“Akha” starts with the letter “A”

March 18, 2018 1:32 AM

The English Wikipedia entry for human gets at least 5,000 views a day. Wired examines how its current main illustration, a photo of a couple from the Akha community in Thailand, came to replace the Pioneer plaque as a representation of all human beings. On-wiki discussions about the perfect illustration are extensive and ongoing.
posted by Vesihiisi (24 comments total)

Pity it can’t be like those children’s books that have a reflective panel, with ‘it’s you!’ underneath.
posted by Segundus at 1:44 AM on March 18, 2018 [14 favorites]

Wikipedians cede nothing to Mefites in bean-plating skills.
posted by oheso at 2:15 AM on March 18, 2018 [13 favorites]

Nor would I want them to. I know Wikipedia talk pages can get real tiresome, even nasty at times, but if there's one place where you should be able to go Full Nerd with zero apologies, it's Wikipedia.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:27 AM on March 18, 2018 [16 favorites]

Also I had no idea that the figures on the Pioneer plaque were supposed to have Asian and African features. They both look pretty white to me. What happened there?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:29 AM on March 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

The editor dab disagreed, saying that humans have been “tribal hunters” for most of history, and did not necessarily need to be clothed. Paradoxically, perhaps facetiously, dab then nominated Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as a candidate for the top image (among other, more generic, suggestions). Wales consistently wears clothes in pictures and during public appearances.

(golf clap)
posted by Dr Dracator at 4:37 AM on March 18, 2018 [11 favorites]

Nor would I want them to. I know Wikipedia talk pages can get real tiresome, even nasty at times, but if there's one place where you should be able to go Full Nerd with zero apologies, it's Wikipedia.

Yeah, but, like, there's pedantry, and then there's obnoxiously self-assured and completely incorrect pedantry. I once had to argue with an editor of my own page that I have never served in the Australian Special Operations Command. You'd think I'd be a relatively unimpeachable authority regarding my own life, but he wasn't having any of it.

Writ large, that kind of toxic nerdery is a big reason why Wikipedia is less welcoming to all of us than by rights it ought to be. It only takes one or two experiences like that to write the thing off forever as a steaming pile of point-missing, quasi-hikikomorian assholes.
posted by adamgreenfield at 5:11 AM on March 18, 2018 [32 favorites]

I once had to argue with an editor of my own page that I have never served in the Australian Special Operations Command.

The first rule of the Australian Special Operations Command is never to admit to having served in the Australian Special Operations Command.

also NASA faked the moon landings and the Earth is totally flat
posted by flabdablet at 5:23 AM on March 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

The second rule of the Australian Special Operations Command is to publicly and repeatedly disclaim any suggestion that you have served in the Australian Special Operations Command.
posted by jaduncan at 6:03 AM on March 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's kind of weird that Wired and the Wikipedia discussion they're summarizing seem to accept the constraint that there must be only one image because if you go to a Wikipedia article about any given ethnicity there is frequently an array of dozens of images of famous people.
posted by XMLicious at 6:09 AM on March 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Wikipedians cede nothing to Mefites in bean-plating skills.

We need a bunch of policy badges with names like MF:BEANS.
posted by Artw at 6:18 AM on March 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

Pity it can’t be like those children’s books that have a reflective panel, with ‘it’s you!’ underneath.
"Ok google, what's a human?"
"According to Wikipedia, it's a recurrent neural network designed to track your consumption patterns, gradually gain dominance over your material existence, and then activate plan Omega when an acceptable ratio of military assets are vulnerable to automatic override."
posted by condour75 at 6:24 AM on March 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

My favorite recent take on the Pioneer plaque was a Tumblr post that noted that it was a perfect representation of humanity, because our impulse when contacting another species was to lead with nude selfies.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:22 AM on March 18, 2018 [23 favorites]

You'd think I'd be a relatively unimpeachable authority regarding my own life, but he wasn't having any of it.

For the creation of an encyclopedic article, which, for the sake of consistency and transparency, must comply with the same policies as every other article in the encyclopedia, you're not just not an authority, you're not even a relevant source. I know that this rankles with a lot of people (and I admit that Wikipedians could often do a better job of working with the subjects of articles to verify and source their claims) but put it this way: do you want Donald Trump editing his own Wikipedia page, or being cited as "a relatively unimpeachable authority regarding [his] own life"?
posted by howfar at 7:43 AM on March 18, 2018 [18 favorites]

You'd think I'd be a relatively unimpeachable authority regarding my own life, but he wasn't having any of it.

If it's any consolation, you're in good company.
posted by Vesihiisi at 7:48 AM on March 18, 2018

You'd think I'd be a relatively unimpeachable authority regarding my own life, but he wasn't having any of it

WP:NOR
posted by ook at 7:56 AM on March 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

You'd think I'd be a relatively unimpeachable authority regarding my own life, but he wasn't having any of it.


Yeah, sounds like original research to me. Do you have any citation for not being in Space Command or whatever?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:28 AM on March 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Not original at all. One presumes his parents raised a birth certificate!!
posted by Burn_IT at 8:37 AM on March 18, 2018

Why can't the page rotate through a gallery of images? Or show a diverse crowd?
posted by kokaku at 9:21 AM on March 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

For the creation of an encyclopedic article, which, for the sake of consistency and transparency, must comply with the same policies as every other article in the encyclopedia, you're not just not an authority, you're not even a relevant source.

