Laura in Wikiland

[Vigilant]

Crazy names to crazy faces

[eagle]

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.

I apologize if you feel that my statement was over-stated. The important questions are: 1) who was the faculty who suggested her elevating Netball (T-H-L) to FA to "bring credit to the department?" Leigh was the only one of the group to ask students to conduct on-wiki editing as a part of their classes. linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Leig ... ral_Health[/link] 2) who was the faculty that LH consulted when she was first accused on-wiki of editing articles with "close paraphrasing" and was told by the unnamed faculty that it was OK and to not use quote marks? 3) who was the faculty who suggested the novel way of analyzing tweet data that will be revolutionary, but this method was abandoned around the time that they brought in an outside reviewer? LH made it sound so exciting on her blog, but this method was quietly dropped for some unstated reason. We will never know if the answers to these three questions contributed to him leaving the University of Canberra.

I find it very strange that the two people who have influenced LH the most during the thesis years of her life were Leigh Blackall and Raystorm -- and neither has a PhD!

[eagle]

Crazy names to crazy faces

Could a man with this face persuade a product sampler at the Algonquin Illinois Kmart to drop everything and move to Australia to pursue a PhD based on a novel technique for analyzing tweet data? He is not my type, but then again, he was probably not LH's type either.

[eagle]

Although John Vandenberg proposed a special Wikiproject for Women's Sports, it seems as if it was to be created to serve as a Laura Hale platform:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... %27s_Sport
Note the same cast of characters including the sockpuppets like Geneviève2. The wikiproject had been drafted in LH's user space.

I still have concerns about POV-pushing and the desirability of splintering coverage of sports that have widespread participation by both men and women, such as running. Would these efforts be better allocated toward working within the existing sport wikiprojects to improve coverage rather than as a parallel effort that competes for resources and generates coordination problems in terms of templates, infoboxes, etc. Racepacket (talk) 09:19, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

The proposal was turned down by the WikiProject Council.

[Poetlister]

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.

I think "fired" conveys a suggestion of dismissal for misconduct whereas "sacked" just means dismissed, but of course people are not always that precise in their use of words.

[eagle]

Laura Hale positioned herself to become an expert on the intersection of the community and sports fandom. She tried to do so with an imperfect understanding of either group. Sports fans have an inexplicable passion for their teams and have an irritating belief in their expertise and an irrepressible desire to share their opinions. In contrast, WP editors have a self-professed passion for NPOV (which is honored in the breach), seek a confirmation of their facts with sources and authorities, and an irrepressible desire to share the output of their work.

A sports fan uses Wikipedia as a reliable source to "settle an argument", to get background information, or to vandalize as an expression of sport-related humor.

Can Wikipedia change people's perceptions of sports, teams or athletes? For example, if the Olympic movement has objective criteria for inclusion of a sport into the Olympic Games, could a concerted on-wiki propaganda effort change public perceptions enough to get an obscure port added? (At least with Netball, we now know that the answer is "no.")

Can Wikipedia raise the popularity or acceptance of a Paralympic team or any other sports team?

Can Wikipedia walk the fine line between an encyclopedia that anyone can edit and covering topics that are inherently susceptible to boosterism?

What motivates people to edit Wikipedia as opposed to expressing their passion for sports using some other on-line media? Other journalism drop the high brow language of its hard news coverage when it comes to sports reporting -- should Wikipedia? Should Wikipedia coverage of professional wrestling stay in character or acknowledge the scripted nature of the performances?

Sports plays a well-established and important role in society. Does Wikipedia?

It would be great if the movement could find someone who came up with interesting insights on the intersection of sports and Wikipedia, and I suppose that it might have been reasonable for the government or the WMF to throw money toward the area. However, there was nothing new of lasting value found here.

Framgate asked the community to pick between silencing the voice of the person who conducted poorly executed on-wiki experiments in this area or silencing the voice of the policeman monitoring that activity. The Arbcom has chosen to strip the bit of the cop on the assumption that the experiments will stop. The community will make their own choice known at the RfA, the community consultation on the T&S partial ban, and the Arbcom sponsored discussion on harassment.

[Vigilant]

Framgate asked the community to pick between silencing the voice of the person who conducted poorly executed on-wiki experiments in this area or silencing the voice of the policeman monitoring that activity. The Arbcom has chosen to strip the bit of the cop on the assumption that the experiments will stop. The community will make their own choice known at the RfA, the community consultation on the T&S partial ban, and the Arbcom sponsored discussion on harassment.

[Midsize Jake]

Just for reference purposes, WP:NOTLAB ("Wikipedia is not a laboratory") wasn't added to the WP:NOT policy page until Dec. 23, 2017, in this edit by User:Winged Blades of Godric (T-C-L) (who I keep meaning to suspend here on Wikipediocracy, btw, because he never responded to my PM about whether he's an impostor account or not).

It's too bad it took them so long to put that in there, because if they'd had it in February 2011, they could have blocked User:LauraHale for it and quite possibly avoided this whole chain of events.

The WP:NOTLAB policy was actually proposed by User:Robert McClenon (T-C-L), in the wake of this strikingly similar incident from September 2017. In the talk page discussion about the new policy, you'll never guess who shows up to make the clearest argument in favor of the idea (emphasis mine):

Wikipedia is like a natural resource. If you want to do to research at the Grand Canyon you cannot just roll in there with your jack hammer and start digging big holes and hauling out rocks. But with our open nature we are vulnerable to exactly that sort of thing. The problem isn't with taking away stuff or forever marring something (not with our digital content). What they stole was volunteer time; in addition they added shitty content that violated many of our content policies, and never talked to us -- not before, not during, and not after. We need a very clear policy that abusing editing privileges this way is unacceptable and that people need to get consensus to do this kind of thing beforehand. Jytdog (talk) 18:02, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

So... I guess they allowed it the first time, but after the second time, they figured they really had to do something...?

