User:Jmabel
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Bienvenidos / Bine aţi venit / Wilkommen / Benvinguts / Bienvenue / Benvenuti / Bem-vindo
Welcome to the Wikipedia home page of Joe Mabel. For Joe's true Home Page, see http://www.speakeasy.org/~jmabel.
As of June 13 2005, I should be a bit more available to Wikipedia than I've been for a while, probably about 15-20 hours a week in total. However, I am working a fulltime job (with a long commute), so please don't expect that this is my primary activity, as it has sometimes been. Do feel free to drop me a note on my talk page if there is something to call to my attention.
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Trust
Recently, working on Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards has made me realize how important it is to know who you can trust to be both intellectually honest and expert in certain areas. I've also noticed that certain users have used their user pages as a Rogue's Gallery of people they are annoyed with (which strikes me as totally out of the spirit of Wikipedia). However, it inspired me to start listing some people whose intellectual honesty and expertise in certain areas I trust enormously: I am so glad to be able to ask these people questions sometimes (for example) I'm not sure whether to trust a particular anonymous edit or not sure exactly how to translate a particular phrase.
By its nature, the following list will never be comprehensive and there are probably some equally trusted people I'm forgetting to name, but here are some I want to single out for praise:
- Bogdangiusca and MihaiC on all things Romanian.
- Error on all things Basque.
- Ahoerstemeier, Mihnea Tudoreanu, and Hadal for general trustworthiness: I can't remember seeing a single edit from any of them that was not a plus to the article in question.
- Jwrosenzweig for advice on dealing with conflict within Wikipedia. I don't always take his advice, but it's nice to know he's there.
- Angela on how to go about getting a given thing done within Wikipedia. She knows the wikipedia name-space better than I know my record collection.
- Chamaeleon for help with tough Spanish-English and French-English translation issues (although we do not necesarily see eye-to-eye on politics).
- If Sam Hocevar says he's just fixing the spelling, he isn't doing anything else, and he isn't getting it wrong.
Mini-CV
Originally from Freeport, New York, went to college at Wesleyan University, and did graduate work in Computer Science at the University of Washington have lived most of my adult life in Seattle; also stints in London, Barcelona, and Bucharest.
I've been in the software industry since 1980, about equally divided between hands-on programming, project/program management and management roles. As of April '05, I'm launching into a contract project writing Microsoft's conceptual-level documents on internationalization and localization of software.
Some online writings by Joe Mabel
- Peace Heathens Seattle Crisis Resource Directory (editor): http://www.scn.org/crisis
- Travel writing, including an extensive narrative of six months working in Bucharest, Romania: http://www.speakeasy.org/~jmabel/travels
- The Interview Brainteaser and its Discontents: http://www.speakeasy.org/~jmabel/brain1.html
- XML: Why it Matters: http://www.lux-seattle.com/resources/whitepapers/xmloverview.htm
- Project Lifecycles: Waterfall, Rapid Application Development, and All That: http://www.lux-seattle.com/resources/whitepapers/waterfall.htm
- Internationalization and Localization (http://www.speakeasy.org/~jmabel/intl1.htm), tips on building international software.
Interests
History, art, travel, film, books, bicycling, language and linguistics, politics (mostly the non-electoral sort), the game of go.
Favorite Music
- Elvis Costello
- Kurt Weill
- Charles Mingus
- techno etc. for dancing
Favorite Books
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- Shame by Salman Rushdie
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Gift by Lewis Hyde (ISBN 0394715195)
- Jazz by Toni Morrison
Favorite Movies
- Aguirre, Wrath of God (directed by Werner Herzog)
- Children of Paradise (directed by Marcel Carné)
- The General (directed by Buster Keaton)
- The Saragossa Manuscript (directed by Wojciech Has)
Wikipedia: Major areas of work
The following is by no means comprehensive, but if you like, here's comprehensive (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Jmabel), at least for the English language Wikipedia.
Ethnicity
As of 02 Jan 04, I've started Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups. I need collaborators.
Related to Romania
Most of these I've written myself, a few I've translated. If you are aware of Romanian-languages articles that could use translation, please notify me on my talk page.
- Constantin Tănase - written January 2005, an interesting figure little-known in the English-speaking world.
