Laura in Wikiland

[Poetlister]

If you want to get any idea of who did what in this project, or where the funds came from and where they went, I'd suggest taking anything Laura Hale has to say about it with a large grain of salt.

That's a good find. Still, it doesn't tell us anything that we hadn't already suspected!

[eagle]

If you want to get any idea of who did what in this project, or where the funds came from and where they went, I'd suggest taking anything Laura Hale has to say about it with a large grain of salt.

That's a good find. Still, it doesn't tell us anything that we hadn't already suspected!

The problem is that Laura Hale is marketing herself (with some success) based on her claims of acceptable prior activities on WP. Instead of appearing on a panel, why isn't she discussing these things at WP:COIN? Laura Hale is claiming that she successfully uses WP to get favorable POV-pushing coverage on Wikipedia for a variety of causes in exchange for pay. Somehow she does not view any of this as COI or "paid editing", because 1) she declared herself to be a Wikipedian-in-Residence and 2) she declared Wikipedians-in-residence as being exempt from COI and NPOV rules.

She never participated in a on-wiki debate of her approach on WP:COIN, despite people asking her to do so.
When she had conflict, she sent out the bat-signal for her usual posse of defenders to come on-wiki and rather than debate the merits of the conflict or disclosing their relationships with LH, the posse raise "harassment" or other attacks on her opponents.

After Hawkeye7 and LH had their falling out, there was even backdoor complaints against Hawkeye7 for his asking someone (perhaps Raystorm?) at Wikimania 2013 how LH was doing in Spain. Raystorm then came to Wikinews to stop him from having Wikinews press accreditations.

Rather than engage in any serious dispute resolution with Racepacket (including a first dismissed Arbcom case), she held her powder dry and kept silent until filing a case that sought his banning.

Rather than engage with Fram on his concerns about her editing deficiencies, she did a back-door complaint to T&S about his "hounding" her.

Finally, there is a weird vibe around all of this, with so many sock puppets, such as Chester Markel (T-C-L), KnowIG (T-C-L), and Genevieve2 (T-C-L) and then a series of IP addresses (from around the United States, including Washington State) used back to claim that Racepacket was violating his ban.

There is also a tribe of self-identified young Australians like Zero1328 (T-C-L) and Bidgee (T-C-L).

It appears that if anyone crosses LH, a team of people will work endlessly to make sure that person will be made to disappear. If I were Fram, I would be careful not to fall into any of their traps (e.g., being provoked into incivility by one of the sockpuppets.)

[Vigilant]

This seems more than a little autobiographical.
https://wikinewsreporter.files.wordpres ... ipedia.pdf

[Vigilant]

Another trip I haven't seen mentioned prior

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata: ... ich_Meetup

[Vigilant]

A manifesto of what we see being propagated through the 2030 initiatives.

https://wikinewsreporter.wordpress.com/ ... nder-bias/

[Randy from Boise]

A manifesto of what we see being propagated through the 2030 initiatives.

https://wikinewsreporter.wordpress.com/ ... nder-bias/

Come on, boy, let's sell that shit...

The role of English Wikipedia’s top content creators in perpetuating gender bias

by Laura Hale

According to Ktr101, the top 5,000 article creators on English Wikipedia have created 60% of all articles on the project. The top 1,000 article creators account for 42% of all Wikipedia articles alone.

You're welcome.

Wikipedia has a well known gendergap when it comes to articles about women. (sic.)

As has been copiously explained, it always will have a gender bias in terms of biography due to multiple centuries during which men ruled, created, legislated, and did while women maintained the home in a largely undocumented capacity. Over time, this disparity will lessen, but there will always be a disparity in the gender of biographical subjects. I digress. Carry on, scholar...

This does bring up the question: How bad is the genderap in terms of article creation by Wikipedia’s top content creators? Are “super users” exacerbating the problem by overwhelming creating new articles at males and not creating large numbers of articles about women?

We are fucking working as we see work needing to be done. Some people are working on pro athletes, which are still overwhelmingly male. Sorry about that. Some people are working on politicians, who are still largely male. Sorry about that. Some people are working on historical figures from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, who are overwhelmingly male. Sorry about that. Carry on...

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah...Using this criteria, 1412 articles were identified as female, 4595 were identified as male, and 74189 were identified as gender neutral. On the face of it, woot woot.

Yes, indeed, "woot woot — you pandering, pretentious dumbass." Carry on...

When looking at gendered article writers only for only their gendered content, only one contributor was at 50% of their articles being about women.

So one person is working on women as a topic of interest. That's good. That's why we have Women In Red, so we can figure out where the holes in coverage are and so that people can focus on these deficiencies...

The next closest created 38% of their articles about women. The third was at 25%. The fourth most popular was 19% and the fifth was 13%. That rounds out the top 25% of creators of content about women. The remaining 75% (including our non-gendered writers) average 2.6% of their content about women. The remaining 75% writing about gendered topics write 4.7% of their content about women.

I write about American radicalism in the early 20th century... So 4.7% sounds about right.

English Wikipedia’s “super users” are not contributing much female content.

That is not our task. Our task is to build a comprehensive encyclopedia pursuing such topics as we see fit. Life is not gender-neutral.

This is problematic on multiple levels. The first is ROI [Return on Investment]. A lot of money is currently being spent on encouraging new contributors to come to the project and write articles about women.

And you are enjoying that fact, I suspect. I digress... Carry on...

It just is not a cost and time effective solution to fixing the representation gap for women on Wikipedia. The best option is to encourage the top 5,000 editors to create articles about women and to incentivize this group.

This is an interesting idea, bearing in mind I am already "incentivized" to do what I am doing. Carry on...

The group is clearly passionate about Wikipedia, enough to create a large number of articles. The costs to get them to switch over to creating content about women is probably much lower.

Your (incorrect) assumption is that we are driven to do what we do by money. We all have our interests and this is our hobby.

...relying almost exclusively on new contributors to create new content women as a way of offsetting the gender imbalance does nothing to address perception problems related to Wikipedia being male and cliquey. Using business jargon, Wikimedia Foundation provides a service: free knowledge for public consumption. The service has stakeholders, a key group of which are the elite content creators. The “super users” in this elite content creating group provide 60% of Wikipedia’s content. They provide most of the material for public consumption for another one of Wikimedia’s key stakeholders which are colloquially known as readers.

I will give LH this: she is cognizant of reality. And she thinks outside the box, which is also good.

