rare survivor of the participatory utopia of the libertarian web, conceived as a decentralized network of exchange and knowledge, recalls Lionel Barbe, for which Wikipedia is after all the greatest digital common good that the Internet has delivered to us.

Jimmy Wales assures us: We are not diverted from our mission for the sake of making more income, so we are not faced with these problems that we see today, this question of algorithms designed in such a way as to encourage engagement in order to increase advertising revenue.

The commercial Internet also has an interest in Wikipedia continuing, nuance Marie-Nolle Doutreix. Google has promoted the visibility of Wikipedia, but in return it uses its articles in its search engine and has significant traffic thanks to this encyclopedia.

Some would also like to draw inspiration from the encyclopedias original model of community moderation in the face of the massive circulation of false information on social networks.

We must not believe either that Wikipedia is going to save us from our own demons. It remains a tool. If we love conspiracy, I doubt that Wikipedia can discourage you, explains Lionel Barbe.

So Wikipedia faces two great challenges: to continue to encourage vocations as encyclopedias, and to moderate its own content and internal debates, on the basis of voluntary work.

All of this, as Lionel Barbe explains, in a context of very strong growth in collective fantasies.

See the article here:

Wikipedia 20th anniversary | The libertarian internet dinosaur has become the worlds largest encyclopedia - Inspired Traveler

America has to deal with a virus infecting our politics stemming from demographic shifts and racial-threat anxiety or it will continue to poison our politics.

Remember the tea party? They were the conservatives in 2009, who had bold rhetoric about freedom and tax cuts, but their social policy revealed racial nativism and anxiety about white social, political and economic standing. Their rise came around the time the nation elected its first Black president.

Stanford University business professors explored the rise of the tea party during the Obama administration in a paper titled Threats to racial status promote tea party support among white Americans. The researchers conducted five experiments, which found that, while the tea party movement did contain people who advocated for libertarian politics, its growth was driven largely by racial-threat anxiety among whites concerned about their group position.

The paper cites other scholars as noting: A substantial literature demonstrates that racial threats can prompt antipathy, violence and political mobilization by dominant racial group members.

We should note that, while the tea partys economic agenda sounds libertarian, the Libertarian Party didnt benefit the way the tea party did from the movement.

In interviews, Glenn Beckwho is no liberalexpressed concern about tea party acolytes embrace of Trumpism and suggested the embrace wasnt due to economic-libertarian views but rather to racial-threat anxiety.

Trump certainly leveraged and spoke the language of white racial-threat anxiety throughout his administration. During his candidate announcement, he suggested Mexico was sending criminalsincluding rapiststo the United States. He suggested there were good people on both sides during a Unite the Right rally, where white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, shouted, Jews will not replace us.

According to The New York Times, he suggested shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down. He demanded President Obamas birth certificate. And he was always slow to denounce white supremacists.

Trumpism replaced the tea party in many ways, but what happened to the tea party?

It essentially went away. There is a Freedom Caucus. The group had more influence when Republicans were in the majority in the House. But in many wayslike Trumpthe groups actions helped Democrats move out of the minority, which diminished the caucuss influence.

This is not a definitive statement, but it is certainly aspirational: Trumpism will die.

Five people were killed during the violent insurrection of a riotous lot of patriots, who fed off a steady stream of alternate-reality tweets and Fox Newsbut most shamefully enabled by, among others, U.S. Sen. Michael Braun, U.S. Rep. Jim Banks and U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana.

Reality will set in as employers learn that their employees participated in only the second breaching of the nations Capitol in history. They will face questions about their role in one of the most ignominious days in U.S. history.

The rioters will face prosecution. The rioters, we hope, to prison for sedition. They might call it persecution. We will call it justice.

Cabinet members and others will continue to resign, much too late to save their reputations. No one will actually want Trump on their resume, their bioor even their obituary. Trump is a stamp of shame.

Trumpism will die.

Given this coming reality, one might presume that, like a virus, elements of Trumpismor at a minimum, racial-threat anxietywill continue to evolve. They will.

But perhaps recognizing issues related to racial-threat anxiety and addressing the economic anxieties of poor white people could create a political herd mentality.

__________

Wolley is a lecturer, columnist and diversity and inclusion consultant.

Click here for more Forefront columns.

