Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-02-28/Humour
Humour
Pronouns beware
 | Blanked article This Signpost article has been blanked per community consensus. The original text is available in the page history. |
| Blanked article This Signpost article has been blanked per community consensus. The original text is available in the page history. |
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writeright now that I'm a she, I've always been a she, I was born a she, I'm staying a she. Don't be It'n on me, forgetaboudit. – Athaenara ✉ 13:36, 28 February 2019 (UTC) (I was hopping mad and couldn't spellrite.) – Athaenara ✉ 13:47, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]IIt should've thought of that ... — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:28, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]Anything can be offensive if a) you're desperately looking to be offended, and b) if you have trouble telling the difference between "entity A writes like X, off-site" and "Wikipedia is required to use exactly X because A says so". It's the exact same thing over and over again with adherents to various religions, with trademark holders, and with people convinced that English is broken and must be fixed right-now-or-else.
If you want to go change WP:MOS to say "It's okay to exactly mimic the appearance of logos, to write of Jesus and Mohammad with "Our Lord" and "Peace Be Upon Him" before and after (respectively) their names, to inject made-up pronoun shenanigans like ze and xir into our articles", well, good luck with that. Never going to happen. That's the entire point of the essay. Given that these are all sacred oxen to their various camps ("my identity", "honoring my Prophet", "my profits"), it is not possible to address the matter without tweaking some people. I gored them in the gentlest manner I could, with explicit silliness. So, grow a sense of humor.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:12, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
If anyone cares, the "It" page was inspired in large part by Scientology (a fake religion centered about a space-god, and banned as a criminal enterprise in various countries), which commingles supposedly religion-based demands, abuse of intellectual property and other laws, and misuse of language, all together as a programmatic agenda. (Though I don't know of them making up pseudo-pronouns, they certainly are chock full of neologisms like "thetans" and "engrams", and do plenty of warping of everyday words to mean things no one else would understand.)
Anyway, if people can't understand that "I want to force Wikipedia to do idiosyncratic and reader-confusing stuff to the English language for personal and socio-political reasons" is wrong, and that calling it out as wrong isn't an attack on TG people, then Xenu help us all. Same goes for not being able to understand the difference between "I identify as female" (or "as non-binary"), and "I use the new pronoun hrim"; Wikipedia is happy to respect the former, just like any good publisher would. We'll largely ignore the latter (unless RS mention it enough it seems encyclopedic to neutrally mention it on WP, too); like virtually any other publisher, WP not actually use that "pronoun" in our own writing. However, I don't think either of these "can't understand" things are real; it's an WP:ICANTHEARYOU act. It simply feels really good to some people to work up a heady sense of outrage and engage in a witch-hunt against someone who wasn't quite as sensitive about something as they would have been. It's much easier and funner to attack the author and the style of the piece to earn points with your friends than to actually address the meaning of the piece substantively.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:48, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Anyway, @Pldx1:, I'm not actually campaigning to promote anything, but doing the exact opposite. The whole point is that WP is not a place for campaigning for doing strange stuff to English. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:42, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It would be useful to have some feedback here on how critics of this "humorous essay" can fairly complain, including the deletion discussion, and which words they are allowed to use or not use in compliance with Wikipedia policies. One of the authors SMcCandlish has repeatedly responded as if what is intended as criticism of the article were a personal attack, so it would benefit everyone to be clear about what is reasonable criticism allowed in comments or the MfD. Many participants in the MfD have already stated that the article appears transphobic and intended to cause offense, some of those contributors have also identified as trans or genderqueer, which you may see as giving them a special perspective on appropriate use of related language or "humour", maybe not.
My understanding of NPA and related policies is that:
To date, I do not believe that anyone has claimed that the author is themselves transphobic, so there have been no NPA violations that would need a warning. Should anyone do so, then warnings for incivility would be entirely justifiable.