[eagle]

Wikipedia is like a natural resource. If you want to do to research at the Grand Canyon you cannot just roll in there with your jack hammer and start digging big holes and hauling out rocks. But with our open nature we are vulnerable to exactly that sort of thing. The problem isn't with taking away stuff or forever marring something (not with our digital content). What they stole was volunteer time; in addition they added shitty content that violated many of our content policies, and never talked to us -- not before, not during, and not after. We need a very clear policy that abusing editing privileges this way is unacceptable and that people need to get consensus to do this kind of thing beforehand. Jytdog (talk) 18:02, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

How many people's wikilives were destroyed by LH (starting with Bill william compton (T-C-L) and ending with Fram (T-C-L))? The LH's unexpected viciousness hurts just as much whether it was done for sport or as a "scientific experiment".

[Midsize Jake]

How many people's wikilives were destroyed by LH (starting with Bill william compton (T-C-L) and ending with Fram (T-C-L))?

I don't know about "destroyed," but I found a good example recently of the kind of problems LH would often cause due to poor handling or understanding of source material (which may well have been Fram's #1 issue with her). There was an AfD (successful) for a Turkish women's ice hockey player named Gizem Öztaşdelen, posted on Aug. 9, 2017. The vote was 4-1 for deletion, with the only "keep" vote coming from LauraHale:

Keep: NHOCKEY is not relevant here as she passes WP:GNG based on the strength of the sources from Turkish language media. It would be helpful if some one more familiar with the Turkish language could fix up some of the sources, and add more information from these sources to improve the article and make notability more clear to people who do not want to search Turkish language media to see a demonstration of WP:GNG. --LauraHale (talk) 12:48, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Now, we pretty much know LH doesn't read or speak Turkish, and historically she hasn't been all that great with Google Translate either. This article (rescued here from June 2016) was also one of a handful submitted at the same time about non-notable hockey players, so hockey fan and AfD enthusiast Ravenswing (T-C-L) felt compelled to check the sources LH was referring to (many of which I'm guessing she'd added herself), just on the hunch that she hadn't checked them. It turned out that 15 of the 17 sources were either roster listings or name-drops, the two exceptions being a story about a minor "scandal" in which she and another player were stuck in a hospital because they couldn't afford to pay the bill after an injury.

Have a look at the AfD page for the full quote, but this is from the last paragraph:

That just burned 45 minutes of my life I'm not getting back. Not a single one of these provides the subject the "significant coverage" the GNG requires (indeed, it wouldn't add up to a cite passing the GNG's muster if you crammed all of them together), and it seems like LauraHale just went for any Turkish-language cite she could find namedropping the subject without bothering to examine them. Ravenswing 18:38, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

You could argue that he didn't have to check those sources, but at that point in the AfD the outcome was still in doubt, and apparently this guy cared about the notability requirements (at least for hockey players). You could also argue that he shouldn't have cared about the notability requirements, but this was a BLP, and Wikipedians are encouraged to care about notability requirements for BLPs. So, he did the right thing and upheld the relevant policies, but it took him 45 minutes to do it that could have been spent a lot more constructively elsewhere, and he wouldn't have had to if not for you-know-who.

[Vigilant]

Times how many shit articles?

[Midsize Jake]

Times how many shit articles?

Good question; raw numbers are here, so it's 1,923 total articles created and 28 pages deleted. But we can't count the ones made after her return in Feb. 2019 from the "wikibreak" she took after the "go away Fram" talk-page meltdown in Feb. 2018, because with the possible exception of the "Abortion in {US State}" articles, those were all pretty good (mostly because they weren't stubs and actually used published academic sources instead of sport-stats websites). So I'm going to say about 1,800 total articles that were posted before that last phase of her wiki-career.

However, it's a bit absurd to think someone checked all of the 1,800 articles for poor sourcing, especially since most were script-generated mass-stubbings. If someone found sourcing problems in one of them, those same problems probably existed in all of the articles from that particular script run, and they might have also been AfD'd together - in fact, this is exactly what brought about the talk-page meltdown in the first place, when Fram submitted 21 articles on non-medal-winning women's junior national softball teams to AfD, due to their "total lack of notability." (He left the teams that had won medals alone... anyway, I'm guessing these mass-AfD nominations were particularly irksome for her.)

Anyway, that means the "real" number of articles that had to be checked was probably much lower - less than a thousand, almost certainly. I wouldn't be surprised if it were as high as 800 or even 900, but somewhere around 600 seems more likely.

Still quite a large number, considering how labor-intensive it would have been.

[Vigilant]

It's another Project Qworty.

[Poetlister]

Could there be a systematic attempt to clean up or delete all LH's articles? Would someone complain that it was grave dancing or harassment of a departed editor? Don't tell me that that is unlikely!

[SLW80]

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.

Late to the party, but she most definitely is not. She has no interest in altruism; her entire life, demonstrably, as been about positioning herself to rake in money and power. And every single time she's been in a position of power, the people under her have suffered.

[Poetlister]

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.

Late to the party, but she most definitely is not. She has no interest in altruism; her entire life, demonstrably, as been about positioning herself to rake in money and power. And every single time she's been in a position of power, the people under her have suffered.

I was trying to phrase my statement as a litotes.

[rhindle]

Times how many shit articles?

Good question; raw numbers are here, so it's 1,923 total articles created and 28 pages deleted.

Maybe someone should take those to Afd. Randy, you like the AfD process. Are you game for that?

Edit: Of the total, almost 1300 are either stub or start classes.

[DHeyward]

Could there be a systematic attempt to clean up or delete all LH's articles? Would someone complain that it was grave dancing or harassment of a departed editor? Don't tell me that that is unlikely!

It would at least be an entertaining sockpuppet show.

[rhindle]

Could there be a systematic attempt to clean up or delete all LH's articles? Would someone complain that it was grave dancing or harassment of a departed editor? Don't tell me that that is unlikely!

It probably depends on how many of her white knights try to show up.

[Vigilant]

Could there be a systematic attempt to clean up or delete all LH's articles? Would someone complain that it was grave dancing or harassment of a departed editor? Don't tell me that that is unlikely!

It probably depends on how many of her white knights try to show up.

That's right.
Those articles won't stand up to scrutiny on the technical merits.