- Bucharest Mall
- Centru Civic
- Corneliu Baba
- Hunger circus
- Iron Guard
- Lăutari (traditional Romanian Gypsy musicians)
- List of buildings in Bucharest
- Nicolae Iorga
- Palace of the People (Romania)
- Systematization (Romania).
- stub articles on other Romania-related topics
- lots of translations of originally Romanian-language material
- lots of articles related to History of Romania
Romanian bands
- B.U.G. Mafia
- Hi-Q
- Spitalul de Urgenţa
- Taxi - I'm really happy with this article, especially because band leader Dan Teodorescu gave us explicit permission to quote extensively from and to translate his lyrics.
- Zdob şi Zdub, who are actually Moldovan
- Taraful Haiducilor
Yiddish theater
Since January 2005, I have been writing a bunch of articles on the early years of Yiddish theater (and related topics like badchonim and Brodersänger). You can find a lot of them at Category:Jewish film and theatre. I also did some articles on the State Jewish Theater (Romania) and related topics. More to come. Tough area: not a lot on line (I think in many cases, we're the first to post even birth and death dates for some rather important figures); I managed to borrow a copy of Israil Bercovici's Romanian-language book on the history of Yiddish theater in Romania, which was useful for research, as were actor Jacob Adler's memoir and scholar Sol Liptzin's works. Really interesting stuff. Check out especially Abraham Goldfaden. This has been a weird one to research, because while I understand a bit of spoken Yiddish, I never learned to read it, so I'm not able to go to the primary sources.
Related to Seattle
- Using some material of my own plus material contributed by Emmett Shear, I've completely reworked all of the articles related to the History of Seattle. This has a ways to go; I've added stubs for subtopics I think particularly could use attention.
- Denny Party
- Grunge_music
- In the Seattle Wiki, which allows POV and original research, check out Last Exit on Brooklyn (http://www.seattlewiki.org/wiki/Last_Exit_on_Brooklyn): a crucial part of the history of Seattle coffee culture.
Related to Jorge Luis Borges and Argentina
- Boedo
- The Book of Sand
- Jorge Luis Borges
- H. Bustos Domecq
- Ezequiel Martínez Estrada
- Florida group
- Gaucho
- The Library of Babel
- Martín Fierro
- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
- Xul Solar
- Translated several articles from Spanish
- Lots more biographical articles. I'm finding that there is very little on anyone from Argentina, so I keep finding myself widening the circle from Borges outward. Almost no source materials seem to be available in English, so I'm guessing that a lot of what I'm writing are the first English-language articles on these individuals, at least on line.
Related to the French Revolution
- 18 Brumaire
- First Estate
- Glossary of the French Revolution
- List of people associated with the French Revolution
- Second Estate
- ...and a lot more. I've now had my hands pretty seriously in about a hundred related articles.
I've also carried the article on the French Revolution solidly through about September 1792, and have spun out more detailed historical articles (incorporating, also, a few solid pieces that were already there), but haven't gotten around to continuing it past that point. I'd be genuinely happy if someone else would carry this forward.
Related to Catalunya and the Catalan world
I've translated:
- Catalan grammar (& related articles)
- a series of articles related to Catalan myths and legends and also taking some material from these to present specifically Catalan aspects of more broadly Iberian or European myths and legends. See, especially, Catalan mythology about witches.
- a series of articles related to the Comarques of Catalonia. Unfortuntately, some of these aren't too strong in the Catalan original, but I'm translating (and in some cases enhancing) what is there.
- History of Catalonia (translated from Spanish, not Catalan)
...and a few others, mostly to do with Catalan monarchs and with Mallorca
BTW, pet peeve: Wikipedia chooses the spellings "Catalonia" and "Majorca".
Brown v. Board of Education
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, I've written several short articles, including ones on the three other cases combined into Brown (Briggs v. Elliott, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, and Gebhart v. Belton) and on the Fifth Circuit Four.
Other
- Freeport, New York (my hometown)
- Wesleyan University (my alma mater)
- I made major contributions (some amounting to rewrites) to the articles liberalism, Socialism, Left-right politics, Left-wing politics, Right-wing politics, Conservatism, etc. Also, trying to work through an NPOV dispute in Left-wing politics has led me to work extensively on ANSWER, Not in Our Name, and United for Peace and Justice. I've also written quite a few stubs on various groups on the political left, mostly in the U.S.
