Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

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Mutineer
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Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by Mutineer » Sat Mar 24, 2018 9:10 am

I encourage that no names be named, but when you examine Wikipedia's administrative culture, you see what appear to me to be a large amount of "transgender females" (that is to say males that attempt to be female). You see this at Arbcom.

If there's a "transgender male" I haven't noticed that person yet.

My position on the question is that "well, if that is what you feel like you have to do, I'll try not to be bothered by it, and certainly won't harm you. But my taxes shouldn't pay for it."

Humans have chromosomes. Females are XX, males are XY. It'll be the year 3000 before anybody can change that.

Has anyone else noticed this? No hate.
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Re: Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Mar 24, 2018 10:06 am

I've noticed, and it isn't a surprise given Wikipedia has a disproportionate population of LGBT people. They pretend they're there for the encyclopedia, but I suspect most get involved simply to be around ike minded individuals, where they can be themselves.

Like the rest of Wikipedia's unrepresentative population issues, they don't seem to be doing a lot to counter the inevitable systemic bias it brings. There's a world of difference between people having their voices heard by writing reliably sourced neutral content, and having Wikipedia become a platform for activism.

Policing that line is of course one of the most important roles Administrators have. This is where it would be worrying if there is a concentration occurring at the highest levels. As we saw in the last election, this won't be because the community made a conscious choice to support LGBT people from a large slate of well qualified candidates - they had eight viable candidates for eight seats.

On the issue of naming names, we really should name people like Drmies, who is IRL at least presenting as male, and in his editing style is definitely a testestorone fueled asshole, but who seems to think being ambiguous about their gender on Wikipedia, without openly declaring their status, is a fun game to play, a nice way to undermine people who have legitimate criticisms of their Admin actions.

Perversely, I suspect the LGBT community isn't as strong in matters of Wikipedia governance as it is IRL. As in they have less of a voice in how it is run than how content or content related guidance is shaped. In real life, people like Drmies would certainly have been targeted for protest and shaming for their disgraceful actions. And there would be more instances of people getting blocked for their pretty obvious phobias, or rather their belief they can happily express them on Wikipedia as if it's just any other part of the internet. You'll get blocked for outright slurs of course, but that's about it.

As for the fixedness of gender, well, I certainly disagree......

https://www.wikipediasucks.co/forum/vie ... f=10&t=469

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Re: Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by Mutineer » Sat Mar 24, 2018 10:36 am

Thanks for the perspective, Crowsnest (and by the way thanks for livening up the place the last few weeks, we sort of needed it).
I am "Modsquad" here, and participate, but I don't want you to think we can't have an angry argument.

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Re: Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Mar 24, 2018 11:52 am

You're very welcome. Regardless of all other considerations, ultimately I will always be appreciative of any platform which actually deals in the business of Wikipedia criticism, rather than just pretending that is their reason for existence, as they get busy merely being a social club for Wikipedians or a safe space for so called critics who are frankly too ill-informed or too closed minded to be saying anything useful at all about what is wrong with Wikipedia.

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Re: Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by Graaf Statler » Sat Mar 24, 2018 7:18 pm

Mutineer wrote:Thanks for the perspective, Crowsnest (and by the way thanks for livening up the place the last few weeks, we sort of needed it).

I agree, although I am much more focussend on WP-NL/WM-NL I always like the intelligent analyses and postings of Crowsnest very, very much.

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Re: Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Mar 25, 2018 3:11 am

You can learn more about this by careful searches on Encyclopedia Dramatica. In fact a goodly number of Wikipedia's most powerful admins/insiders have undergone M-F gender change. I daresay it is a larger percentage than the population at large, given how few admins WP actually has esp. today. And worst of all, some of them are among the craziest people Wikipedia has ever seen, period.

