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The March for Science in Washington DC. You dont have to be anti-science to see that there is an inevitability about its difficult relationship with politics. Photograph: Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images

There is an old joke about being able to tell an extroverted scientist: instead of staring at their shoes when they talk to you, they stare at yours. This is no longer true. Scientists are the new rock stars. Tonight Einstein gets the full soft-focus Crown-style treatment as National Geographic launches a 10-part series about the man described by the actor Geoffrey Rush, who portrays him in Genius, as a stud-muffin theoretical physicist.

The scientist as hero is familiar enough. Whats less familiar is scientists demonstrating, thousands of them around the world, with placards and banners declaring Science improves decisions and other inflammatory assertions, such as Science belongs to no country because knowledge belongs to humanity. Evidence not arrogance, they demanded.

But you dont have to be anti-science to see that there is an inevitability about its difficult relationship with politics. It is the point where knowledge and belief collide, which is why it is now the crucible of the culture wars.

Scientists cant but be the villains of the Brexit narrative. They are highly educated in the ultimate transferrable skills. They are the quintessential citizens of the world, people who keep their passports in their back pockets, and often work not just in towns where they were not born but in countries their parents never imagined visiting. They might dream of a Nobel prize, but they may also have an eye on a job in Silicon Valley. Intellectual property is the new alchemy.

More challenging than their lifestyles, however, is their insistence on the sanctity of evidence and the importance of making decisions based on established fact. Expert-deniers trade on the natural resistance to uncomfortable truth by asserting that the truth is a negotiable quality. Donald Trump thinks windfarms are bad for your health, and low-energy lightbulbs give you cancer. He has linked childhood immunisation with autism. Although he tweeted yesterday that rigorous science is critical to my administration, he has yet to appoint a scientific policy adviser.

In one way, this is an argument that was already well rehearsed when Pope Paul V took on Galileo 400 years ago. Science and belief have always rubbed up against each other. They find compromise positions. Popes die. In the end, science emerges victorious.

Yet there are differences. Trump is not arguing from some alternative, God-centred perspective. He is not defending a belief system subscribed to by most of the known world. He just doesnt like facts that contradict what he wants to say. The expert-deniers rest their case on experts sometimes being wrong. They refuse to recognise that to know something properly, it must be capable of being proved wrong. If it is, that in fact constitutes the advancement of knowledge.

There is another reason science is at the heart of this argument. Scientists are all very well when they are discovering penicillin and working out how to transfer great quantities of data instantaneously. Science is good when it makes life longer, easier, richer and more comfortable and convenient. It is also wonderful when it is makes discoveries concerning the metabolism of naked mole rats, or negative-mass fluids mind-boggling discoveries that are basically irrelevant to most peoples lives.

It is a harder sell when it points to unacceptable realities. Its disagreeable to stop smoking or to drink less alcohol or to avoid sugary drinks. The people who make cigarettes, booze and fizzy drinks are often unscrupulous in defence of their products and their profits. Accepting that our way of life threatens the sustainability of the planet was never going to be easy. Donald Trump is not a new version of a 17th-century pope, but there are millions of US voters who believe he can preserve their world: a world that depends on coal and cars.

There was plenty to admire about the scientists protest. But its increasingly clear that their greatest skill unearthing the truth is not enough to win a culture war.

Link:
Scientists are armed with the truth. But it won't win them the culture war - The Guardian

In February, The Guardian reported that editors at Wikipedia had voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website after deeming it generally unreliable.

The Daily Mail, a UK-based daily print and online publication with a daily newsprint circulation of 1.5 million and 238 million unique visitors a month, responded with a series of angry articles, ambushed one editor at his mother's home, and released a statement saying it banned its own reporters from using Wikipedia as a source in 2014.

Except, Wikipedia never truly banned the Daily Mail. Many citations pointing back to the Daily Mail are still live, and new ones have appeared on Wikipedia since the kerfuffle. So what's going on?

H.G. Wells predicted the need for something like Wikipedia back in 1937, saying that without a world encyclopaedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles.

Wikipedia editor Andrew Davidson shared that quote at the beginning of a talk in London earlier this month in which he explained how Wikipedia editors clean up the site. The site's editors, who are volunteers, have always struggled over the essence of facts. Famous battles breaking out over the origin of hummus, when to use Gdansk versus Danzig, and how to spell the word yoghurt. This process is decentralized, democratic, and well-documented; these arguments play out on the "talk" pages for individual entries as well as forum threads dedicated to editor discussion, where they are saved forever.

There are no rules on Wikipedia, just guidelines. Of Wikipedia's five pillars, the fifth is that there are no firm rules. There is no formal hierarchy either, though the most dedicated volunteers can apply to become administrators with extra powers after being approved by existing admins. But even they don't say what goes on the site. If there's a dispute or a debate, editors post a "request for comment," asking whoever is interested to have their say. The various points are tallied up by an editor and co-signed by four more after a month, but it's not a vote as in a democracy. Instead, the aim is to reach consensus of opinion, and if that's not possible, to weigh the arguments and pick the side that's most compelling. There was no vote to ban the Daily Mail because Wikipedia editors don't vote.