[Jans Hammer]

Considering Laura Hale has more-or-less formally retired, this would be virtually impossible and even if it weren't there isn't any serious evidence that Laura Hale was involved other than their interactions with Fram being the basis for a warning. As much as people have been wanting to beat on her due to the Wikipediocracy allegations and Raystorm's (not to put too fine a point on it) disrespectful and counterproductive responce, continuing to act as if Laura Hale had anything more than a minor role in it absent more credible evidence is not fucking helpful in the slightest and only lends credence to T&S' position that we don't take harassment seriously. —A little blue Bori v^_^v Fram was railroaded! 8:48 pm, Today (UTC+1)

linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... Is_it_over?[/link]

[Midsize Jake]

Maybe someone should take those to Afd. Randy, you like the AfD process. Are you game for that?

Hmmm...

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but let's bear in mind that a lot of her articles already were taken to AfD around the time they were posted, and most of them survived - at least partially because HoPAu was a tight-knit, well-organized group dedicated to keeping as many of those articles up as possible. Those stubs on non-medal-winning women's junior national softball teams, for example, were all kept, even though nobody had any intention of expanding on them. (And indeed, nobody has expanded any of them, with not even a single non-bot edit on any of them.)

So this is not like the Qworty situation in that respect, because Robert Clark Young didn't have a dedicated backup organization. The HoPAu people are still around; both Tony Naar and Sam Hinton are still in their same jobs. There's no money in it anymore, but I think it would be a mistake to assume they no longer care about it - they're devoted Aussie-sports fans and this is a significant part of their lives. They're still interested in their PageView numbers. What's more, there are plenty of people involved with the Australian Paralympics stuff who probably are getting paid for their regular (non-WP-related) jobs who could pitch in if an AfD campaign were to get off the ground - practically everyone on this list is a potential "keep" vote, IMO. They might not get involved with non-Aussie/non-Paralympics AfDs, but who knows.

All in all, if Wikipedians couldn't even manage to clean up after RCY/Qworty, I don't think they've got a prayer of cleaning up after Laura Hale.

And just to add a related observation about this, I suspect that Paralympic Stories, which was launched on April 13 of this year to augment the main Australian Paralympics site, may be the result of HoPAu's realization that Wikipedia's notability requirements and COI standards aren't going to be lowered enough to satisfy them, at least not soon enough for their purposes. So far I don't think they've featured anyone who doesn't already have a Wikipedia article, but it's probably just a matter of time - if you look at an article like Lawn bowls at the 1980 Summer Paralympics (T-H-L), for example, you'll see that the names of about 90% of the lawn-bowlers are red links (because, you know, very few people are interested in disabled lawn-bowlers enough to write WP articles about them, wonderful people though I'm sure they all are). I can't imagine HoPAu's going to be happy with this situation forever, and now that their main Wikipedia stub-creator is gone, maybe they figure it's time to take matters more into their own hands. (Which is good, by the way - more power to 'em, if that's the case here.)

[Midsize Jake]

Considering Laura Hale has more-or-less formally retired, this would be virtually impossible and even if it weren't there isn't any serious evidence that Laura Hale was involved other than their interactions with Fram being the basis for a warning. <snip>

You didn't quote the thing he was responding to, though:

As a matter of Restorative justice, a group should review all of the editors which Laura Hale harassed starting with User:Bill william compton and make amends. Hlevy2 (talk) 18:20, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

I suspect User:Jéské Couriano (T-C-L) misunderstood what Mr. Hlevy2 (T-C-L) was saying, and thought he meant they should somehow bring Laura Hale back to apologize to people, which indeed probably is impossible.

More to the point though, Mr. Hlevy2 probably shouldn't have used the term "harassed" there - Laura Hale didn't really harass anybody; what she did was more like "blatant promotional gaslighting." IOW, in order to promote the stuff she was promoting, she did all sorts of dubious things that toed the ethics/honesty line, even if they didn't always cross it - telling people the DYKs were just something she was doing in her spare time, or insisting the sports bios were all GLAM articles, or making fishy claims about "New Zealand English," or even adding herself to the Wikipedians-in-Residence list, among other examples.

Racepacket, Bill william compton, and (ultimately) Fram did suffer for disagreeing with her and the HoPAu brigade about the notability of various Paralympic sports and athletes, not to mention the quality of the articles, but even then I doubt it would have been seen as "harassment" on her part - she was really just claiming false expertise and generally bullshitting people in defense of whatever she happened to be doing. (An extremely common narcissist's reaction to being challenged, btw.)

[Vigilant]

I'm not sure how you square bringing in Trust and Safety as your bully boys with not really harassing.
It seems like that's the ultimate harassment card.

In the lower orders of tactical nuke deployment, you've got Maria Sefidari Huici aka Raystorm galloping to Laura Hale's rescue at several critical junctures, not the least of which was calling anyone looking into Laura Hale's history a part of GamerGate.
Maria Sefidari Huici definitely harasses people on behalf of Laura Hale while the Chair of the Board of Trustees, no less.

Ross Mallett aka Hawkeye7 ran cover for Laura Hale for years, penultimately arriving at Fram's RfA for a little stabby stabby.

Victuallers, Fae, even the ancient evil one herself, Slim Virgin, have arrived, miraculously, to berate any and all of those who darted to thwart the great and wise Laura Hale.


Laura ale doesn't do the dirty work herself, she manipulates others into harassing her enemies.
I'm pretty sure that's worse.