Worse yet, because of behaviors by one group (or at least the perception of their behaviors), it hurts the ability of the Wikimedia Foundation to grow readers and to grow another stakeholder group, regular and new-contributors. One of the ways to offset this gender imbalance that creates this perception problem and lack of information problem is to change not reader desires but the behavior of the super users who are perceived as “being” Wikipedia. And after these super users create the articles about women, highlight them and talk up their work.

The basic problem is that WMF has not clue whatsoever what makes a longterm WP editor. We're here. Talk to us. And database us and figure out who we are.

RfB

[Poetlister]

There are so many reports in the newspapers of edit-a-thons aimed at increasing the number of articles about females that I have stopped mentioning most of them. Of course, it may be that most of the articles created like that are later deleted. I doubt that anyone is keeping the score on that.

[eagle]

This seems more than a little autobiographical.
https://wikinewsreporter.files.wordpres ... ipedia.pdf

The first rule of being a good scientist/researcher is that if you don't have access to good data, don't publish it. Instead, redesign your study to collect meaningful data from which you can draw statistically valid conclusions. I grit my teeth every time Laura Hale tries to write up her work, because she never follows this simple rule.

While autism data is included in this data, the sample size is very small and likely does not reflect the broad array of people who have autism which includes four groups according to DSM 5. At the same time, the symptoms of autism generally suggest that people with autism would have extreme difficulty effectively contributing to English Wikipedia. This includes such problems as difficulty reading, difficulty with language acquisition and retention, and problems with motor coordination. It seems likely, though it is not supported by observations, that some of the users who put the autism user boxes on their user pages are more likely to be people who support autism related topics given the visibility of and activism surround the disorder. This sort of affiliation may be present for other mental disorders and learning disabilities but the size of the cohorts is likely to mitigate that effect somewhat and it seems likely that there would be similar activist to people having the disability across all disability types.

This same problem applies to the Diversity Working Group recommendations. They propose that users self-identify on a number of characteristics. Those characteristics would be secretly encoded on their user page, and then diversity reports would be generated for various pages and wikiprojects. The fact is that Laura Hale does not know how many autistic people edit enWP. There is no incentive for autistic people to self-identify. Autism is a spectrum, and many people would argue that she is on it.

An ethical issue also exists. All the data used for this analysis was publicly available, and were it conducted inside a university setting, may not require a human ethics research approval. Public data is public data. Given Wikipedia´s transparency in editing and the fully trackable nature of all edits on a project, there is even less of an expectation of privacy especially given the completely voluntary disclosures on the user pages. Still, some people may have concerns about doing research about people with mental health disorders and learning disabilities without requesting they sign a consent form.

So, as she encounters Fram (T-C-L) and other editors with whom she had a negative experience, she decides to rationalize her response as a part of a PhD program research study. And she rationalizes the failure to gain consent or to submit to University regulation that applies to all work with human subjects. Laura Hale was not a passive observer of editor behavior on WP -- she set up conflict situations going back to when she recruited Bill william compton (T-C-L) (an editor from the Global South who had never reviewed a GA nomination) to review her GA nomination of Netball (T-H-L).

In this study, Laura Hale focuses on the initial editing patters of each account that displays a relevant user box. Again, this method can be criticized because she does not know how many IP edits the user had made before creating a user account or whether this was the user's first account. LH does not want to survey the users that she is studying because that would require informed consent by the user and University regulation of a human subject study.

Bottom line is all of us have served as human Guinea pigs in a University of Canberra research project designed and conducted by a PhD candidate who lacked the self-awareness to see how her own personality could possibly taint the results. Field work based upon observation and insightful narrative can be illuminating. Jane Goodall (T-H-L) has a better understanding of what makes a human a human and separates us from other primates than LH has of what makes a WP editor edit WP. Yet, LH feels that she can study and write about us with credibility and authority. Her supervising faculty should have been waving red flags. We later discover that he was fired before this paper (or the PhD thesis) was finalized and that he was in on the grifting from the start.

[Moral Hazard]

It is much easier to manipulate those stats by creating sock-puppet accounts, particularly given the small number of accounts with such boxes.

Watch for Laura to get a grant (c. 300,000 USD?) promoting WMF/Wikipedia to disabled people, and then after her invention watch for a jump in the number of "new accounts" quickly adding disability user-boxes.

[eagle]

Mr. Vigiliant's post above reveals that Laura Hale started another WordPress blog at: https://wikinewsreporter.wordpress.com
with posts from November 2013 to June 2014. So, this continued her work after she left Ozziesports, and her focus shifted from Australia to disabled athletes. Her about page reads:

My name is Laura Hale. I’ve been a Wikinews reporter since January 2012, where I primarily write about sport, disability sport, women’s sport, women’s topics and politics.
I am a PhD student at the University of Canberra, Australia.
E-mail: laura at fanhistory dot com
twitter: purplepople
Wikinews: LauraHale

It is interesting that she self-identifies as a Wikinews reporter rather than a Wikipedian. For all of you narrow-minded male GamerGaters out there, she includes computer game reviews.

She runs ads on her blog, and when I viewed it, a was served up ads about fighting tinnus and toe nail fungus.

[Randy from Boise]

There are so many reports in the newspapers of edit-a-thons aimed at increasing the number of articles about females that I have stopped mentioning most of them. Of course, it may be that most of the articles created like that are later deleted. I doubt that anyone is keeping the score on that.

There probably needs to be a thread dedicated to edit-a-thons. Hell, we could start the thread with LH's blog post on the efficacy of using edit-a-thons to alter the M:F gender balance of biographical content at WP. ( linkhttps://wikinewsreporter.wordpress.com/ ... nder-bias/[/link] ) There is solid evidence that this ratio is shifting — but I would argue that it is going to naturally shift as the number of women working outside the home increases, the number of female politicians slowly climbs towards 50%, and women's issues continue to get more play in academic work. But, that said, I think LH may actually be more pessimistic than I am (!!!) about the utility of using focused groups of temporary, trained-from-scratch WP content writers (i.e. edit-a-thons).

Is it cost-effective? Hell, no. But there isn't a single thing WMF does that is cost effective, because they have accumulated too much money too rapidly.

LH is right on the verge of really understanding the situation at WP when she observes the stable body of hardcore content contributors who create much of the new content and when she starts to intimate that the problem is the perceived behavior of this predominantly male group.

Her understanding is much deeper than that of WMF, which worships the metric of drive-by casual editors and considers the long-term volunteers disposable and easily replaceable.

My snark above notwithstanding, I'm fairly impressed with LH's grasp of the situation, although I think her thoroughly original idea to "incentivize" the Long Term Content Contributors is rather unlikely. What it MIGHT be possible to do is briefly focus some significant part of this group for specific tasks.

RfB

[Poetlister]

There probably needs to be a thread dedicated to edit-a-thons.