Excerpt from:

Marshawn Wolley: Like the tea party, Trumpism will die - Indianapolis Business Journal

The frequent appeals to personal liberty made by anti-maskers and lockdown sceptics make a depressing addition to the Covid debate for anyone on the left who believes inliberty.It isnt just that those appeals dont add up to a very good argument. Its that a small group on the libertarian right (and assorted contrarian types who havejoined their ranks) have claimed the word liberty for themselves, degrading its meaning to suit their own ends.

But we've been here before.Duringthecholera outbreaks of the 19th century,therewasalsoastrident minority resisting the rules brought in to save lives, often by means of invoking liberty. (There were conspiracy theories then, too, one of which claimed that elites had released cholera to cull the poor;thisisprobably worth rememberingevery time you read about 5G or mysterious Chinese labs.)

What's interestingisthat the basisfor the public health measures put in place at the end of that century and afterwards was provided in part by John Stuart MillsOn Liberty, whichbecameaclassic text on the subject.According to Mills harm principle, liberty may be suspended if its expression harms someone else. TheDeclaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which laid out the values of the French Revolution, said much the same thing 70 years before.But though the lockdown sceptics arguments have beendiscredited,we still find ourselves in a semantic muddle. Andthereason for this is that many on the left have granted those self-described libertarians the exclusive right to define liberty, by forgetting or neglecting the libertarian strands of their own tradition, as well as their defenders.

[See also:Why lockdown sceptics should accept the overwhelming case for restrictions now]After all, libertyisn't the preserve ofthe right.Manygreat thinkersonthe left Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Herbert Read fuseda respect for liberty with a concern for social justice. You might even mention Gore Vidal, or Christopher Hitchens, whose libertarian leanings stayed with him throughout his political life.Defending (and, indeed, demanding) civil liberties was once a defining principle of the left.Bound up with itwas aleftist defence of liberty that differs starkly from the absolute variant on themodernlibertarianright. Orwell, invoked by the right whenever absolute free speech is questioned, wrote that there always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. According to the leftist tradition, liberty may be (and often is) put to one side in pursuit of another cause: Freedom without equality is exploitation, as Rosa Luxemburg put it. To defend liberty, in other words, is not to give up your critical faculties, your common sense, or your regard for others. It isnt to become an evangelist for unbridled individualism.It's just to respect personal freedom and agency in the context of wider society.

And yet, turned over to sundry contrarians and the fringes of the libertarian right, inside and outside parliament, untrammelled individualism is what the word is now associated with. Liberty a political construct, used synonymously with but distinct from freedom is coming to mean a kind of absolute, do-whatever-you-like autonomy that has no regard for the harm that autonomy might do to others. On that view, being told you're not allowed to swing an axe into someone's face would be an attack on liberty. This is obviously ridiculous, but the fact is thatthe left has allowed a small group on theright to give liberty whatever meaning it likes.This isnt just an academic point. The lefts desertion ofliberty as an idealhas some dispiriting real-life consequences. There has been weak opposition from the left to the roll-out of warrantless mass surveillance as well as its means, much of it fraught with bias thathas very real consequences for social justice. The news over the summer that the right to peaceful protest might be restricted was met with little more than a shrug. (The architect of thatplan, theHome Secretary, Priti Patel, described the Black Lives Matter protests as currently unlawful due to Covid-19.) And one cant help but feel that the news the government has reportedly dropped its plans to let people define their own gender might have provoked a stronger reaction if a zeal for social justice could have been fused with an appeal to liberty.As for the pandemic,a nuanced critique of the Coronavirus Act from across the spectrum has been lacking.Those who would think of themselves asliberalhave been silent, despite the criminalisation of many forms of human behaviour without real debate, to be ratified retrospectively. Perhaps this is necessary in this case, but the lack of opposition sets a dismal precedent.As it is, the word liberty has been left to those who gleefully tweet photos of themselvessansmasks. That's something the left should findoff-putting. Compassion and a real emphasis on the common good are necessary during a crisis such as the pandemic. But that doesnt condemn the idea of liberty to meaninglessness or irrelevance.

[See also: Richard Seymour on why the hard right fought against lockdown]

Harry Readhead is a member of the advocacy group Liberty.

View post:

How the right claimed liberty and made it a toxic word - New Statesman