[Vigilant]

What an interesting page
linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk ... newsletter[/link]

The WikiCup is over for another year! Our Champion this year is Courcelles (submissions), who over the course of the competition has amassed 147 GAs, 111 GARs, 9 DYKs, 4 FLs and 1 ITN.

linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... Courcelles[/link]

GA: 35 points

Armenia at the 1994 Winter Olympics Talk:Armenia at the 1994 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.6x multiplier)
Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 2014 Winter Paralympics Talk:Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 2014 Winter Paralympics/GA1 (1.2x multiplier)
Afghanistan at the 2016 Summer Paralympics Talk:Afghanistan at the 2016 Summer Paralympics/GA1 (1.2x multiplier)
Faroe Islands at the 2016 Summer Paralympics Talk:Faroe Islands at the 2016 Summer Paralympics/GA1 (1.2x multiplier)
The Gambia at the 2016 Summer Paralympics Talk:The Gambia at the 2016 Summer Paralympics/GA1
Virgin Islands at the 2016 Summer Paralympics Talk:Virgin Islands at the 2016 Summer Paralympics/GA1
Faroe Islands at the 2012 Summer Paralympics Talk:Faroe Islands at the 2012 Summer Paralympics/GA1 (1.2x multiplier)
São Tomé and Príncipe at the 1996 Summer Olympics Talk:São Tomé and Príncipe at the 1996 Summer Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Solomon Islands at the 1996 Summer Olympics Talk:Solomon Islands at the 1996 Summer Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Bermuda at the 1994 Winter Olympics Talk:Bermuda at the 1994 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Turkey at the 1998 Winter Olympics Talk:Turkey at the 1998 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.6x multiplier)
Brazil at the 1994 Winter Olympics Talk:Brazil at the 1994 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Brazil at the 1998 Winter Olympics Talk:Brazil at the 1998 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Mongolia at the 1994 Winter Olympics Talk:Mongolia at the 1994 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.6x multiplier)
Netherlands Antilles at the 1992 Winter Olympics Talk:Netherlands Antilles at the 1992 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Swaziland at the 1992 Winter Olympics Talk:Swaziland at the 1992 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Mexico at the 1994 Winter Olympics Talk:Mexico at the 1994 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Philippines at the 1992 Winter Olympics Talk:Philippines at the 1992 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Bangladesh at the 1984 Summer Olympics Talk:Bangladesh at the 1984 Summer Olympics/GA1 (1.6x multiplier)
Malawi at the 1996 Summer Olympics Talk:Malawi at the 1996 Summer Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Yemen at the 2000 Summer Olympics Talk:Yemen at the 2000 Summer Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
Virgin Islands at the 2014 Winter Olympics Talk:Virgin Islands at the 2014 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.8x multiplier)
Nepal at the 1976 Summer Olympics Talk:Nepal at the 1976 Summer Olympics/GA1 (1.4x multiplier)
The Gambia at the 2000 Summer Olympics Talk:The Gambia at the 2000 Summer Olympics/GA1 (1.6x multiplier)
Tonga at the 2014 Winter Olympics Talk:Tonga at the 2014 Winter Olympics/GA1 (1.8x multiplier)

Pure co-inky-dink, I'm certain.

[Vigilant]

Amazing diff
linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =918409766[/link]

[Midsize Jake]

Pretty much all of the 2019 stuff is going to look completely nuts from the non-radical-feminist perspective, quite frankly. I mean, for the history of lesbianism in the United States, for example, there's basically one article, History of lesbianism in the United States (T-H-L) - there are some biographies of course, and articles for a handful of events, books, and so forth, but most of it is neatly encapsulated into that one article. Spain, meanwhile, still has LGBT history in Spain (T-H-L), but that article has been stable for years, and Dr. Hale hasn't made a single edit to it. I suspect this is because she's a "get the L out" lesbian, and doesn't seem to like the "LGBT" construction one little tiny bit. She's also a proponent of the "wave theory" of feminism, and in a fairly big way (I personally tend to see feminism as a bit more cohesive than that, but that's just me.)

So now, within the space of just 5 months, Spain has a few dozen lengthy, fairly well-sourced articles about the history of lesbianism, feminism, women, etc., all specific to that country, and many of them also specific to a particular period in Spanish history (or, more typically, to a particular government, especially the Franco regime). And she was just about to pull the trigger on adding significantly to her existing Spanish lesbian history articles (i.e., Lesbians in Francoist Spain (T-H-L), Lesbians in the Second Republic period (T-H-L)) by moving new stuff like Lesbians during the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Lesbians in the Spanish democratic transition period, and Lesbians during the conservative government of José María Aznar out of her user-space when the Framban came down and she left Wikipedia altogether.

Simply put, Spain already had more detailed coverage of its lesbian history on Wikipedia than any other country in the world, and Dr. Hale was preparing to make it much more extensive than it already was.

We've been mostly glossing over this material because Fram never touched any of it - again, all of these articles were complete (i.e. not stubs), well-sourced (or at least not sourced to dicey sports-promotion websites), and mostly about notable subjects. She might have even regretted getting the WMF to put Fram on their hit-list after a couple of months of total non-interference from him, but I guess she felt she would lose face over it - again, the WMF is interested in fixing the gender gap, not the en.wiki "culture" in general, and Fram's total failure to "harass" Dr. Hale while she was writing these rad-fem articles might have seriously messed up their narrative about him.

As for the articles themselves, they really are pretty radical, so there's been a fair amount of work required to make them "NPOV." For example, here's the first couple of lines from the current version of Fifth-wave feminism in Ibero-America (T-H-L):

Fifth-wave feminism in Ibero-America is a movement of feminism that rejects English-speaking feminist models of discourse to address the needs of marginalized female populations by providing them with collectivist tools to fight oppression.

And here's the first two lines from the original version:

The feminist movement has entered into a fifth-wave, arriving like a tsunami. Its existence though is still debated as part of a broader overall questioning of the feminist wave model.

So yeah, a fair amount of appearance-of-bias there, but it's still a lot better than what she was doing before, unless maybe you're a male Spaniard. But you know, as long as they keep doing that bullfighting shit, I guess I'm not going to feel too sorry for them. (Except for the Catalonians, since they banned it in 2012.)

[eagle]

Maybe someone should take those to Afd. Randy, you like the AfD process. Are you game for that?

Hmmm...

both Tony Naar and Sam Hinton are still in their same jobs. There's no money in it anymore, but I think it would be a mistake to assume they no longer care about it

I thought that Tony Naar stepped away from the Australian Paralympic Committee staff at the end of 2012. linkhttps://au.linkedin.com/in/tony-naar-7b056336[/link]

[Giraffe Stapler]

As for the articles themselves, they really are pretty radical, so there's been a fair amount of work required to make them "NPOV." For example, here's the first couple of lines from the current version of Fifth-wave feminism in Ibero-America (T-H-L):

Fifth-wave feminism in Ibero-America is a movement of feminism that rejects English-speaking feminist models of discourse to address the needs of marginalized female populations by providing them with collectivist tools to fight oppression.