What would we discuss? It is easy to list ones mentioned on mainstream media; there is no shortage. They can be analysed by what they are trying to do, usually creating more articles about females. We would need to get lists of articles created in these sessions, and track what happens to them to see how many survive. We could add solo efforts to create such articles.

[Jbhunley]

My snark above notwithstanding, I'm fairly impressed with LH's grasp of the situation, although I think her thoroughly original idea to "incentivize" the Long Term Content Contributors is rather unlikely. What it MIGHT be possible to do is briefly focus some significant part of this group for specific tasks.

RfB

I suspect the way to "motivate" individual content creators is to ask them to write something. Preferably something specific. I am not a content writer so I'm pretty much pulling this out of my ass but you, RfB, are and we have others here as well who can comment on if this would work for them:

• Identify the major article creators and their area's of interest
• Parcel them out among a 'Motivator Project' say WiR who will identify subjects that might be interesting to each editor and make sure they pass notability requirements and maybe collect some source material. -- Make a wishlist with this material, tagged by area's of interest identified in the creators.
• Tell the article writer about the project. Ask them about their work, get some information about their editing, preferences, current projects etc. Get some intellectual engagement, treat them like a person and set the situation up so even if they say no to the request you will have some feedback. Make sure the 'ask' makes them feel appreciated/recognized not put-upon/exploited.
• Ask the article writer if they would please write an article on the subject.
• When they write it thank them for their work.
• Ask them what they thought of the process, get feedback in general and ask them if they would be interested in writing something else, when they have time or when the MP identifies someone else they think may be interesting.

Maybe something like this:

Hi RfB I am working to increase the coverage of woman's biographies on Wikipedia. [maybe more info on project]. I have read some of your work, it is quite good, and I would like ask for some of your time to help out with this project.

You have mentioned that you like writing on Anarchism in the early twentieth century and Wikipedia does not have an article on Anastasia Ivanovna Galaieva (T-H-L). She was active in the Anarchist Communist Workers’ Group of Ekaterinoslav in the early 1900's and after the February Revolution she was active in various local chapters of the Anarchist Black Cross in Ukraine. She also worked with prisoners through the Political Red Cross. Here is some of the material I have been able to identify which discusses her life linkhttps://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... women#toc6[/link].

Would you please lend [the Motivator Project] some of your time and write a brief article on her, or any of the women on our list of early twentieth-century women anarchists? linkhttps://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... women#toc7[/link]

(I did not try to stand the topic up. I just went for an easy example from a quick web search.)

Such a project would require several people to first survey the 'major content creators' and identify some who might respond well and identify some biographies they may be interested in but it is scalable. In some cases partnerships of researcher and writer may form and, better, the researcher may eventually turn into a writer.

Does something like this look workable in general? If not what would motivate you, or any other 'content creator' here, to write biographies for such a 'motivation project'?

--
Jbh

[Randy from Boise]

I think you are exactly right on it. So Laura, if you're lurking and if you still care, there you go.

RfB

[Randy from Boise]

As I was just moving over to belatedly start some coffee, it occurred to me that LH's article really helps illuminate her (terrible) "mass stubs" approach to being a Wikipedian. She's counting the gonads of articles and it's a competition between testes and ovaries — raw numbers of articles are what is important to her, and their gender ratio, not covering this or that important topic and doing really good work on it. Or even passable work.

That's her biggest problem as a Wikipedian — an obsession with racking up mass article starts, presumably in an effort to shift the gender balance of the universal set. All the sloppy, terrible, cut-and-paste work ultimately can be reduced to that.

RfB

[Vigilant]

As I was just moving over to belatedly start some coffee, it occurred to me that LH's article really helps illuminate her (terrible) "mass stubs" approach to being a Wikipedian. She's counting the gonads of articles and it's a competition between testes and ovaries — raw numbers of articles are what is important to her, and their gender ratio, not covering this or that important topic and doing really good work on it. Or even passable work.

That's her biggest problem as a Wikipedian — an obsession with racking up mass article starts, presumably in an effort to shift the gender balance of the universal set. All the sloppy, terrible, cut-and-paste work ultimately can be reduced to that.

RfB

If you've read her history on fan wikis, you'll come to realize that at her core, Laura Hale is a grifter and everything she does is geared towards enabling a liquidity event favorable to her.

The approach on making stubs is only to generate the statistics she needs for 'credibility' in the yes of those who might give her money.

[Sophie]

Doesn't "an obsession with racking up mass article starts" or stubs, apply to the vast majority of articles created by, for instance, the members of Women in Red or at almost all edit-a-thons?

[C&B]

I do not know. Let me ask Dr. Blofeld (T-C-L)...

[Poetlister]

Doesn't "an obsession with racking up mass article starts" or stubs, apply to the vast majority of articles created by, for instance, the members of Women in Red or at almost all edit-a-thons?

That is probably true. However, their motives may be very different from Laura's. I'm not sure that she's really trying to improve the encyclopaedia for the sake of giving everyone access to as much knowledge as possible.

[Midsize Jake]

...raw numbers of articles are what is important to her, and their gender ratio, not covering this or that important topic and doing really good work on it. Or even passable work.

That's her biggest problem as a Wikipedian — an obsession with racking up mass article starts, presumably in an effort to shift the gender balance of the universal set. All the sloppy, terrible, cut-and-paste work ultimately can be reduced to that.

This is probably what it looks like on the surface, but the impression I got (once we looked a little further into it) was that the mass-stub-creations were actually a kind of "control" for the experiment she was doing for her dissertation. What she really wanted to do was determine the intrinsic value of a Wikipedia main-page link (i.e., a Did-You-Know, or DYK) to an organization, such as the Australian Paralympic Committee, that was willing to spend real money on a project to use Wikipedia for promotional purposes. (This is because people with money want to see metrics, and of course she knew this, either all along or simply because they told her precisely that.) In order to "maintain a consistent baseline" and make it look properly scientific, the articles all had to be created at the same time, so that the pageview statistics prior to the DYK for each article could be "rationalized" more easily. If they had been created on different dates, someone could claim that the pre-DYK stats may have been influenced by factors beyond the simple notoriety-level of the subject. (Or something like that, anyway - this is not hard-science we're talking about.)