The Daily Mail is known, especially online, for sensationalist content, sloppy reporting, borderline plagiarism, and the occasional fabrication. The paper made up an entire story with quotes and colorful description reporting the wrong verdict in the Amanda Knox trial. However, it has won kudos for original reporting and was named newspaper of the year at the latest Press Awards. Wikipedia editors frequently argued about its validity as a source in the discussion section for individual entries. In this case, an editor submitted a broader request for comment about its general reliability. Seventy-seven editors participated in the discussion and two thirds supported prohibiting the Daily Mail as a source, with one editor and four co-signing editors (more than usual) chosen among administrators declaring that a consensus, though further discussion continued on a separate noticeboard, alongside complaints that the debate should have been better advertised.

Though it's discouraged, the Daily Mail can be (and still is) cited. An editor I met at a recent London Wikimeet said he'd used the Daily Mail as a source in the last week, as it was the only source available for the subject he was writing about. The site has a link filtering tool that automatically bans spamming sites, text with excessive obscenities, and persistent vandalism (trends such as leaving "your mom" on pages), but it has not been activated for the Daily Mail.

The change is less of a ban and more of a general rule not to use Daily Mail references when better ones exist, said John Lubbock, communications coordinator for Wikimedia UK, the charity that helps fund and organise the encyclopedia, but doesn't direct its efforts.

Lubbock noted that the move means editors will replace Daily Mail links with better sources, but with some 10,000 in use, that work may never be fully completed. If there's no more reliable source, editors have to make a judgement call: if only the Daily Mail is saying something, can we trust it? If not, delete the fact. If so, keep the link.

That practice isn't new on the site, and it isn't limited to the Daily Mail. Buzzfeed is generally considered not reliable by Wikipedia editors discussing the issue on the Reliable Sources noticeboard, though such discussion isn't binding and won't be seen by many editors. While its listicles may be of little use to an encyclopedia, it has an investigations team and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer this year.

Meanwhile, less-reputable sources including Russia Today and Breitbart aren't listed as unreliable. However, editors on the site and those I spoke to pointed out that editors shouldn't need reminding that those aren't trustworthy sources.

Debate aside, the Daily Mail itself noted that the "vote" saw 53 editors decide for the millions who use Wikipedia, but the encyclopedia isn't a democracy. The Request for Comments pages where such debates happen are rooms for remote debate that anyone can take part in. And there, consensus isn't about tallying votes, but weighing the merit of arguments.

That means a minority could win a dispute by making a better case, though in the case of the Daily Mail, a majority of editors involved in the conversation did back the ban. It's a small slice of the the 135,000 people who edit the site each month, though one editor pointed out that the vote was watched by more than 2,000 users, more than a usual debate would see.

Editors often do reach consensus. They have to in order to disable open contributions for controversial pages, for example. They recently introduced tighter guidelines for entries on living people to avoid fake death reports and libel. They've also agreed to use systematic reviews rather than individual studies as citations on medical pages.

Enforcement is a different matter. These decisions are typically enforced by editors who revert changes that don't meet the agreed-upon standards. This means the back-and-forth continues on Wikipedia's pages. The Daily Mail decision supported using an automated edit filter, but with it not in place and no apparent plans to do so, there's no reason a person new to the site would even know about the ban. And even if an automatic edit filter was used, it wouldn't outright ban the Daily Mail as a source. Though that is technically possible, it would simply show a warning message but then let the editor still click to save the link to the Daily Mail. Remember, there are no firm rules.

In the end, there was no vote, there is no ban, and plenty of other newspapers have had similar treatment, with a Wikipedia guide to potentially unreliable sources listing the Sun, Daily Mirror, TMZ, and Forbes.com. Listing the Daily Mail as an unreliable source is merely a trump card for editors to batter each other with during their constant debates about sources. If you want to link to the Daily Mail, be prepared to defend why. If you can't, the link will be replaced.

As foolish as some Wikipedia battles may seem, eventually consensus is reached, reality is decided upon, and we can feel like we're on solid ground. The site's volunteer editors are bickering their way to a common interpretation of reality, something we desperately lack here in 2017, with newsroom cuts gutting fact-checking, the rise of fake news, and a president who constantly contradicts himself. We don't have the certainties we used to that leaves people unsure what's reliable and who to believe, one editor told me. People in politics play off that, to confuse people, to paralyze them.

Knowledge is power

The Whitehouse.gov reset broke Wikipedia links en masse

Heres what editors are doing about it.

Read More

See the article here:
Wikipedia's method for sorting out good and bad sources is a mess - The Outline

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Mrinalini Mukherjee at MS University, Baroda1969. PIc/source: Jyoti Bhatt. Courtesy: The Baroda Archives project, Asia Art Archive

The late Mrinalini Mukherjee, who fashioned the most sensuous sculptures out of hemp, is a name that Indian art history cannot afford to miss out. Mukherjee, who passed away in 2015, was notable for her iconic figures at once robust and curvaceous inspired by goddesses, vegetation and archetypal forms. Her works are part of collections at Tate and New Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art. It should come as a surprise, then, that Mukherjee got a Wikipedia page only about a fortnight ago.