And here's the first two lines from the original version:

The feminist movement has entered into a fifth-wave, arriving like a tsunami. Its existence though is still debated as part of a broader overall questioning of the feminist wave model.

So yeah, a fair amount of appearance-of-bias there, but it's still a lot better than what she was doing before, unless maybe you're a male Spaniard. But you know, as long as they keep doing that bullfighting shit, I guess I'm not going to feel too sorry for them. (Except for the Catalonians, since they banned it in 2012.)

Those lines still appear in the article, just not in the lead. Go ahead and check the three references for that sentence. The "tsunami" part comes from here:

Si lees este post el día que ha visto la luz (22 de febrero del 2019), te cuento que faltan exactamente 13 días para el 8 de marzo. El segundo 8 de marzo histórico en el que la huelga de cuidados, laboral y de consumo será lo que viviremos. No sé si ya somos la cuarta ola (o la quinta) del feminismo. Lo que sé es que es una ola global, un tsunami de mujeres (y personas-realidades diversas) que está azotando fuerte las costas del sistema que quieren hacernos creer que es el único posible.

Google translates this as:

If you read this post the day that has seen the light (February 22, 2019), I tell you that exactly 13 days are left until March 8. The second historical March 8 in which the care, labor and consumption strike will be what we will live. I don't know if we are already the fourth wave (or the fifth) of feminism. What I know is that it is a global wave, a tsunami of women (and diverse people-realities) that is hitting hard on the shores of the system that want to make us believe that it is the only one possible.

Seems legit.

[eagle]

Pretty much all of the 2019 stuff is going to look completely nuts from the non-radical-feminist perspective, quite frankly. I mean, for the history of lesbianism in the United States, for example, there's basically one article, History of lesbianism in the United States (T-H-L) - there are some biographies of course, and articles for a handful of events, books, and so forth, but most of it is neatly encapsulated into that one article. Spain, meanwhile, still has LGBT history in Spain (T-H-L), but that article has been stable for years, and Dr. Hale hasn't made a single edit to it. I suspect this is because she's a "get the L out" lesbian, and doesn't seem to like the "LGBT" construction one little tiny bit. She's also a proponent of the "wave theory" of feminism, and in a fairly big way (I personally tend to see feminism as a bit more cohesive than that, but that's just me.)

So now, within the space of just 5 months, Spain has a few dozen lengthy, fairly well-sourced articles about the history of lesbianism, feminism, women, etc., all specific to that country, and many of them also specific to a particular period in Spanish history (or, more typically, to a particular government, especially the Franco regime). And she was just about to pull the trigger on adding significantly to her existing Spanish lesbian history articles (i.e., Lesbians in Francoist Spain (T-H-L), Lesbians in the Second Republic period (T-H-L)) by moving new stuff like Lesbians during the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Lesbians in the Spanish democratic transition period, and Lesbians during the conservative government of José María Aznar out of her user-space when the Framban came down and she left Wikipedia altogether.

Simply put, Spain already had more detailed coverage of its lesbian history on Wikipedia than any other country in the world, and Dr. Hale was preparing to make it much more extensive than it already was.

We've been mostly glossing over this material because Fram never touched any of it - again, all of these articles were complete (i.e. not stubs), well-sourced (or at least not sourced to dicey sports-promotion websites), and mostly about notable subjects. She might have even regretted getting the WMF to put Fram on their hit-list after a couple of months of total non-interference from him, but I guess she felt she would lose face over it - again, the WMF is interested in fixing the gender gap, not the en.wiki "culture" in general, and Fram's total failure to "harass" Dr. Hale while she was writing these rad-fem articles might have seriously messed up their narrative about him.

As for the articles themselves, they really are pretty radical, so there's been a fair amount of work required to make them "NPOV." For example, here's the first couple of lines from the current version of Fifth-wave feminism in Ibero-America (T-H-L):

Fifth-wave feminism in Ibero-America is a movement of feminism that rejects English-speaking feminist models of discourse to address the needs of marginalized female populations by providing them with collectivist tools to fight oppression.

And here's the first two lines from the original version:

The feminist movement has entered into a fifth-wave, arriving like a tsunami. Its existence though is still debated as part of a broader overall questioning of the feminist wave model.

So yeah, a fair amount of appearance-of-bias there, but it's still a lot better than what she was doing before, unless maybe you're a male Spaniard. But you know, as long as they keep doing that bullfighting shit, I guess I'm not going to feel too sorry for them. (Except for the Catalonians, since they banned it in 2012.)

Yes, but is Italy really an Ibero-American country? linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =916338863[/link]

[Midsize Jake]

...both Tony Naar and Sam Hinton are still in their same jobs. There's no money in it anymore, but I think it would be a mistake to assume they no longer care about it

I thought that Tony Naar stepped away from the Australian Paralympic Committee staff at the end of 2012. linkhttps://au.linkedin.com/in/tony-naar-7b056336[/link]

I suspect that's a problem with the way he entered that on LinkedIn - maybe because the APC is now called "Paralympics Australia," but who knows... Anyhoo, I was actually going by this blog post by Keith Lyons, the UCNISS (Univ. of Canberra National Institute of Sports Studies) director. (Lyons is still in the same job too, apparently.)

I wonder if they have any idea that we're talking about them like this? Or if they even know what happened with Laura Hale on WP? They're not posting about it in their Google Group, though of course that's understandable from their perspective.

[Midsize Jake]

Yes, but is Italy really an Ibero-American country? linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =916338863[/link]

Ignorance of foreign geography (not to mention domestic geography) is kind of a hallmark of younger Americans, so I guess that still applies even after they've moved to Europe. I prefer not to think of it as a hallmark of all Americans, but I guess some people would...

TBH, even the most charitable explanation (which is that she's quoting someone from Turin, and Turin is one of the two closest Italian cities to the Iberian peninsula) doesn't excuse that one. Still, there are some really good Spanish restaurants there, apparently.