The thing is, when someone who isn't a Wikipedian (like me) sees this, they're probably going to say, "oh, that's interesting; I guess DYKs aren't worth much after all, but at least now we know." But a Wikipedian will see this and think, "OMG, she's getting paid for this and it's part of her Ph.D. research?!?!? This is the very definition of Wikipedia COI! How is this allowed to go on???" But in fact, it really wasn't allowed to just "go on," because someone (guess who) kept getting in the way, even going so far as to try to prevent Laura Hale from submitting DYKs completely:

I have never seen any established editor creating so many problematic articles in such a short time, and believing that they are good enough for DYK anyway. I am also ammazed at the ease that these articles are then promoted to DYK, but that's a different problem. Fram (talk) 10:35, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Never mind that the "value" of a DYK link, intrinisic or otherwise, is based on purely qualitative, not quantitative, behavioral and personal-interest factors present in random individuals who just happen to be viewing WP's main page at any given time, and never mind that by the time LH did this research, it was already extremely clear that pretty much everyone was going to Wikipedia straight from Google and never hitting the main page at all.

The really, really uncharitable interpretation of this would be that LH wanted to monetize her Ph.D. research by saying in effect, "a DYK is worth $X, so if you're looking to hire a Wikipedian to promote your organization, you should look at the Wikipedian's article-to-DYK conversion rate, and the higher the rate, the more valuable the Wikipedian" - bearing in mind that her own conversion rate would of course be unusually high. I don't think she ever quite got that far, probably because she couldn't even come close to proving that DYKs were worth anything. There are several blog and mailing-list posts in which she claims otherwise, but from what I've seen, most (if not all) of them are dated prior to her dissertation defense.

That, in turn, is why I personally have generally avoided the term "grifter" in reference to her - she might have started out trying to be one, but to her credit, it looks like she stopped trying once she realized there was no basis for her research assumptions. At that point (sometime in mid-2015, give or take a few months) she seems to have mostly stopped viewing Wikipedia as a potential income source, and started treating it as a revenge platform like everybody else.

[Randy from Boise]

There probably needs to be a thread dedicated to edit-a-thons.

What would we discuss? It is easy to list ones mentioned on mainstream media; there is no shortage. They can be analysed by what they are trying to do, usually creating more articles about females. We would need to get lists of articles created in these sessions, and track what happens to them to see how many survive. We could add solo efforts to create such articles.

Dunno exactly. But racking them up in one place like is being done with the sports vandalism might be a platform for something interesting...

RfB

[Randy from Boise]

Doesn't "an obsession with racking up mass article starts" or stubs, apply to the vast majority of articles created by, for instance, the members of Women in Red or at almost all edit-a-thons?

I haven't really dug into the output of WIR, but it strikes me as a different project in that it is planting seeds for future article development about legit GNG-meeting biographical subjects, as opposed to the Norwegian Paralympian Bobsledders at the 2014 Kyoto Games (T-H-L), Venezuelan Paralympian Bobsledders at the 2014 Kyoto Games (T-H-L) -type bullshit that comes from other quarters.

There's nothing wrong with stubs, per se, if there's thought behind them and a future for them.

RfB

[Randy from Boise]

...raw numbers of articles are what is important to her, and their gender ratio, not covering this or that important topic and doing really good work on it. Or even passable work.

That's her biggest problem as a Wikipedian — an obsession with racking up mass article starts, presumably in an effort to shift the gender balance of the universal set. All the sloppy, terrible, cut-and-paste work ultimately can be reduced to that.

This is probably what it looks like on the surface, but the impression I got (once we looked a little further into it) was that the mass-stub-creations were actually a kind of "control" for the experiment she was doing for her dissertation. What she really wanted to do was determine the intrinsic value of a Wikipedia main-page link (i.e., a Did-You-Know, or DYK) to an organization, such as the Australian Paralympic Committee, that was willing to spend real money on a project to use Wikipedia for promotional purposes. (This is because people with money want to see metrics, and of course she knew this, either all along or simply because they told her precisely that.) In order to "maintain a consistent baseline" and make it look properly scientific, the articles all had to be created at the same time, so that the pageview statistics prior to the DYK for each article could be "rationalized" more easily. If they had been created on different dates, someone could claim that the pre-DYK stats may have been influenced by factors beyond the simple notoriety-level of the subject. (Or something like that, anyway - this is not hard-science we're talking about.)

The thing is, when someone who isn't a Wikipedian (like me) sees this, they're probably going to say, "oh, that's interesting; I guess DYKs aren't worth much after all, but at least now we know." But a Wikipedian will see this and think, "OMG, she's getting paid for this and it's part of her Ph.D. research?!?!? This is the very definition of Wikipedia COI! How is this allowed to go on???" But in fact, it really wasn't allowed to just "go on," because someone (guess who) kept getting in the way, even going so far as to try to prevent Laura Hale from submitting DYKs completely:

I have never seen any established editor creating so many problematic articles in such a short time, and believing that they are good enough for DYK anyway. I am also ammazed at the ease that these articles are then promoted to DYK, but that's a different problem. Fram (talk) 10:35, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Never mind that the "value" of a DYK link, intrinisic or otherwise, is based on purely qualitative, not quantitative, behavioral and personal-interest factors present in random individuals who just happen to be viewing WP's main page at any given time, and never mind that by the time LH did this research, it was already extremely clear that pretty much everyone was going to Wikipedia straight from Google and never hitting the main page at all.

The really, really uncharitable interpretation of this would be that LH wanted to monetize her Ph.D. research by saying in effect, "a DYK is worth $X, so if you're looking to hire a Wikipedian to promote your organization, you should look at the Wikipedian's article-to-DYK conversion rate, and the higher the rate, the more valuable the Wikipedian" - bearing in mind that her own conversion rate would of course be unusually high. I don't think she ever quite got that far, probably because she couldn't even come close to proving that DYKs were worth anything. There are several blog and mailing-list posts in which she claims otherwise, but from what I've seen, most (if not all) of them are dated prior to her dissertation defense.

That, in turn, is why I personally have generally avoided the term "grifter" in reference to her - she might have started out trying to be one, but to her credit, it looks like she stopped trying once she realized there was no basis for her research assumptions. At that point (sometime in mid-2015, give or take a few months) she seems to have mostly stopped viewing Wikipedia as a potential income source, and started treating it as a revenge platform like everybody else.

Very interesting post.

t

[Midsize Jake]

Very interesting post.

Thanks!

And just to follow on to what you wrote earlier:

Her understanding is much deeper than that of WMF, which worships the metric of drive-by casual editors and considers the long-term volunteers disposable and easily replaceable.

It actually goes even further than that. Check out these two posts to the gendergap-l mailing list from June 2012, at a time when she was probably still being paid by the APC to write Wikipedia articles about (mostly-female) Aussie Paralympians. You should really read both in their entirety, but I'm going to quote something from the second one - in effect she's saying that any kind of female-directed recruitment effort is dubious, as there's no detailed, broken-out data that really shows it will have the desired outcome, and they only hope it will lead to more articles about women (the "20%" figure refers to their estimate of the percentage of women biographies on WP at the time). Parts of it almost read like something you, or even Mr. Eagle, would post here on Wikipediocracy.

