Wikipedia has some severe biases when it comes to what and who counts as notable. For instance, you can compare ”programming pattern” and ”knitting pattern” and try to guess which is a 50 year practice and which is as old as civilization...
That sort of topic bias is best solved by adding new contributors, but they will intrinsically have to be different sorts of persons, and historically that difference has caused issues for the newcomers: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-w...
Interestingly, if the article is to be believed knitting patterns aren't as old as civilization but are actually roughly contemporary with mechanical knitting machines.
Also, I suspect the actual answer is that knitting patterns as a general concept aren't actually all that interesting, what people are interested in talking about is the things you can do with them. So there are a lot of fairly old, long articles about various knitting stitches and techniques, traditional designs, yarns, communities etc but no-one created the "knitting pattern" article until 2015. The otherwise extremely long and detailed article on knitting referenced patterns even before then, there was quite a bit of information about where to get them, and the various row counters used to keep track of where you were within a pattern had a huge article covering different types and their history, but nowhere explained what a pattern was and how it worked!
(The other interesting thing is that a lot of the knitting-related articles were obviously created by women, as you might expect, but the article on knitting patterns was created by some guy as his first edit. His only other edits were an attempt to split up the content in the extremely long main knitting article into other articles which was immediately reverted. This probably does show something about some kind of flaws in the Wikipedia model, but probably not the ones you're assuming it does.)
Programming patterns as a general concept aren't actually all that interesting either, what people are interested in talking about is the things you can do with them.
> an attempt to split up the content in the extremely long main knitting article into other articles
These attempts are inherently hard to arrange, often requiring a long discussion on some agreed-upon Talk: page. Wikipedia does not have an equivalent to the git sites' "merge request" workflow where a set of diffs to multiple pages can be worked-on in "draft" status and then transparently merged; these things have to be arranged manually.
The last edit to the Knitting article at the time of writing is 24 September 2019, and the page doesn't seem to have any sort of edit protection enabled. I'm confident Wikipedia's policies aren't the major issue holding back a flood of knitting-oriented contributors. The people involved in knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users.
As for the lurking culture war and worrying about the word 'inclusivity' it is hard to imagine a less important issue. Wikipedia is one of the most structurally democratic organisations on the entire planet, and possibly the knowledge accumulating enterprise most resistant to social pigeonholing of its members. Even I could literally copy their software and content and rehost the whole thing if I don't like how the project is run. The Wikimedia Foundation can do whatever it thinks is best; good luck to them. There is no reasonable problem here, even for the paranoid.
> The people involved in knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users.
Well, probably not heavy Wikipedia editors, but then neither are most heavy internet users, so concluding that they aren't heavy internet users is probably unwarranted.
> The people involved in knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users.
The knitters manage to set up vast collection of patters for download just fine, and more people spent time knitting last month than there are programmers in the USA, so it is in fact more an issue of them not being present on wikipedia.
The fact that more people knit in the US than there are programmers is irrelevant though for the argument that most of "the people involved with knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users."
And it's conceivable that it's only a relatively small percentage of all practitioners who actually upload patterns.
> And it's conceivable that it's only a relatively small percentage of all practitioners who actually upload patterns.
That holds for anything through - including programming. Why would it be so hard to accept that a group of people can be active on internet without adding stuff to wikipedia?
Wikipedia is crappy about anything sewing, knitting, embroidery etc related. But whenever I need something, I can find information on reddit or blogs or youtube quickly and easily. It is not that information does not exist on the internet in general, it is that those groups dont find wikipedia place to put stuff in. It is not even that those groups cry for wikipedia to add them in cause they are helpless without that. Wikipedia is not a thing in that space, because who cares about wikipedia and anecdotally those few who tried found it generally waste of time and frustrating.
This is wikipedia finding about situation, because its mission is "to be the largest, most comprehensive, and most widely-available encyclopedia ever written" and it is failing in these areas. And somehow people take offence on that.
That holds for anything through - including programming. Why would it be so hard to accept that a group of people can be active on internet without adding stuff to wikipedia?
> The people involved in knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users.
Or MAYBE the Internet is structured in such a way that knitters are systematically discouraged from participating?
Maybe non-knitters are getting favourable treatment?
Ah, there were two questions:
First, yes, I can explain that, it was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the whole debate on inclusivity, if some domain has fewer of some category of people in it, it must be due to structural exclusion (unless the minority is men, then it's a great victory for equality).
The second question:
No, I cannot explain how the Internet is structured to discourage knitters to contributing, just like I can't explain how STEM or tech jobs are supposed to be structured to exclude women.. Except, from my educations, there were _ZERO_ women from the start, so somehow, even before education started, they must have been structurally excluded, it's the only explanation, next to "the females didn't apply", which is entirely too reasonable to be true, especially considering that it's not even serving any political agenda.
I can see that choosing topics to be gendered is itself problematic. Is the implied assumption that knitting is a women's interest not inclusive, and an unhelpful stereotype?
An example - there are pages which are not fleshed out as much as programming patterns such as childcare or kindergarten education which are commonly viewed as stereotypically gendered but which in reality all parents regardless of gender are actually interested in and write about.
