Boycott Wikipedia

Kevin Gorman

Wikipedia campus ambassadors

Recently Wikipedia started deleting articles that were favorable to men or they misrepresented them. The dedication to Thomas Ball is gone along with other pages that were favorable to men's rights. The men's rights page has been altered to make MRA's the bad guys and to further the idea of female victim hood. In fact A Voice For Men discusses this in a couple of places.

This requires a bit of context, which I’ll establish as quickly as I can.You’ve just comprehensively re-written wikipedia’s entry on Men’s Rights. The page, formerly provided a reasonable summary of issues of concern with a movement called “the men’s rights movement.”

Now, after a thorough rewrite, the wikipedia entry under the heading “Men’s Rights,” characterizes the phrase to refer to collective privilege afforded to men throughout history. Essentially you’ve provided the definition of “male privilege” as it is presented in the context of Patriarchy Theory (PT).

PT, by the way, is one of the ideological tenets of Radical Feminism, thus the Men’s Rights wikipedia page, formerly addressing a movement called “the mens rights movement” is now a reference page for an item of mainstream feminist doctrine. The rewrite was skillful, certainly – and appears to have taken considerable work. Just look at all those links to feminist advocate research.

Here’s my question. or yours, actually. If you find yourself rewriting reference material to obscure and minimize the topic of that reference material; in fact censoring that topic, to create a public impression that it does not exist – do you recognize your own action as censorship? Taking that question further – do you recognize that the urge to silence opinions other than your own is a totalitarian urge?

Source:click here

And

In a sudden and sweeping change of the Wikipedia page on Men’s Rights, references to the myriad of issues and efforts highlighted over the past forty years of pro-male activism have been replaced with the standard litany of feminist dogma about male privilege and patriarchy. They start the page (just below the notice challenging its neutrality) with a simple definition: Men’s rights are the entitlements and freedoms claimed by boys and men.

That is followed up by a list of historical and other items that point to male privilege and hegemony, as well as female oppression. Further down the line, below the remainder of the misdirecting clutter (and past where most people will actually read), there is cursory mention of some elements of the MRM, pointing to NCFM and ACFC. This is where they make their first and only mention of men’s rights activists. It’s placed just below a sub-header addressing the male dominant laws in Pakistan.

There are other, very minor references to legitimate men’s rights issues, but they are all literally buried in a deluge of pro-feminist perspective that was added to the page in one fell swoop sometime in the last few days.

The intent here is transparent. The Wikipedia page on men’s rights has been rewritten, in deliberate and premeditated fashion, in order to turn it into a tool that will lead readers to conflate the men’s rights movement with an agenda of domination and control over women. Actually, the page has not been so much rewritten, as it has been reengineered, to turn it from an information source into an instrument of disinformation and deception. None of this was done accidentally, as anyone who has ever read the previous incarnation of that page can clearly see.

Source:click here

This lead to a WTF moment. Why is wikipedia taking this attitude? Who is making the decisions to delete the sections on men's rights?

We believe we may have the answer. This may explain what happened:

Campus Ambassador program tackles gender gap
Thursday, March 31st, 2011

A key piece of Wikimedia’s strategic plan is to close the gender gap by encouraging more women to participate in projects. One area where we already see progress is the Wikipedia Ambassadors program, developed in conjunction with the Public Policy Initiative. During the 2010-11 academic year, university students across the United States are writing Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework, and they learn the Wikipedia basics from trained Campus Ambassadors who come into the classroom to teach students how to start contributing.

These Campus Ambassadors are the first face of the Wikimedia movement that most students have seen, and 27 of the 59 Campus Ambassadors this term (that’s 46%) are women. At Indiana University Bloomington, for example, six Campus Ambassadors assist three classes of students — and five of them are women.

“I think I am putting a face on Wikipedia instead of it just being a web site that people use,” says Chanitra Bishop, a librarian at IU and one of the five female Campus Ambassadors there. “Hopefully, if students and professors have thought about becoming involved, they will see that they can and that they have unique knowledge to contribute.” Likewise, Indiana Library and Information Science master’s student Beth Brockman was drawn to becoming a Campus Ambassador because of her desire to make Wikipedia a better resource for anyone to use, but she thinks seeing women teaching about Wikipedia in university classrooms can be an inspiration to the female students in the class.

Chanitra’s and Beth’s views are echoed across their cohort. They don’t focus on being role models for female students. Instead, they try to ease all students into the joys of editing Wikipedia — and closing the gender gap is a nice side effect of their work.

“I would hope that I am providing a model for any new editor, not just women, and I would hope that I am contributing to making Wikipedia a professional and respectful environment,” says Adrianne Wadewitz, a longtime Wikipedian. “Being a Campus Ambassador allows me to join together two things about which I’m passionate: Wikipedia and teaching. It allows me to show professors how useful Wikipedia can be as a teaching tool and it allows me to learn, in turn, from students and other teachers about a variety of subject matters and techniques for communicating.”

Campus Ambassadors were trained in five regions across the United States in January, including a training in Indianapolis, pictured here.

Ellie Dahlgren is a staff member at the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Indiana, and she agrees with Adrianne that her primary focus as a Campus Ambassador is on what the students get out of the Wikipedia assignment.

“I like challenging instructors to think about teaching and learning in different ways,” Ellie says. “I like being part of a team that creates unique and practical (i.e., real-world) experiences for students.”

And it’s not just Campus Ambassadors closing the gender gap. More than half of the 600 students contributing to Wikipedia through the Public Policy Initiative this term are women. Two classes feature an all-women roster: women’s college Simmons’ “Public Relations Seminar” and Georgetown University’s “Women and Human Rights.”

Brenda Burk is a librarian at nearby Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and she travels to Bloomington to assist in the classrooms there. Becoming a Campus Ambassador has given Brenda a new way to connect with students, she says. Brenda says the principles librarians support — understanding resources, determining source reliability, and verifiability — complement Wikipedia well. And she’s particularly excited to see the students in her class continue contributing to such an important resource.

“Seeing me use Wikipedia and edit encourages them to jump in,” Brenda says of her students. “In the class, the women are a bit more cautious starting to edit and create articles. Once they start and become comfortable in this environment they get excited about it. Hopefully the enthusiasm continues.”

Learn more about the Public Policy Initiative, the Wikipedia Ambassador program, and the classes involved so far at WikiProject United States Public Policy.

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

Tags: gender gap
Posted in Community, Outreach, Public Policy Initiative, Wikipedia | Comments Off

Source:click here

Sounds like the editors of wikipedia are man-hating dykes or self-hating dweebs. So wikipedia is now being edited by people who have never lived in the real world. Never had to pay their own rent,buy their own groceries or pay their own bills because they have mommy and daddy to do that for them. Let's show these dykes and dweebs what happens when you fuck with men. The organization that pays the bills for wikipedia is wikimedia. This link will take you to their "benefactors" page. Let's tell these benefactors what kind of operation wikipedia is running and ask them if they support bigotry because that is exactly what they are doing when they support wikipedia. Wikimedia is a 501c nonprofit so let's see if we can fuck with wikimedia's 501c status. How can we do that? We can contact our elected leaders (see "men's resources"),both houses and ask them if a 501c nonprofit can engage in sexist practices. If they can't then they should be called on it. Also there is Wiki which may be the parent company of wikipedia so we should email them about our disgust toward wikipedia and the practices they are engaged in. The more of us that write in the better so write in today.