How many articles would you expect about female heads of government in the United Kingdom? How does this compare to the 20% number? 20% would suggest that we're actually OVER-REPRESENTING women as I don't believe there have been 20% female prime ministers and queens when compared to men. I think something like 99% of articles about softball players are about women despite the fact that male softball players have a world championship, often meet WP:GNG and pass sport notability... and when playing up the men's game would actually work towards bringing back softball to the Olympics. The articles about the female presidents of the United States and female senators and female house of reps members in the United States, would you say 50% of these positions historically have been held by women? If that is the case, then we do have big gender gap if the number is actually 20% existing but I some how doubt it. Let's talk about female mathematicians. How many of these are articles about mathematicians are about women? What percentage of the notable and influential mathematicians would be women inside of the maths community and according to Wikipedia's guidelines would be women?

So your number of 20% is a nice number, but ultimately meaningless because it doesn't explain much at all. Cursory data that doesn't provide actionable data...

This leads into the question of why she would question, if not reject, the (presumably pro-feminist) conventional wisdom on gendergap-l that a rise in female users would lead to a rise in female biographies and other articles. A charitable interpretation would be that she really is only concerned about favorable outcomes and doesn't want the WMF to waste valuable time and money on stuff that might not work (such as edit-a-thons and other women-directed recruitment efforts).

But knowing what we know about her, we have to at least consider uncharitable interpretations too, one of which might be that she really wanted the WMF to finance a cash-incentive program for established WP users to write those articles - a program that, being her idea, she might very well have been hired to run.

I should note that just two months later, she was off the gendergap list completely after having "made people uncomfortable with her tone."

[Vigilant]

I strongly suspect you guys are overanalyzing this.

In none of Laura Hale's published work has she shown any understanding of sample sizes, scientific method, scientific ethics, peer review, plagiarism, etc.

[Randy from Boise]

I should note that just two months later, she was off the gendergap list completely after having "made people uncomfortable with her tone."

I apologize to those I have made uncomfortable with my tone. I never intended to silence those voices of women here trying to do outreach, which was why I helped organise WikiWomenCamp.

I would like for the moderators to unsubscribe me as I feel unsafe in voicing my opinion and unsupported by the list by active outreach I do.

I want to humbly thank the administrators for telling me this during the Paralympic Games Opening Ceremonies, which I am covering for Wikimedia, and working on to help improve disability related and women's outreach.

I hope I can do better with my tone and outreach outside the framework of this list where I am less likely to make people uncomfortable.

I am sorry. Truly so.

Laura Hale got out laurahaled!

It is really interesting that she and I seem to have shared the view that (1) the count of female biographies on WP was not that far off of what might reasonably be expected; and (2) dumping money on edit-a-thons involved a lot of magical thinking about likely outcomes.

Long-term Wikipedian content people are simply not "made" by assembling random crews at a university for a few hours one afternoon and feeding them pizza.

Speaking such heresy got her pushed away from the extremely orthodox and thoroughly icky gendergap-l mailing list. And she fell on the sword like a trooper.

Now here are the final steps in enlightenment that she didn't make.

(A) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the fact that the M:F ratio of long term Wikipedians is 85:15. As I mentioned before a couple times, when I was doing a punk label in the 1990s I kept a careful database of my mailorder customers, including a field for gender, and it ran almost precisely 85:15 for the duration. And no, I was not putting out tough-guy hardcore or street punk — it was "wussy" pop-punk, which should theoretically have had a 50:50 fan mix, because that is what live shows looked like. More record collectors were male; it was what it was — and I didn't worry about it. Nor should WMF be so frantic about the matter, assuming that LH's observation #1 above is correct.

(B) It is not really the anti-social, uncivil behavior of Wikipedians that is the problem, it is the perception that this is a problem that is the problem. "Incivility" of the 85% male editing base is a big talking point that is repeated endlessly to the clickbait contemporary media, and that projected perception becomes the reality. In actual fact, the number of true asshole editors and administrators at WP is small in percentage terms and the alleged "hostility to women" of the average editor more or less a fabricated meme.

Not to say there aren't sexist dicks at Wikipedia. There are. But they are few and far between. Not to mention: on the internet, no one knows you are a dog.

RfB

[Vigilant]

Also, how likely is the Fram v Laura Hale case because of shit like this?
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/g ... 03072.html

I would personally be less bothered if it was women criticising women critically and harshly, but when it looks like man after man criticising women and no other female voices in the conversation, that bothers me because of the historical overtones regarding male voices in women's conversations.

Sincerely,
Laura Hale

and this
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/g ... 03067.html

ate to be a pain... but Ryan, your comments and the comments by another male on the list, they make me feel uncomfortable as the tone argument is one historically used to repress women and to silence them.

As women in western cultures, many of us have been culturally indoctrinated to be loud, pushy and abrasive in order to get things accomplished. If we just go along with the flow, we cannot get things accomplished that men could get accomplished. This is a historical thing, and I would hope as a man on a list like this, you would be aware of the historical backdrop for which your comment sits.

I find nothing wrong with Carol's tone and I find it troubling that the people who do are all men, and that men continue to dominate the conversation with out having provided any real evidence of their value to improving the gendergap or any evidence of having learned lessons from this list... such as, you know, using the tone argument to historically repress women and how it really looks when men appear to gang up on a woman to do that.

Now, that may not be your intent, and I assuming you were acting in good faith in making your comment... but now you know. And hopefully, you will use fewer arguments used to historically repress female voices.

Anyway, what gendergap work have you been doing lately Ryan? We miss you on Wikinews and would love to have you writing articles about women over there.

Sincerely,
Laura Hale

How dare a man critique a woman!!?!?!?


The encyclopedia anyone can edit indeed.

[Vigilant]

Beria Lima to the rescue!
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/g ... 03091.html

I would like to say to the moderator team - especially Sarah who now
decided to create a "WWC" initiative (and I'm now requesting her to change
the name) - to fuck off and try to do half of what Laura is doing for women
in Wikipedia..

I'm with Laura in this. If this list isn't welcoming to women from outside
USA, it failed the propose to exist. If isn't a safe place for women, it
has no reason to exist.
_____
*Béria Lima*

Exposing more of the Laura Hale clique everyday.

[Moral Hazard]

I should note that just two months later, she was off the gendergap list completely after having "made people uncomfortable with her tone."