Thanks --Fæ (talk) 14:18, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@SMcCandlish: Given that your co-author was in violation of a TBAN by creating the humour essay, and has now been blocked for it, does that potentially change anything about what you have said so far here or in the MfD, or help illuminate any of the issues that others have raised during discussion? I presume that you were the main editor, but I have not checked who did or instigated what. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 16:30, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
At this point I would bet cash money on it.Done; I opened the ANI myself, despite my distaste for the dramaboards, because your topic ban from sexuality, broadly construed, was lifted only on condition that you not return to canvassing and incivility the topic area. In point of fact, Barbara_(WVS)'s block was removed because the topic ban in question is limited to medical and health topics and thus it wasn't a valid block. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:04, 2 March 2019 (UTC); updated 06:45, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]PS: I've caught up over at the ANI. Obviously a wrongful block (which has already been undone), as the topic-ban is constrained to health and medical topics. As usual, your ranting is simply off-topic. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:40, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Been on Wikipedia for nearing 14 years & I thought I'd seen it all. First, Justin Trudeau (the current Prime Minister of Canada) says use peoplekind instead of mankind. Now? we've got censuring taking place at Wikipedia's Signpost. It makes me want to engage in an involuntary personal protein spill. GoodDay (talk) 04:38, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Bilorv, not "everyone" agrees with you; opinion at both MfDs is sharply divided, and those against deletion actually have much better policy arguments, while those for deletion are mostly having knee-jerk reactions about what someone told them the page was about in several canvassing "calls to action" posts by Fæ (seems you are too, since you mischaracterize it badly; it does not contain what you claim it does). I think you might want to read CIR closely, then look at Fæ's behavior in the multi-page drama about this essay, and in the ANI thread that's open; it's characterized by constant pretense to "not understand" anything critical; this is a CIR problem (of one sort or a different sort) whether it is genuine inability to get it, or an act to dodge criticism and cause text-walling through re-re-re-explanation. If you know eight-graders who make jokes about being a transcendental space-god with strange demands about language, then you know some really weird kids. Finally, whether the piece was funny to you is irrelevant (and it's satire, which tends toward irony, not slapstick). The words humor and humorous are not synonyms; one is authorial intent (or critical classification of it), the other is perception.
Anyway, I'll depart with Paine a bit, in that blanking of the Signpost page isn't surprising or terrible to me, because this isn't an independent news source, it's a house organ produced by [a small subset of] the editorship, and it's in projectspace. The community arguably has a collective editorial oversight rationale. They don't have one for doing something like that to the userspace copy, and they don't have one for outright deletion of the Signpost copy. As I argued at the latter's MfD, doing so would render all of this community discussion moot, because no one in the future would be able to tell was the debate was about.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:54, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Streisand effect
Regarding your question on gay marriage: The issue of editorials supporting (or opposing) gay marriage is somewhat complicated, so bear with me here. (That complexity makes it a bit hard to apply meaningfully as a direct analogy to the situation of this Signpost article, but I think it is an interesting question to try to tackle separately regardless.)
Government recognition of gay marriage is an improvement over the status quo, as it reduces gender discrimination by the government, but it is merely treating a symptom of an underlying problem, rather than solving the problem itself. Marriage is a social interaction between individuals; it is irrelevant to government. Likewise, gender is irrelevant to government. So when the government considers marriage or gender in laws or in the way it treats people, it's overstepping its proper bounds. The real solution isn't allowing married gay people to be treated like married straight people; instead the solution is treating all people equally, regardless of whether they're married and regardless of gender. Thus, governments recognizing gay marriages as equivalent to straight marriages is reasonable as it reduces discrimination based on gender, but from the perspective of some religious communities, it is perceived either as the government trying to legislate private religious practice (which governments should not do), or as the government implicitly critiquing religious restrictions on marriage (which governments also should not do).
So, to get back to the issues of editorials. Consider two hypothetical editorials, accepted for publication in a major newspaper. The first editorial argues for the addition of government recognition of gay marriage to the current status quo, with the rationale that the government should not discriminate based on gender. That is a reasonable argument, but does not acknowledge that it is not an actual solution to the underlying problem, but is, rather, a suboptimal solution limited by political expediency. The second editorial argues that the status quo is preferable, as it avoids the government implicitly critiquing religion. That is also a reasonable argument, but does not acknowledge that the only reason that the current government recognition of marriage is accepted by the concerned religious communities is because that recognition, as a consequence of its history, is done in a way that happens to align with those communities' existing religious beliefs. So, both of these editorials are flawed, and miss part of the picture. They both could be plausibly accepted for publication, as each presents a reasonable argument.
If those two hypothetical editorials were published by a newspaper, should that newspaper's decision to publish either or both of them be criticized? That depends on how hurtful they were to people, so let's try to assess that. In the case of the pro-gay-marriage editorial, it is arguably hurtful to religious people by advocating for the government to adopt legislation that implicitly critiques their religious practices. In the case of the anti-gay-marriage editorial, it is arguably hurtful to gay people by advocating for the government to retain legislation that treats them differently than straight people. So, there's some room for criticism of both editorials. However, the anti-gay-marriage editorial is more hurtful overall to gay people than the pro-gay-marriage editorial is to religious people, as gay people are both historically and presently more marginalized than the concerned religious people are, and in this case the harm of laws that discriminate based on gender is greater than the harm of laws that implicitly critique religious practice. So, the criticism of the choice to publish the anti-gay-marriage editorial is more compelling than the criticism of the choice to publish the pro-gay-marriage editorial, as the publication of the former is more harmful. The pro-gay-marriage editorial shouldn't be suppressed, on the basis of it ultimately doing more good than harm, but it also is not perfect.
In conclusion, governments should remove any consideration of marriage or gender from their laws and actions. —{{u|Goldenshimmer}} (they/their)｜😹｜✝️｜John 15:12｜☮️｜🍂｜T/C 10:42, 13 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]