A full list of her exhibitions and biographical details are just a click away now, thanks to a daylong event in Chandigarh called the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon. The event, organised by a non-profit called Heritage Lab, hits Mumbai on April 29 at Lower Parel's Piramal Museum of Art, where artists like Damyanti Chowla, Sunayni Devi, Nilima Sheikh and Madhvi Parekh are set to get Wikipedia entries. The Edit-a-Thon is an attempt to make the free online encyclopaedia a space where women artists from India can find equal representation as their male counterparts. "It is easy to find an artist like Amrita Sher-Gil on Wikipedia. She had an edge over others as she was declared a National Treasure artist. But, what about the remaining female artists?" says Medhavi Gandhi, who founded Heritage Lab in 2015.

Medhavi Gandhi

The feminine touch Gandhi, an MBA graduate who has been working towards improving the visibility of the arts and museums, has partnered with the Art+Feminism Movement (art.plusfeminism.org) to bring this Edit-a-Thon to India. The global movement, which started in 2014 in the US as "a conversation between four friends who wanted to create meaningful changes to the body of knowledge available about feminism and the arts on Wikipedia", partners with interested individuals and establishments the world-over.

Cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania says, "The Euro-American art worlds have become more vocal in recent times about the under-representation of women artists in art history. Museum exhibitions and publications on women artists are addressing this issue. In India, we have long had very prominent women artists, whose work has been well acknowledged. We need to ensure that global public platforms such as Wikipedia reflect this."

At a time when having a Wikipedia page seems to be the easiest, and the most obvious, Internet resource, what's stopping our artists from getting one of their own? "Editing a Wikipedia page is a gendered activity, with most of it being done by male users. There is a misconception that using a Wikipedia dashboard requires a knowledge of coding, but that's not the case at all. It is important that diverse sets of people add their research to these pages," says Gandhi, who was introduced to editing the online portal through members at Art+Feminism.

At the Edit-a-Thon in Chandigarhs Government Museum and Art Gallery, participants create a Wikipedia page for Sheela Gowda

Adajania says that the last decade has seen major publications on women artists such as Nalini Malani, Amrita Sher-Gil, Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh, Navjot Altaf and Sheba Chhachhi, among others. "Our publishing scene is definitely improving. However, in some cases, outsized and expensive publications can be a deterrent to those who are really interested in art," she says. Many of these publications, however, are housed at reputable museums across the country. The last two Edit-a-Thons that Heritage Lab organised at the National Museum, New Delhi, and Chandigarh's Government Museum and Art Gallery saw students, journalists and teachers use research material and publications housed in these museums' libraries. It is also, as she puts it, an important way for museums and their resources to connect with the virtual user.

"Several people asked us if this was an event meant for women only. It is for anyone who is interested," Gandhi adds. Did any art historian sign up? Not yet, says Gandhi.

What does the under-representation of women artists on Wikipedia say about the art milieu in India? Artist Sharmistha Ray, who draws on queer politics in her works, says, "If you look at the most significant pool of India's 10 galleries of established and emerging artists, the representation of women artists stands at about 36%. If you look at the international percentages of the gender split at major galleries, it's far less positive. So, overall, I would say India is in a better place. That's not to say it's a perfect balance yet."

As for Wikipedia, she adds, "It's not the measure of an artist by any standard. It's great if there's a bigger effort being made to represent women artists, but I would like to think that a Wikipedia entry is not the ultimate validation of an artist's legacy."

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Heritage Lab comes to Mumbai to help create space on Wikipedia for female artists - Mid-Day

Yale Daily News (blog)

Swimming coach steps down Yale Daily News (blog) Yale men's swimming and diving head coach Tim Wise resigned on Tuesday after 19 years with the program. A press release by the Yale Athletic Department Tuesday evening announcing Wise's resignation did not offer a reason for his departure. Wise has ...

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Swimming coach steps down - Yale Daily News (blog)

Anti-racism activist Tim Wise, whom American scholar and philosopher Cornel West calls a vanilla brother in the tradition of slavery abolitionist John Brown, will speak at Walla Walla University at Tuesday.

His 6 p.m. lecture, White LIES Matter: Race, Crime and the Politics of Fear in America, is free and open to the public. Wise, nationally recognized for his book and documentary White Like Me, will discuss contemporary race relations and how to advance racial justice.

He has spoken at more than 1,000 colleges and high schools and made numerous appearances on radio and national television news programs, according to his website. He has also lectured internationally in Canada and Bermuda, and has trained corporate, government, law enforcement and others ways to dismantle racism in their institutions.

Most recently, he was included in a video exhibition, together with President Obama, at the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

His work began when he was a college activist in the 1980s, fighting for divestment from and economic sanctions against South Africa, then under apartheid rule. After graduation he served as a youth coordinator and associate director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, among the largest of the many groups organized in the early 1990s to defeat the political candidacies of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

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National anti-racism activist to lecture at Walla Walla University ... - Walla Walla Union-Bulletin