Serious sarcasm and passive-aggression

Above, RfB already had quoted this.

I apologize to those I have made uncomfortable with my tone. I never intended to silence those voices of women here trying to do outreach, which was why I helped organise WikiWomenCamp.

I would like for the moderators to unsubscribe me as I feel unsafe in voicing my opinion and unsupported by the list by active outreach I do.

I want to humbly thank the administrators for telling me this during the Paralympic Games Opening Ceremonies, which I am covering for Wikimedia, and working on to help improve disability related and women's outreach.

I hope I can do better with my tone and outreach outside the framework of this list where I am less likely to make people uncomfortable.

I am sorry. Truly so.

[Midsize Jake]

I strongly suspect you guys are overanalyzing this.

In none of Laura Hale's published work has she shown any understanding of sample sizes, scientific method, scientific ethics, peer review, plagiarism, etc.

But there's the rub - we know that, she knew that, but they didn't know that.

What's more, she was operating in what was then a relatively new, mostly-uncharted research area - nobody involved in her Ph.D. research probably had any understanding of those things in relation to what she was writing about. (Except maybe plagiarism, since they could at least check that.) This could have been because what she was writing about was too new, or because everything she was writing was basically jibber-jabber, but who knows, maybe both, on some level... She even coined her very own term, "Social Response Analysis," to describe her methodology (and maybe that word should also be in quotes). That's the title of the dissertation itself, of course. This is from page 190:

Social Response Analysis was used with initiatives undertaken by two National Paralympic Committees involving the free sharing of knowledge about disability sport on platforms supporting freely licensed content, and largely drew on data from Wikipedia and its sister projects to determine the effectiveness of these projects. The goal of data collection and analysis was to understand how the content promoted the Paralympic movement in specific geographic contexts, and how effective organization directed efforts were to increase engagement with newly created content in these areas through editing or viewing this content. Much of this analysis focused around getting data at key points in time to try to understand what was going on related to specific time based events conducted either in sports on the field of play, athlete promotional appearances at different events or via different mediums such as radio or in print, or organizational events related to increasing and improving existing content.

The "time-based events" included DYK appearances on WP as well as competitions, news articles, personal appearances, and so on. But only one of her DYKs made it into the dissertation, and then, only in passing (on page 35) - namely, Annabelle Williams (T-H-L). On that article's DYK day (June 14, 2012), the number of pageviews soared from about 250 per day to almost 8,000, even though it looked like this (I mean seriously, look at that "Swimming" section - Sheez Louise).

So... what was the point of that "deluge" of low-quality Aussie Paralympics-related DYK submissions in mid-to-late 2012, that caused Fram to try to ban her from submitting DYKs altogether? I still think she probably did it for her dissertation, only to realize later on that there wasn't enough overall consistency in the pageview data to use it. And maybe that's bad enough, from the perspective of other Wikipedians who had to wade through all those articles and approve/reject the DYKs, just so she could get her Ph.D.

But if, as you suggest, she never really understood or cared about the scientific method, then we're going with the uncharitable interpretation again - maybe she didn't do it for her dissertation, and instead just did it to impress her employers. After all, nobody would do that just for fun. And it so happens that late 2012 was right around the time when her funding at the National Sports Information Centre dried up. So in that interpretation, the DYKs were little more than a desperate effort to keep her job.

[eagle]

I strongly suspect you guys are overanalyzing this.

In none of Laura Hale's published work has she shown any understanding of sample sizes, scientific method, scientific ethics, peer review, plagiarism, etc.

But there's the rub - we know that, she knew that, but they didn't know that.

But if, as you suggest, she never really understood or cared about the scientific method, then we're going with the uncharitable interpretation again - maybe she didn't do it for her dissertation, and instead just did it to impress her employers. After all, nobody would do that just for fun. And it so happens that late 2012 was right around the time when her funding at the National Sports Information Centre dried up. So in that interpretation, the DYKs were little more than a desperate effort to keep her job.

I really tried to put aside my obvious anti-LH bias when I read the Laura Hale PhD thesis. I came away from it confused as to what was being measured and who was the intended audience. I suspect that she kept reworking it until all of the criticisms were addressed and/or self confessed, but it was a hodge-podge without a clear theme. I think it may have been intended to be instructive to people who are responsible for relating to the fan base of sports organizations. These people will want to measure the effectiveness of their promotional efforts. In the era of big data, how do such sports organization executives reach their target populations? Laura Hale gives you two paths: start taking out google ads vs. relying upon techniques explored by a woman who does not have sufficient programming skills to handle a large data sample or enough statistical sophistication to understand whether her work is statistically significant.

She loves WMF projects because the data collection is freely available to her (and she doesn't have to worry about university regulation of studies involving humans or animals.) But what would happen if she had approached a woman's netball league (or any other Australian sports league) and proposed a multidimensional study of their fan base? What if she organized a survey of people who attended a large sporting event at a stadium and asked them "how do you discuss your interests in the team?" What if she got access to the logs of the sport team's website and checked to see how many people were accessing the biography pages on the official website vs the Wikipedia biographies?

I am impressed that the readers of this thread have spent so much time studying the life and thoughts of Laura Hale. Yet none of us including Laura Hale have a done a full literature review of her field. If she had spent her time actually reading her field instead of trying to crowd-source her dissertation (including her review of the literature via her blog), readers of her dissertation and this thread would be able to understand the scope and magnitude of her contribution to scholarship and academic "knowledge."

As an extra bonus question for all would-be Laura Hale researchers in the audience: LH recently finished a post-doc at the University of Salamanca. What was she researching and what papers or products were produced by her (or her research group) there? What is the typical duration of a post-doc at that institution?

[C&B]

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... mmigration

...https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... ale...fock All

[eagle]

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... mmigration

...https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... ale...fock All

Many thanks. It is odd that LH would take a position that is a 2 hour 19 minute drive away from her spouse in Madrid. Usually post docs join a research group and co-author papers with a faculty member. As best as I can tell, she was evangelizing for Wikibase there one or two academics at a time. Is there any evidence that she was a postdoc in the traditional (paid) sense as opposed to using a different description of another short-term Wikipedian-in-Residence?

the data on ParaSports Data around immigration patterns for disability sportspeople migration patterns, while not complete, is the most complete database that exists with 411 unique sportspeople identified.

How does LH know that her database is "the most complete" in the world???
How many total adaptive football players are there in the world?
Of those, how many are in LH's database?
Of those, how many have accurate data on current residence vs. nation of birth vs. nation where the athlete's career began?

[eagle]

If one were looking for a research project, working with the largest data set is the obvious way to go. LH reports that the largest sample in her set of 211 athletes is wheelchair basketball at 29, but there are only 16 football (soccer) players. So, she studied the football/soccer players.