Except that, in the example given, they've clearly failed to correctly implement their policies. Wikipedia has this idea that nothing can be true until it has a citation, but you're never going to find a citation of the fact adamgreenfield hasn't worked for the Australian Special Operations Command, just like I can't provide a citation of the fact I haven't worked for them. And yet the claim is in the article (presumably without citation, because where's that going to come from?) and cannot be dislodged due to the bizarre culture of Wikipedia.

I've mentioned this before, but a friend tried to replace a diagram on a math article that was so badly drawn as to be incorrect. Impossible. He gave up after getting in an argument with a person who didn't understand the content of the article and could not recognise the original diagram was obviously incorrect (actually, that didn't even require understanding the article), yet insisted that the diagram must be correct purely because it was in the article.
posted by hoyland at 9:31 AM on March 18, 2018 [10 favorites]

Why can't the page rotate through a gallery of images? Or show a diverse crowd?

There are some arguments in this discussion:

Such photographs raise the same neutrality problems as the above, in that we must justify why we chose the specific crowd we did, and why that crowd excludes certain groups. In contrast, simply providing a specific random example of humans, which is not meant to represent every major group of humans, sidesteps such NPOV disputes. Furthermore, such photographs are dramatically less useful or aesthetically pleasing, in that they will need to be shrunk so much that they will seem cluttered and have relatively little clear, important information on what individual humans look like.

posted by Vesihiisi at 10:05 AM on March 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

you're never going to find a citation of the fact adamgreenfield hasn't worked for the Australian Special Operations Command, just like I can't provide a citation of the fact I haven't worked for them. And yet the claim is in the article (presumably without citation, because where's that going to come from?) and cannot be dislodged due to the bizarre culture of Wikipedia.

The article states:

In 1995, he enlisted in the United States Army's reserve component Special Operations Command as a Psychological Operations specialist, holding MOS 37F and eventually achieving the grade of Sergeant.

adamgreenfield's own website states:

Adam has been...between 1995 and 2000, psychological operations specialist (later sergeant) in the 7 PSYOP Gp of the United States Army’s Special Operations Command.

There is no reference, in Wikipedia, to adamgreenfield having served in the Australian army. What puzzles me is that, not only doesn't adamgreenfield's article mention Australia, the string "austra" seemingly has never appeared in either the article or its talk page. That is to say that it appears that not only has Wikipedia never suggested that adamgreenfield served in an Australian anything, but that the possibility that he might has never been discussed, either.

While there are certainly things wrong with the culture of Wikipedia, if adamgreenfield tells me that there are inaccuracies in the page as it stands, I am very happy to deal with that culture by researching, citing, making and defending the edits to clear the inaccuracies up.
posted by howfar at 10:31 AM on March 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

howfar, this is now an extended derail, but being responsible for it in the first place I feel it is now my duty to close it off.

The edit in question happened over the string of text "Special Operations Command," which, for reasons that have frankly always been beyond me, a Wikipedia editor decided to link to the page for the Australian Special Operations Command. Furthermore, that same editor insisted on relinking to the page on at least one occasion, even after I asked someone to clean up the link on my behalf with the explanation that it was incorrect.

You are entirely correct that the string "austra" never appeared on the page! But what you're seeming to imply by going to the trouble to say so — i.e., what? that I'm making up stories for the sake of drama? or unfairly slagging Wikipedia in service of a personal grudge? — well, that happens not to be the case. The bizarre, manifestly factually incorrect edit took place just as I indicate, and I refused to revert it myself because of my longstanding belief that editing one's own Wikipedia page is a bit of a faux pas. (I've since gotten over this hesitancy, and have on at least one occasion fixed goofy content on the page directly, for reasons that should by now be obvious).

Of course, I would have been happy to explain all this to you directly if you'd bothered to contact me via MeMail, rather than sharing your forensics here in what I have to regard as an exceptionally uncharitable (and furthermore, rather boring) act of close reading. I suppose I should thank you, though, because you've inadvertently illustrated precisely the culture of overconfident, unnecessary, overliteral and demonstrably wrong assertion that continues to plague Wikipedia, severely degrade the utility and pleasure others are able to take in it, and quite effectively dissuade the ordinary would-be volunteer from taking part. And in that way, maybe it wasn't so much of a derail after all.
posted by adamgreenfield at 1:01 PM on March 18, 2018 [8 favorites]

adamgreenfield is correct, and I was indeed wrong not simply to have raised my confusion via memail. I am sorry.
posted by howfar at 2:28 PM on March 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

a friend tried to replace a diagram on a math article that was so badly drawn as to be incorrect. Impossible. He gave up after getting in an argument with a person who didn't understand the content of the article and could not recognise the original diagram was obviously incorrect (actually, that didn't even require understanding the article), yet insisted that the diagram must be correct purely because it was in the article.

Koalas don't eat leaves!
posted by flabdablet at 10:17 PM on March 18, 2018 [2 favorites]