[Giraffe Stapler]

The feminist movement has entered into a fifth-wave, arriving like a tsunami. Its existence though is still debated as part of a broader overall questioning of the feminist wave model.

That's Laura Hale very, very "closely paraphrasing" other authors.

You missed my point. The author wasn't saying that fifth wave feminism arrived like a tsumani. She was explicitly saying she wasn't sure if it was the fourth wave of feminism (let alone the fifth) and referring to people marching on the upcoming International Women's Day protest as being a "tsunami". LauraHale either misunderstood or twisted it to say what she wanted.

You know why there is no general Fifth wave of feminism (T-H-L) article on Wikipedia? Because no one agrees on what it is, or if it is happening.

[eagle]

The feminist movement has entered into a fifth-wave, arriving like a tsunami. Its existence though is still debated as part of a broader overall questioning of the feminist wave model.

That's Laura Hale very, very "closely paraphrasing" other authors.

You missed my point. The author wasn't saying that fifth wave feminism arrived like a tsumani. She was explicitly saying she wasn't sure if it was the fourth wave of feminism (let alone the fifth) and referring to people marching on the upcoming International Women's Day protest as being a "tsunami". LauraHale either misunderstood or twisted it to say what she wanted.

You know why there is no general Fifth wave of feminism (T-H-L) article on Wikipedia? Because no one agrees on what it is, or if it is happening.

You are absolutely correct. Even Laura Hale could not spin a straightforward account of the Fifth Wave on a world-wide basis, so she fell back to her tendency to spit out and show off what sources she found without any string or flow through the items. She did not want to lose her findings so she shared them with us on the talk page:

Removed content
Originally, the intention was to present this as a more world-wide feminist wave. There is just a lack of coherence between Ibero-American feminist waves at this point and wave theory in geographical regions. To preserve sources and in case people have an interest in writing about it from other feminist regions, original text and sourcs below...

She then had sections for Italy, Poland, Sweden ("Sweden is in fourth or fifth-wave feminism."), Turkey, Ukraine, Great Britain, and the United States. I hope that there is a rule against nominating a newly-created article talk page for DYK! She copied the Italy section to the talk page, but apparently forgot to remove it from the article itself.

Who could possibly benefit from an article called Fifth-wave feminism in Ibero-America (T-H-L)? Well, we learn that there is a new magazine called "La Quinta Ola" and an organization by that name in Venezuela, established in April 2019. We also learn that "Spanish filmmaker Isabel de Ocampo in 2013 claimed to have invented fifth-wave feminism."

This reminds me of all the speculation and rumors that precede each new iPhone model launch regarding the product name and feature set. Also, in 2008, a recent college student tried to organize other young people into an organization called "Generation Obama." Of course, nobody could define Generation Obama, because Obama was 47 himself, and many of Obama's supporters were over 65. The important thing was that this "founder"/"creator" was able to put it on his resume, and that he wanted to feel different than the "Generation George Bush."

If that young man created a Generation Obama (T-H-L) article, it would be subject to speedy deletion under A11. I am not clear whether Laura Hale's article should fit CSD A11 or G11.

Because Laura Hale has vanished, we have been spared the early creation of articles for each paralympic event and nation "at the 2020 Paralympic Games."

[Poetlister]

As for getting articles deleted, being a stub is probably not a reason for deletion. If it says everything that can reasonably be said about the topic, what would be the point of demanding an expansion? Plenty of these articles deal with non-notable topics and of course that's a good reason for deletion, but if umpteen people storm in and insist that the subject is notable, especially if there has already been an AfD, the chances are that the article will be kept.

[el84]

Because Laura Hale has vanished, we have been spared the early creation of articles for each paralympic event and nation "at the 2020 Paralympic Games."

May be an idea to keep an eye on this and see who does create these articles, to see if there's any LH COI involved.

[eagle]

Because Laura Hale has vanished, we have been spared the early creation of articles for each paralympic event and nation "at the 2020 Paralympic Games."

May be an idea to keep an eye on this and see who does create these articles, to see if there's any LH COI involved.

Good idea. We know that LH had at least one prior undisclosed account. To paraphrase President Trump, "Laura, if you are listening, please find and disclose all of your prior and future accounts."

[eagle]

I just noticed this warning box at the top of the Talk:Fifth Wave Feminism in Ibero-America:

This article was created or improved as part of the Women in Red project in 2019. The editor(s) involved may be new; please assume good faith regarding their contributions before making changes.

How are we supposed to interpret that? "I dare you to take it to AfD, because my posse will be there." Or "I think this article is a dumb idea, but don't blame me, Women in Red suggested it."

[Randy from Boise]

As someone who was involved in the second wave of punk, let me tell you that there is no such thing as "fifth wave feminism," outside of a trendy slogan for a handful of self-absorbed PC warriors to use about themselves as an ephemeral tribal description.

RB

[el84]

I just noticed this warning box at the top of the Talk:Fifth Wave Feminism in Ibero-America:

This article was created or improved as part of the Women in Red project in 2019. The editor(s) involved may be new; please assume good faith regarding their contributions before making changes.

How are we supposed to interpret that? "I dare you to take it to AfD, because my posse will be there." Or "I think this article is a dumb idea, but don't blame me, Women in Red suggested it."

linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... e_feminism[/link]

Ahahahahahahaha.

[Giraffe Stapler]

Since we're discussing Laura Hale's pivot from paralympics to Ibero-lesbianism, please allow me to present Lesbians during the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, one of the drafts she left behind. Guess which chair of the WMF board is given prominent mention in that one?

María Sefidari, known as Raystorm on Wikipedia, was one of the major writers of the English Wikipedia article, "Same-sex marriage in Spain," updating the article often in 2007. She was one of 182 members of the English Wikipedia LGBT Wikiproject, founded in March 2006.[72][73] Sefidari went on to create the LGBT Wikiproject on Spanish Wikipedia. She also created the article about Ellen DeGeneres on Spanish Wikipedia. She believed it was important to include information about homosexuality and queer culture on Wikipedia as part of serving the mission of the encyclopedia, saying, "There is a certain current of thought for which being LGBT is a minor detail of the lives of professionals and people , and that mentioning it is unnecessary, when in fact it has had a profound impact on their lives because they have been discriminated against, marginalized or persecuted."[73] Including information on orientation is important to her because "knowledge breaks prejudices."[73] She later went on to serve as Vice President of Wikimedia Spain 2010 and 2012, and then the board of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2016.[73]

here is an archived copy in case it mysteriously disappears....