This is like that WMF-funded study that she did covering on-wiki swear words.

The word cunt is one that appears on English Wikipedia as part of the collaborative process, appearing on over 2,500 different talk pages. Twat appears on over 1,000 talk pages. Bitch appears on over 11,300 different talk pages. Social justice warrior appears on over 20. Whore appears on over 3,500 talk pages. Shemale appears on over 310 different pages. Mangina appears on 60 talk pages. Pussy appears on over 2,600 different talk pages. Slut appears on over 1,400 different talk pages. Bimbo appears on over 550 different talk pages. Douche appears over 1,500 times. Gendered wording, which has a negative implication or is considered vulgar and insulting in some part of the English speaking world, exists on English Wikipedia.

The same odd selection of the smaller sample applies again. If "bitch" appears in over 11,300 talk pages, why study "cunt" at 2,500? Is it possible that LH was involved in a behavioral dispute with someone who used "cunt" on-wiki?

The problem with athlete migration is the notion that nations (particularly in the mid-east) are buying athletes rather than developing their own population as athletes. I don't think that anyone has suggested that nations are "buying" para-athletes. If anything the scandal in Spain proved that it was much easier to mis-classify non-disabled basketball players to allow them to win a Paralympic medal for intellectually disabled basketball. There are rules governing a waiting period between the migration of an elite athlete and when the athlete can compete for a national team. LH's paper does not report on whether there are such rules for Paralympic athletes. (Perhaps the absence of such rules implies that LH is not studying a real problem.)

In contrast, LH's study of on-wiki use of certain words also fails to isolate real problems and meanings. If a man calls a man a "cunt", "pussy", "douche", or "whore", the common understanding of those words has nothing to do with sexual activity. How could LH fail to breakdown usual in a man-man vs man-woman vs woman-man vs woman-woman context. If a woman calls another woman a "bitch" or otherwise uses it in conversation, few people would be alarmed. Similarly, if one person of color calls another person of color the "N-word", alarm bells do not go off. In contrast, if LH could show a significant number of cases where a man called a woman a "bitch" on wiki, that would be a finding that could form the basis of action.

When LH's paper on Paralympic migration reports that a disabled football player migrated with his parents, the reader is forced to ask, "why I am looking at dramatic graphics that show only one or two people on each migration pathway?"

Both papers are worthless because of the sample size and the other methodology flaws.

[Vigilant]

I know things get circular because there's so much bad acting on Laura Hale's part.
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewto ... 50#p242215

[Vigilant]

Both papers are worthless because of the sample size and the other methodology flaws.

This is the universal outcome with Laura Hale's research.

She doesn't understand what she doing and she's too lazy to learn how to do things right.
When she's called out, she goes into her 'you're stalking me because I'm a strong woman routine', instead of taking on criticism as a means to improve.

Similarly, in software engineering, many weak engineers dread code reviews.
I view them as ways to find and fix my mistakes before the code enters production.
I don't want to ship shit.

Thankfully, engineering is much more of a meritocracy than whatever field Laura Hale pretends to study in.

[Poetlister]

If one were looking for a research project, working with the largest data set is the obvious way to go. LH reports that the largest sample in her set of 211 athletes is wheelchair basketball at 29, but there are only 16 football (soccer) players. So, she studied the football/soccer players.

Obviously, a suitable sample size for analysis depends on what analysis you intend to do. However, 16 is a pretty small sample for almost anything.

[Beeblebrox]

Doesn't "an obsession with racking up mass article starts" or stubs, apply to the vast majority of articles created by, for instance, the members of Women in Red or at almost all edit-a-thons?

I don't know about WiR but edit-a-thons for sure mostly churn out crap articles, many of which don't survive. Trying to get people who haven't edited Wikipedia before to start off by creating articles is a terrible idea.

[Beeblebrox]

Both papers are worthless because of the sample size and the other methodology flaws.

This is the universal outcome with Laura Hale's research.

She doesn't understand what she doing and she's too lazy to learn how to do things right.
When she's called out, she goes into her 'you're stalking me because I'm a strong woman routine', instead of taking on criticism as a means to improve.

Similarly, in software engineering, many weak engineers dread code reviews.
I view them as ways to find and fix my mistakes before the code enters production.
I don't want to ship shit.

Thankfully, engineering is much more of a meritocracy than whatever field Laura Hale pretends to study in.

Every time I think i can't think any less of her you dredge up some new thing that just sucks ass and I find a new low.

[Vigilant]

I am a river to my people...

[Earthy Astringent]

Similarly, in software engineering, many weak engineers dread code reviews.
I view them as ways to find and fix my mistakes before the code enters production.

Weak and strong engineers should appreciate reviews. It shows them (and others) where they suck. And a good review shows them how to suck less. I love it when someone points out something I’ve been doing “wrong”, because it makes me better.

But I’ve noticed code reviews on long running teams just doesn’t deliver enough value. I make the junior developers do that shit now. Every sprint, I have a bonus pool of money that I can divvy out how I see fit. I give the lion’s share to the kids for catching stuff. From how to write more elegant code, to developing new processes. Some of the seniors complain, but fuck em. They make a lot more and work half as hard. A year ago I gave the entire pot to this woman who showed everyone how to use git bisect to track down where bugs were introduced into the project. “I could have done that” said everyone else. “But you didn’t, did you” was not the reply they wanted to hear. Meritocracy indeed. Too bad she resigned for greener pastures.

[Randy from Boise]

But I’ve noticed code reviews on long running teams just doesn’t deliver enough value. I make the junior developers do that shit now. Every sprint, I have a bonus pool of money that I can divvy out how I see fit. I give the lion’s share to the kids for catching stuff. From how to write more elegant code, to developing new processes. Some of the seniors complain, but fuck em. They make a lot more and work half as hard. A year ago I gave the entire pot to this woman who showed everyone how to use git bisect to track down where bugs were introduced into the project. “I could have done that” said everyone else. “But you didn’t, did you” was not the reply they wanted to hear. Meritocracy indeed. Too bad she resigned for greener pastures.

Well, you did your best to pay her enough, credit for that...

not my world,

RfB

[Poetlister]

I don't know about WiR but edit-a-thons for sure mostly churn out crap articles, many of which don't survive. Trying to get people who haven't edited Wikipedia before to start off by creating articles is a terrible idea.

THis is undoubtedly true. They have to warm up the account by making a few edits and waiting a few days before they create an article, but that is scarcely enough to prepare them.