- Over a hundred translations, including School of Salamanca, Paraguayos, República o Muerte (the Paraguayan National Anthem), José Ortega y Gasset, Wayang, Technoparade, Paragraph 175, about two thirds of ETA, and (on Wikisource) Salvador Allende's last speech (http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende%27s_Last_Speech_%28English_translation%29). I'm a heavy participant in Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English, Wikipedia:Translation into English, and Wikipedia:Vfd.
- I've also been known to adapt old, now public domain, articles to be more easily read by the contemporary reader. A good example of this work is at Exilarch.
On systemic bias
I see that User:Peregrine981 has chosen to rework Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias to drop my short essay on systemic bias in Wikipedia that was there since the start of the that project. Rather than fight over its presence on that page, I am reproducing it here. Probably other people made some small edits to this (you'd have to check the history of that page to see), but this is essentially my writing, and I have deliberately worked from an early version here (dating from October 4, 2004) rather than the more collective version of November 28, 2004 when it was removed. Since this is now on my own page, I have also taken the liberty to revert some other people's edits with which I did not entirely agree.
Wikipedia has a number of systemic biases, mostly deriving from the demographics of our participant base, the heavy bias towards online research, and the (generally commendable) tendency to "write what you know". Systemic bias is not to be confused with systematic bias. The latter just means "thoroughgoing bias". Systemic bias means that there are structural reasons why Wikipedia gives certain topics much better coverage than others.
As of this writing, Wikipedia is disproportionately white and male; disproportionately American; disproportionately written by people from white collar backgrounds. We do not think this is a result of a conspiracy — it is largely a result of self-selection — but it has effects not all of which are beneficial, and which need to be looked at and (in some cases) countered.
Wikipedia is biased toward over-inclusion of certain material pertaining to (for example) science fiction, contemporary youth culture, contemporary U.S. and UK culture in general, and anything already well covered in the English-langauge portion of the Internet. These excessive inclusions are relatively harmless: at worst, people look at some of these articles and say "this is silly, why is it in an encyclopedia?"
Of far greater (and more detrimental) consequence, these same biases lead to minimal or non-existent treatment of topics of great importance. One example is that, as of this writing, the Congo Civil War [eventually written about at Second Congo War], possibly the largest war since World War II has claimed over 3 million lives, but one would be hard pressed to learn much about it from Wikipedia. In fact, there is more information on a fictional plant.
An example list of poor treatment due to this bias would include (in no particular order):
- Africa and the 'Third World' generally, in all of its aspects
- Asia - particularly 'underdeveloped' countries
- Female oriented/dominated subjects
- Foreign literature (particularly writers whose work is unavailable or not widely available in English)
- Non-white figures in the U.S., UK, etc.
Systemic biases are not easily addressed. We will need a variety of strategies. Among those are:
- Identify existing structures that can help in promoting this effort — e.g. Collaboration of the week, the translation page, cleanup — or can serve as models: the Irish wikipedians' notice board, WikiProject Philosophy, etc.
- Create new structures to coordinate our efforts toward countering systematic bias.
- Create an infrastructure for recruitment and support of contributors outside the present Wikipedia mainstream. For example, this could include active outreach to Historically black colleges and universities in the U.S. and to colleges and universities in various countries of the British Commonwealth.
- Identify subject-matter areas and specific articles that have been neglected due to systemic bias and which ought to be written, added to, or otherwise improved.
- Collaborate on producing such articles.
Wikipedia is an evolving project. While some of its biases — e.g. a preference for online sources — are probably inherent, others — generally the demographic ones — need not be. However, they will not be overcome by wishful thinking. We need to devote active effort to these matters, rather than keep doing the same thing and expect different results.
To this I would like to add (November 29, 2004):
I believe that the most important of these correctives would be infrastructure for recruitment and support of contributors outside the present Wikipedia mainstream. I also think it is the one we are doing least to address. We need to deepen our understanding of why women and certain ethnic minorities in the English-speaking world do not find this project as appealing as white men and we need to work out what we can do about it. We need to work out how to successfully recruit contributors from a broader human base.
Please write any comments on my talk page, not here. -- Jmabel | Talk