> I can see that choosing topics to be gendered is itself problematic. Is the implied assumption that knitting is a women's interest not inclusive, and an unhelpful stereotype?
The person you are responding didn't choose to gender the topic.
Society did that. You may not like it, but in 2020, most people do, in fact, gender those topics. Ignoring that is ignoring reality.
If we don’t acknowledge sex differences in interests of subjects, then we fail to see the true problem, and thus an actual solution. Why is it taboo to say on average, one sex is more likely to take on a specific kind of work than another? Despite evidence [0] [1]
I’m all for increasing the opportunity for everyone to participate in specific subjects. Yes, at one point in time oppression from one sex against another was real in intellectual pursuits, be it academia or certain areas of interest. And there are instances of it today. But it’s not as pervasive as so many commentators or inclusion boards want it to be.
But to try and get a 50/50 split, or whatever arbitrary ratio, is madness. It implies personality is 50/50 split, as personality is directly related to interests, among other factors (such as writing dry, technical content, which men (on average) tend to gravitate towards). These ratios are impractical, and verifiably false. Men and women on average have widely different personalities, based purely on biological sex. Evolutionarily this makes sense, as each had a specific, important role. Today we have the luxury of looking past the necessity for adhering to these roles, but denying they’re not a part of our genetics is denying reality.
It’s no different than asking why person X dislikes subject Y. Is it because of institutional oppression? Rarely, yes. But for a vast majority of people, person X just doesn’t like subject Y. And if on average, sex Z is disinterested in subject Y, then naturally we’ll see a disparity between the representation of each sex in subject Y.
Most people who knit are not biologically male. There exists male knitters, as there exists male nurses. Is there a cabal oppressing male knitting on an institutional level? Doubt it.
Using inclusivity as a goal has unfortunately become a loaded word. It’s now more akin to price control in a market, essentially forcing a metric value that is arbitrarily chosen, without understanding the implications. I’m not saying this instance in particular is using the word in such a way (though the tone of the article leads me to believe so), but for a vast majority of cases this is how it’s interpreted. We should not be striving for equality of outcomes, but equality of opportunity.
> Why is it taboo to say on average, one sex is more likely to take on a specific kind of work than another? Despite evidence [0] [1]
It really depends on why someone is saying it. If one is saying it as an observation of statistics, then it's fine (usually. There are contexts where it is not; it's not a set of facts you should point out to a group of students about to take a college entrance exam, for instance). If you're saying it in the context of a causal inference, such as, for example, the Damore memo, then it's falling into the trap of conflating correlation and causation that has traditionally unfairly banned women (and men) from entire allowed modes of participation in society.
> Yes, at one point in time oppression from one sex against another was real in intellectual pursuits, be it academia or certain areas of interest. And there are instances of it today. But it’s not as pervasive as so many commentators or inclusion boards want it to be.
I agree. Many commentators want it to be far less pervasive than it is. Unfortunately, it's still very pervasive. We are no more than two generations removed (in the US at least) from women being generally overtly barred from working in most industries. We are only a scant 100 years out from women in the US being allowed the right to vote. It hasn't been enough time for the difference of fact to permeate into a difference in opinion; old prejudices die hard.
For example, the rest of your comment indicates you believe that the differences we see in society are biologically rooted. That's precisely the question the jury is out on; we used to believe it was true, but psychology has come to understand much better how profoundly deep cultural indoctrination and phobia of new cultural patterns run. Before we make claims like "Men and women on average have widely different personalities, based purely on biological sex," we need to be extremely sure we isolate out cultural effects, which is damnably hard to do.
Your example of knitting, specifically, ahistorically excludes the Celtic culture [https://www.thefencepost.com/news/when-men-knitted-a-surpris...]. Any discussion of biological imperative to knit needs to explain why men knit in Celtic societies, not only why men don't knit as much in Western societies now (and given that we know how quickly genetics change, it's going to be a real chore coming up with a genetic explanation that distinguishes Celts from the rest of humanity).
> Wikipedia has some severe biases when it comes to what and who counts as notable.
This is very true. I once googled “Next.js” to try to learn more about it, and Google “helpfully” linked me to the “Nuxt.js” (note the “u” instead of “e”) Wikipedia page. I was thoroughly confused.
Turns out Next.js doesn’t even have a page! It has a draft[0], but it’s been rejected as “not notable” despite it being more popular on GitHub (in terms of stars, contributors, etc)
Then you need to establish strict(er) notability guidelines.
The approach, tone, use of sources, etc. should be exactly the same when writing about design patterns and knitting patterns (actually, I have the feeling pages about knitting patterns will be much more sound and factual than those about design patterns- but that's only a specific case...).
Wikipedia has some severe biases when it comes to what and who counts as notable. For instance, you can compare ”programming pattern” and ”knitting pattern” and try to guess which is a 50 year practice and which is as old as civilization...
That sort of topic bias is best solved by adding new contributors, but they will intrinsically have to be different sorts of persons, and historically that difference has caused issues for the newcomers: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-w...