[Osborne]

But I’ve noticed code reviews on long running teams just doesn’t deliver enough value. I make the junior developers do that shit now. Every sprint, I have a bonus pool of money that I can divvy out how I see fit. I give the lion’s share to the kids for catching stuff. From how to write more elegant code, to developing new processes. Some of the seniors complain, but fuck em. They make a lot more and work half as hard. A year ago I gave the entire pot to this woman who showed everyone how to use git bisect to track down where bugs were introduced into the project. “I could have done that” said everyone else. “But you didn’t, did you” was not the reply they wanted to hear. Meritocracy indeed. Too bad she resigned for greener pastures.

That's a good way to do it.

[Moral Hazard]

Laura Hale (T-H-L) / LauraHale (T-C-L) knew that her paralympics project has fewer women athletes who satisfy notability, and so she opposed feminists' ability to downgrade her grant proposals because of they feature men.

[Midsize Jake]

Laura Hale (T-H-L) / LauraHale (T-C-L) knew that her paralympics project has fewer women athletes who satisfy notability, and so she opposed feminists' ability to downgrade her grant proposals because of they feature men.

IMO that doesn't make much sense though, at least in 2012, for a variety of reasons. It might have made sense in 2015, when she was married to a WMF Board member and knew from bitter experience what she could and could not get away with on WP (because Fram). But even then, she knew the WMF wasn't likely to come up with any money for her to set up a HoPAu-like project in Spain; that's not really the sort of thing the WMF does. (They might have continued to dole out drips and dabs for her to travel to various sporting events for Wikinews, but once she got burned on the trip to Colorado, I doubt she'd have gone out of her way for small stuff like that anymore... and of course, by 2015 nobody cared about Wikinews anymore, either.)

No, I think she knew she had to get that grant money from the Spanish Paralympic Committee, which she (apparently) did, at least for a few months (2014-15). But the Spanish Paralympic Committee wouldn't have cared about whether or not she agreed or disagreed with feminist orthodoxy on the WP gender gap — they would only have been interested in results, just like the Australian Paralympic Committee.

It might also be worth noting that she never attempted to add the Spanish Paralympic Committee project/job to the Wikipedians-in-Residence list, even though she referred to herself as a WiR for them in various blog posts and what-not. I think that's because people on WP had accused her of a COI in 2012, despite her presence on the WiR list for that (Aussie) project and her attempted deflection ploy of saying that none of her DYK data was in her dissertation. I'm guessing that she figured she'd be better off trying to fly more under-the-radar the second time around. It might have worked too, if it weren't for those pesky kids (i.e., Fram) and their insistence on correct Spanish-to-English translations. But of course, at that point she had Maria Sefidari backing her up.

Last but not least: Like I might have said earlier, one of the big problems with accusing her of purely mercenary motivations in regards to the two Paralympics projects/jobs is, even though that's obviously how and why she got started on them, she didn't stop - she kept working on Aussie-sports WP articles for years, long after they'd stopped paying her. Same with the Spanish ones (though not to the same extent, probably because there was much less of a "community"/social thing built up around that effort). I assume she mostly wanted to maintain good working relationships with the U.Canberra people because that's just what you do in academia; you don't want your profs to bad-mouth you later on, you'll need them for references someday, etc., etc. (To some extent that might also apply to Wikiland, because if you want to remain viable on WP you don't want to just suddenly stop doing something you've been accused of having a paid-editing COI for doing, as that would tend to indicate the accusers had been right all along.) Either way though, it's only been since the Framban fiasco blew up that she's stopped doing that stuff.

So... I guess I could have just said "I like my explanation better," but I'll at least give your explanation points for being even less charitable than my explanation.

[Vigilant]

...

That's incorrect.

She was building a private database on paralympic athletes and was attempting to monetize that.
para-sports.es and a few other domains.
Laura Hale was billing it as the largest collection of paralympic information in the history or the world or something extravagant as that.

[lonza leggiera]

…

Yet, LH feels that she can study and write about us with credibility and authority. Her supervising faculty should have been waving red flags. We later discover that he was fired before this paper (or the PhD thesis) was finalized and that he was in on the grifting from the start.

The introduction to Hale's thesis lists Sam Hinton as her "primary supervisor". He is still on the academic staff of the University of Canberra.

I presume the person you're referring to as having been "fired" is Leigh Blackall, apparently another of Hale's supervisors. Here in Australia, an unqualified statement that someone has been "fired" (or "sacked") tends to suggest that he or she has been dismissed for unsatisfactory performance. I have seen no evidence that the UC's notice to Blackall gave this, or any other, reason for his services no longer being required.

[Edit: Apologies for the originally misattributed quotations]

[Midsize Jake]

She was building a private database on paralympic athletes and was attempting to monetize that.
para-sports.es and a few other domains.
Laura Hale was billing it as the largest collection of paralympic information in the history or the world or something extravagant as that.

Okay, fair point - I should have mentioned that.

I don't think it helps with our immediate problem, though - for one thing, parasport-news.com is now defunct, so it was a complete failure business-wise, and for another, she (and her defenders) could always come back with an argument like, "why would she continue to provide data to free-sector projects if she was trying to make money from that same data?" We're also assuming she was delusional enough to think anyone could make money from something like that, which I believe to be a false assumption. She of all people would know that the fan base is too small, and the mainstream media only cares about the Paralympics once every four years (and even then, not much).

I suspect the parasport-news.com thing was just CV-padding, a cheap-easy way of giving herself a credential (should she ever need one) and keeping some "skin in the game" once the Spanish Paralympic Committee funding dried up. She probably used it to get a press pass for the Rio Paralympics in 2016 (which she went to on her way back to Australia to pick up her Ph.D. diploma), and after that she didn't really do much with the site - it was gone by March 2017 or so, I think.

[Midsize Jake]

I presume the person you're referring to as having been "fired" is Leigh Blackall, apparently another of Hale's supervisors. Here in Australia, an unqualified statement that someone has been "fired" (or "sacked") tends to suggest that he or she has been dismissed for unsatisfactory performance. I have seen no evidence that the UC's notice to Blackall gave this, or any other, reason for his services no longer being required.

My assumption there was that Blackall was on a series of one-year contracts (his title was "Learning Commons Coordinator," so he wasn't actually a faculty member) and they just let the 2011 contract expire with no renewal. So you guys are technically both right; he wasn't fired, but if he were working for a US college it would amount to the same thing, by some perspectives anyway. Actually, at the time he was a Ph.D. student there himself (though unlike Laura Hale's, his was "self-directed," so who knows what his status was in that regard).

I think we've already posted it somewhere, but this is the blog post he wrote when he found out he wasn't getting renewed.