[Poetlister]

I just noticed this warning box at the top of the Talk:Fifth Wave Feminism in Ibero-America:

This article was created or improved as part of the Women in Red project in 2019. The editor(s) involved may be new; please assume good faith regarding their contributions before making changes.

How are we supposed to interpret that? "I dare you to take it to AfD, because my posse will be there." Or "I think this article is a dumb idea, but don't blame me, Women in Red suggested it."

It would be a good idea if people, as a general principle, assumed good faith if newbie editors muck things up. But that doesn't preclude improving articles, so "before making changes" is rather arrogant.

[Vigilant]

https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1177181704961875970

Replying to
@krmaher
and
@BYoungMedia
Transparency is a core value of Wikipedia so it’s important to disclose any potential COI, ideally on your user page. We recommend participating on article talk pages to recommend improvements, rather than editing directly.

https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1177183693401726977

Katherine Maher
@krmaher
Replying to
@krmaher
and
@BYoungMedia
The system is rare - it asks people to weigh common interest ahead of personal gain, and editors and readers alike take that seriously. That’s why no reputable campaign, company, or individual wants (egg) on their face being caught trying to manipulate Wikipedia.

https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1177183779015802880

Katherine Maher
@krmaher
Replying to
@krmaher
and
@BYoungMedia
We strongly discourage people from pursuing COI editing. You can read more here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped ... f_interest

COI editing Edit
See also: Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide
Shortcut
WP:COIEDIT
Editors with a COI should follow Wikipedia policies and best practices scrupulously:

you should disclose your COI when involved with affected articles;
you are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly;
you may propose changes on talk pages (by using the {{request edit}} template), or by posting a note at the COI noticeboard, so that they can be peer reviewed;
you should put new articles through the Articles for Creation (AfC) process instead of creating them directly;
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you should respect other editors by keeping discussions concise.
Note that no one on Wikipedia controls articles. If Wikipedia hosts an article about you or your organization, others may add information that would otherwise remain little known. They may also decide to delete the article or decide to keep it should you later request deletion. The media has several times drawn attention to companies that engage in COI editing on Wikipedia (see Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia), which has led to embarrassment for the organization concerned.

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Lol.

Laura Hale and Maria Sefidari Huici say what?

[Midsize Jake]

<snip>
Laura Hale and Maria Sefidari Huici say what?

That shows the lack of imagination they've always had, along with a certain amount of obtuse naiveté. It's easy for them to think they're protected by the idea that "no reputable campaign, company, or individual wants (egg) on their face being caught trying to manipulate Wikipedia," but even if that's true, it doesn't apply to entities that are essentially egg-resistant like Paralympics organizations. Someone who's willing to look for it might find all sorts of corruption in such an organization, but because everyone is so sympathetic to what they do overall, most people who hear about something like that will think, "well, they must have had a good reason." And frankly, they did have a good reason (i.e., they're trying to promote a worthy cause, WP is hogging all the Google juice, so if you can't beat 'em, join 'em).

So it's hard to blame them, but it still went against WP policy and misused a lot of volunteer time - and though they couldn't have predicted it, it ultimately produced a highly-divisive and damaging management crisis.

There are probably lots of "egg-resistant" organizations out there, actually. (Hopefully most of them have better institutional control and hiring standards in place by now.)

[Poetlister]

Anyone who attacks the Paralympics would be inundated by righteous condemnation. They are scarcely in the same category as North Face and its campaign to post adverts disguised as interesting photos.

[eagle]

Anyone who attacks the Paralympics would be inundated by righteous condemnation. They are scarcely in the same category as North Face and its campaign to post adverts disguised as interesting photos.

I agree that Paralympics are "egg-resistent", but what about Netball who was lobbying to be added to the Olympics at a time when there was a hard cap on the number of events (thereby indirectly seeking the expulsion of some other sport to take its place.) The wrestling community felt on the chopping block at the time that Laura Hale joined the Netball crusade. Subsequently, boxing and wrestling both added women competitions to their Olympic roster, making Netball's argument more challenging.

In general, online managers have a basic strategic choice: should we put resources into SEO for our own website or should we work with someone like Laura Hale to get WP page views on articles related to us. Because WP uses the "nofollow" command, putting links on WP back to our website will not improve the search engine rankings of our pages. If the only article on Paralympic athlete X is on our website, the absence of a Wikipedia page on X will only improve our rankings. Finally, there is the problem that the page views carefully counted by Laura Hale are not just people interested in the content. It also includes spiders as well as the many people who scrutinize Laura Hale-created pages. In other words, when you hire Laura Hale to bring you page views, are you getting positive interest or something more negative?

[eagle]

Laura Hale's Warning box addressed to Fram said:

You have claimed that DYKs I did were related to Gibraltarpedia, when they were clearly not, and you never retracted this.

In the middle of the Gibarltarpedia hailstorm, Laura Hale went trolling by making Gibarltar-related DYK nominations, as Bluemoonset noted:linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template: ... orongurups[/link]

this was part of a series of "Gibraltar" articles that, although sharing a name with the original Gibraltar, had nothing to do with it or Gibraltarpedia and thus could serve as a nice poke in the eye to the people trying to ban Gibraltar hooks from the DYK section of the main page for up to a year.

Fram had pulled Laura Hale's nomination for Gibraltar Rock from the DYK queue and explained:

The hook claimed that "King Alfred's Castle" is a climbing trail on Gibraltar Rock, Porongurups, but the source [15] makes it clear on page 24 of the 27 that while the other two in the hook are climbing trails, King Alfred's Castle is "an area of enormous boulders on the ridge just west of Gibraltar Rock". There is a climbing trail to the Castle (which is close by but not even a part of Gibraltar Rock) called The Trans-African Aeroplane Canal.
Having noticed the liberty LauraHale takes with her sources and the lack of quality of many of her edits, I have looked at other nominations she made, and found serious problems

Fram rejected Laura Hale's DYK nominations because they were faulty, not because she was caught up in the Gibraltarpedia scandal.