Not counting Kelly Martin, who quit on her own and later became a major critic of Jimbo and WP, we have these, every one of whom is an embarrassingly incompetent and aggressive abuser of authority:

  • early arbitrator Rebecca "Ambi" Leighton, who gave up and left in February 2012.
  • DeltaQuad, aka Amanda Passley. Another arbitrator. Still active today.
  • Morwen, aka Abigail Brady. Quit in disgust in November 2013, having something to do with the desysopping of Phil "Snowspinner" Sandifer. She logs in and does something every year to keep her account from being desysopped.
  • Andrea "Jokestress" James. Never became an admin but might as well have been one--did many abusive things and was protected by powerful insiders. Ask Dan Murphy about her!
  • Sarah "Sceptre" Noble. Unbelievable. I tell people about some of the things Sceptre got away with on Wikipedia and they commonly refuse to believe me. Repeatedly lost adminship and repeatedly managed to get it restored. She resigned adminship in 2011 but is still diddling content--badly. Proof that the people who run Wikipedia are insane and unreliable. Sceptre should have been pushed out ten years ago.
  • Xaosflux. Admin since 2006, became a bureaucrat in 2016, also an admin on Meta. Something to do with editing bots. I dare any of you to tell me what the hell he/she/it is actually doing for Wikipedia. Please go ahead and try, because I give up.

Have a look at the category for more. So far as I can tell, the vast majority are male to female. Very few of them managed to get admin or other advanced permissions on WP; but the ones who did were usually awful people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: ... ikipedians

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Re: Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by The End » Sun Mar 25, 2018 4:42 am

Many, many years ago, I remember Raul654 being asked about the perceived high number of LGBT Wikipedians on the English Wikipedia, but he admitted no survey was ever done to confirm that. I tried looking at the date from the General User Survey done in 2008. The data only breaks down gender by male and female. If they had added transsexual and transgender, I bet we would have a better idea of the number.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey

If anyone wants to dig further into finding any survey that might have that data, you can start here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Surveys

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Re: Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Mar 25, 2018 12:15 pm

Well, I guess we are naming names then......I didn't even know about most of those, and funnily enough, it is remarkable how many of them are total psychos. I think it fits the broader theme the majority of female editors on Wikipedia are far more aggressive and hostile than gender norms would suggest. I've previously argued this is simply natural selection at work - only the rough and tough end of the so called fairer sex will survive the toxic Wikipedia environment, or even want to be there (or even love being there). But maybe the answer has more to do with how many of them are simply men pretending to be women. Going full trans to complete the fantasy seems a bit extreme to me, but then I'm not a Wikipedian.

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Re: Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by Mutineer » Sun Mar 25, 2018 4:23 pm

CrowsNest wrote:Well, I guess we are naming names then......I didn't even know about most of those, and funnily enough, it is remarkable how many of them are total psychos. I think it fits the broader theme the majority of female editors on Wikipedia are far more aggressive and hostile than gender norms would suggest. I've previously argued this is simply natural selection at work - only the rough and tough end of the so called fairer sex will survive the toxic Wikipedia environment, or even want to be there (or even love being there). But maybe the answer has more to do with how many of them are simply men pretending to be women. Going full trans to complete the fantasy seems a bit extreme to me, but then I'm not a Wikipedian.


Eric's an administrator here and I'm a moderator (whatever the heck that's supposed to be). He won't catch me crossing him. It's not defamatory to say "Cynthia Smith is a trans." It's not defamatory to identify the Wikipedia administrators that routinely strut about with their little Twinkle buttons pushing common editors around. And truth is an absolute defense.

Yeah, on Internet discussion boards you sometimes encounter an aggressive and hostile person presenting himself as female, you can kind of sense it, but you don't really know. I mean, I'm not doing the medical examination.
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Re: Transexuals in Wikipedia's Administrative Culture

Post by The End » Mon Mar 26, 2018 2:47 am

Quite a few like Sceptre, Fran Rogers (formerly Krimpet), and Tristessa de St Ange (formerly NicholasTurnbull) have previously identified as one gender and later changed it without fanfare or drama. I'm glad they did that instead of starting a new account or hiding it. They show the world has changed for the better. It could still be a lot better, of course.

Also, I owe Fran two favors for blocking the crap out of a pedophile editor years ago and beating the common sense into a nutty editor (Alarics) I railed against on the old WR. She smited them mightily.
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