Notices by Rama (photos_floues@bagarrosphere.fr), page 2

A serious discussion needs to take place between contributors on how Wikimedia projects can thwart these attacks. We cannot limit ourselves to banalities such as "civility", because fascists have become very apt at weaponising such naive tone-policing against legitimate contributors.

We need to go beyond outrage, and start organising a patient, disciplined, methodic defence of Wikimedia projects against fascism.

It did not need to be so.

I have been a Wikimedian for 20 years. I have seen loads of nasty debates, including political activists (e.g. anti-nuclear, antisemitic Left, specific interests such as the Bogdanov Brothers...). We essentially resisted these attempts.

I also remember individual fascists at the beginning: they kept having tantrums, leaving and rejoining the project several times in a row. They were abhorrent, but inefficient.

But this has changed.

We now see patient, coherent far-Right infiltration designed to undermine our projects and hijack them. They use sophisticated metapolitic techniques to shape the public opinion in advance. Just like cybersecurity has a notion of Advanced Persistent Threat, Wikimedia projects are facing fascist APTs for which defence is currently ineffective.

So we are in an extraordinary situation where half a dozen far-Right activists, after using very recognisable tactics of the contemporary far-Right to bamboozle naive users, manage to start consultations at a machine-gun pace, preside the debates, police the tone, heavy-handedly punish their opponents, count the votes and formalise their self-proclaimed victory.

There are more infiltrated fascists than that, of course, but not enormously so. A tiny minority has hijacked the project.

This particular tactic is a textbook example of the contemporary far-Right use of "meta-politics": first, set up a stage where every word or concept that your opponents are likely to use has become loaded; then, trigger provocations that will start polarising debates in a semantic field turned into a minefield.

This is the stuff of people like Steve Bannon or Christopher Rufo.

https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/jeff-stein-strategic-speech-and-alt-right-metapolitics/

https://fair.org/slider/the-far-rights-manufactured-meaning-of-critical-race-theory/

the first lies in the "54%" majority claimed by the proponents of transphobic phrasing.

Wikipedia is not a democracy. It does not conduct referendums.

The purpose of consultations is to elaborate a Wikipedian "consensus", i.e. a common solution with the backing of an overwhelming majority. The solution may be reshaped during the debates as to include more people, and while nobody has a veto, a significant opposition is considered a lack of consensus.

It is a negotiation.

Bullies and fascists have for long intrigued to cast the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as its local chapters, as corrupt and power-drunk institutions trying to impose an illegitimate authority on the projects.

For the far-Right, this is a convenient way to cut victims of bullying from any superior recourse (cf the "Fram Affair"); and to unmoor specific projects, which are vulnerable to fascist governance capture (cf the Croatian WP), from minimal standards of decency such as WMF charters.

What we saw on WP-FR was the exact opposite: a violently polarising question, with half a dozen dedicated activists with far-Right leanings misleading a large number of badly-informed voters, with an equal amount rejecting the proposition outright.

These activists claim that a skin-of-the-teeth majority, obtained by artistically carving the electorate, is a mandate to embark the whole of WP-FR into a radical, damaging course.

This is a sort of Brexit.

This is not how Wikipedia works.

It is worthy of note that the people who instigated this catastrophic consultation already have several other similar consultations ready: one aims at making it official WP-FR policy to misgender trans people; the other is a reform of the Code of Conduct that would ban members of minorities from contributing to subjects pertaining to their lives.

This stream of polarising consultations is typical of the "permanent campaign" tactics of the far-Right, especially the Swiss SVP-UDC Party.

The second reason why this so-called consultation is not worth the bits on which it is written is that Wikimedia projects as a whole come under the umbrella of the Wikimedia Foundation. While the WMF does not claim direct editorial authority on specific projects, its statements of values do apply.

However the consultation on WP-FR goes frontally against the principles of "Resolution:Biographies of living people".

https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Biographies_of_living_people

And this calls for a few remarks:

1) there is a "Boiling Frog" effect, compounded by deliberate gaslighting from far-Right elements, that makes us lose perspective of how uncomfortable we are with the situation: is this deadname thing really that serious? Are we not getting a bit carried away by our feelings? Are not "trans activists" a bit over the top?

This 2009 resolution provides a landmark that shows how grotesquely extreme and abhorrent the WP-FR "decision" objectively is.

2) The decision puts WP-FR on a collision course with the WMF.

This is absolutely deliberate.

There is a sort of populism on Wikimedia projects, whereby people reflexively distrust external influence on the projects. People fantasise themselves as heroically resisting political influence, financial temptation and legal threats.

This makes them easy marks for far-Right manipulation.

Today, the French-speaking Wikipedia passed a decision to deadname trans people in their biographies.

Some will argue that this makes WP-FR transphobic, and there is certainly something to it: while Wikipedia is not a monolithic institution, and while I am critical of the phrase "Wikipedian community", it is a fact that WP-FR is effectively controlled by people hostile or indifferent to inclusion.

But this decision is utterly un-Wikipedian, and therefore lacks any legitimity, for 2 reasons:

Aujourd'hui, la Wikipédia francophone a décidé de montrer de façon proéminente les deadnames de personnes trans dans leurs biographies.

D'aucuns diront que cela fait de WP-FR un projet transphobe, et il difficile d'écarter l'argument : bien que Wikipédia ne soit pas une instutition monolithique, et que l'expression "communauté wikipédienne" me laisse très sceptique, on voit WP-FR de fait contrôlée par des gens hostiles ou indifférents à l'inclusion.

LRT: I am old enough to remember when Aaron Swartz died over the copyright of a few academic papers, to allow scientists to access their own literature without interference by parasitic publishers.
Today, a Microsoft-funded den of techbros tells us that the concept of intellectual property is hindering their make-money-quick scam, so obviously they can't be held by the law.
Funny how capitalism values altruism and the common good.

@MartyFouts @cstross
If you take that into account, it is only extremely carbon-efficient and sustainable, and immensely more sound than fossil fuels...

I wonder whether we are giving sufficient thought to the possibility that we could be about as close as creating a Human-level of superhuman-level AI with Deep Learning as we were to reanimating corpses with electricity in 1818.

@Daojoan
« "Atlas Shrugged" is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
»
— Dorothy Parker (attributed, apocryphal, orders of magnitude better and more insightful than anything Ayn Rand ever wrote)

@scalzi
I heard that about Reagan and "The Day After", and I would not find it a stretch of the imagination that he would have needed to watch mass entertainment to understand the basics of the issue.