Laura Hale then used WMF funds to write up the difference between her DYK hooks and those of Gibraltarpedia. linkhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc ... ow_traffic[/link]

[Midsize Jake]

I agree that Paralympics are "egg-resistent", but what about Netball who was lobbying to be added to the Olympics at a time when there was a hard cap on the number of events (thereby indirectly seeking the expulsion of some other sport to take its place.) The wrestling community felt on the chopping block at the time that Laura Hale joined the Netball crusade. Subsequently, boxing and wrestling both added women competitions to their Olympic roster, making Netball's argument more challenging.

Netball was the first thing she started working on, almost immediately after the HoPAu tender was posted in February 2011 - and perhaps more importantly, she mostly stopped working on it in June 2011, probably as soon as it became clear that the HoPAu project (as tendered) was going to be funded. There were a few more minor edits from June 20 to June 23, but after those, it was pretty much all routine maintenance edits, increasingly rare ones at that.

So my assumption would be that they picked Netball as a "proof-of-concept," to show what they were capable of doing promotionally. Like you say, in many ways Netball (to the extent that it's an organized "federation" or whatever) was victimized by this, maybe even twice - first by making it harder for them to get into the Olympics, and again, now, by being lumped in with everything else Laura Hale was promoting on WP at the time. I think they'll be OK for now though, because even though Netball could easily be harmed by bad PR, somebody on Wikipedia will hopefully read this thread and see that they probably weren't directly or deliberately involved - in which case they probably won't take a hatchet to the articles, or otherwise make an issue of it with them. Not that they would anyway, since WP clearly doesn't have much of a reputation for cleaning up the messes they allow to accumulate.

[Midsize Jake]

Fram rejected Laura Hale's DYK nominations because they were faulty, not because she was caught up in the Gibraltarpedia scandal.

A good/important point to make, too, since it also suggests that he wasn't just doing it because he didn't like her. And by that same token, we could point to the multi-AfD for "Gibraltar at the 2011 Commonwealth Youth Games" as an example - it's the same strict sports-related notability standard he applied to some of Laura Hale's articles during 2014-2018, and which made her so angry at him, but those are not Laura Hale's articles at all. She didn't write them, or post them, or participate in the AfDs. Nothing to do with her, Fram just didn't like articles about non-winning national teams at highly-obscure sporting events in general, I guess. Perhaps if he had, all this could have been avoided.

Laura Hale then used WMF funds to write up the difference between her DYK hooks and those of Gibraltarpedia. linkhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc ... ow_traffic[/link]

Cheeky.

[eagle]

Laura Hale then used WMF funds to write up the difference between her DYK hooks and those of Gibraltarpedia. linkhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc ... ow_traffic[/link]

Cheeky.

I still do not understand how a WMF individual research grant is measured, other than in terms of compensation. When the NSF funds the research of a college professor, it is usually in terms of operating and staffing a research group for one or more years. The professor is passionate about his work, and his graduate students want to stay competitive and marketable so they work day and night to produce publishable results. If they waste a period of time on unpublishable rubbish, that is a setback and a violation of the trust they put into the professor to have experimental designs that are statistically sound. Although the grad students want to complete their work and get a degree as soon as possible, it is really up to the professor to decide when they are "ready."

Individual research grants (such as the one the funded Laura Hale's "Anatomy of English Wikipedia Did You Know Traffic" in many cases do not have such a lab director/professor and instead must rely upon the WMF Staff to filter out the wheat from the chaff. I do not understand how she repeatedly got her WMF grants for repeatedly doing shoddy work in meaninglessly small increments. It is like watching people at the window of the unemployment office seeking benefit checks. Are we trying to help the economically needy over a short-term rough-spot or to fund a meaningful block of research that is sufficient large to be of significance?

In the case of the DYK study, Hale worked with a sample of 544 DYK hooks that appeared from October 2012 to July 2013. However, roughly 25 hooks run per day, so the potential population would be 6,000 DYK hooks. Instead of selecting hooks at random from the 6,000 population, or analyzing all 6,000 hooks, Hale chose to study the set of 421 DYK hooks that she wrote (even back to 2011) and then threw in the hooks (from a limited time period) from three other editors who were active in writing about Gilbarltar. Why did she select hooks based upon who authored them? Of the non-Laura Hale hooks studied, only 47 of them pertained to Gibraltar.

Perhaps Hale's thesis was that people proposing the year long ban on Gilbraltar hooks were concerned about audience fatigue, and that these 47 hooks still gained page views would be a counter argument to that concern. In fact, the argument was that if Gilbraltar (or any other specialized topic such as Paralympics) flood DYK, the general main page readership will stop looking at that section because DYK would not be viewed as representative of WP as a whole. This would require a study of main page readers, not hook-earned page views.

Hale also has gender gap theories, and coded each article as "male" or "female." For biographies, this would be the gender of the article subject. Of course, the Hale hooks were disproportionately female. For non-biographies, Hale reveals her own socialization biases. For example, all military history hooks were coded as "male." Hale reports that "male" DYK hooks got more page views on average than "female" hooks. This junk is exactly the type of statistics that the Diversity Working Group wants to bake into WMF projects as a whole going forward, particularly being able to generate automatic reports as to the gender composition of each page or wikiproject. Unaddressed is whether DYK hooks written by men get a more popular response than DYK hooks written by women, or whether women are discriminated against in seeking access to DYK attention to the articles that they write.

Even the small sample size was of concern to Hale. For example, footnote 20 reads:

Please not a sample of only two hooks.

A very apt typo. Her other caveats were (fn 25):

Given the huge amount of data mining involved, unlike other regions, an attempt was not made to get a posting time for every hook. 10:00 AM also includes on 10:15 hook.

and fn 28:

The decision not to do median was made based on time constraints of the researcher.

Why didn't the WMF turn the paper back and ask it to be redone in order to insist on the WMF getting value for its money?