Sure, but the point was about the double standard of using “circumcision” for one side an “genital mutilation”
If you make the decision which term to use based on the merits of the term that’s a valid point. That’s not Wikipedia’s policy. Wikipedia’s policy is to use words the way they generally used.
Take a look at Google ngrams for “male genital mutilation” and “female genital mutilation”. The difference between usage is two orders of magnitude. Most people use the term circumcision in the male case and not in the female case and it’s Wikipedia’s rule to go with what has most usage. That rule is consistently applied in this case.
This happens also for political correct language that someone proposes and that differs with general use. The guidelines around talking about suicide (at least when I saw the discussion) for example go for terms that are in common usage and not the political correct ones that are engineered to reduce the chance of people committing suicide.
Having a Wikipedia that says “You might have an argument for why term X is benefitial over term Y for political reasons such as equality but we don’t care we go for the common usage.” is a useful heuristic to prevent a bunch of social justice activism from creeping into Wikipedia.
Complaining on the one hand that Wikipedia’s policy are biased towards the left and then objecting to Wikipedia valuing the principle of equality not enough is not very consistent. You need policies to fight people who come and tell you “obesity is a discriminatory term, the political correct term is X”.
It’s also relevant that “circumcision” is a fairly accurate description of what is done to boys, but not of most of the things that are done to girls; and that many of the things done to girls are more severe in their effects than circumcision. So it’s not at all obvious that calling the thing done to boys “circumcision” and the thing done to girls “mutilation” is wrong; they are not at all the same thing, the word “circumcision” is more appropriate to the former than to the latter, and the word “mutilation” is more appropriate to the latter than to the former.
(To be clear, I am not saying that you’re wrong if you call what is done to boys “mutilation” [EDITED to add: or, more to the point, that Vanilla_cabs is]. Only that using different terminology in the two cases doesn’t need to be a double standard; it suffices to be picky about the meaning of “circumcision” or restrictive about what you call “mutilation” or both.)
It’s also relevant that “circumcision” is a fairly accurate description of what is done to boys, but not of most of the things that are done to girls; and that many of the things done to girls are more severe in their effects than circumcision.
It’s relevant to the merits of using the term in general, but’s it’s completely irrelevant from the policy decision in Wikipedia. The policy decision inside Wikipedia is about what terms people actually use outside of Wikipedia.
If someone wants to change the usage of a term with a similar pattern in Google nGrams in Wikipedia they are very unlikely to succeed even if they have really good arguments (like in the case of suicide).
Yes, to be clear, I meant relevant to this discussion and specifically to Vanilla_cabs’s complaint that Wikipedia’s policy amounts to a double standard. The policy of using the most widely used terms could produce unfairly inconsistent results, if the populace at large were biased (e.g., differential outrage for things affecting men vs things affecting women, or for things associated with “Western” religions versus things associated with “weird foreign” religions), or if different topics were commonly discussed by different groups of people (e.g., if cutting off foreskins were widely talked about among the populace at large but cutting off clitorises were more commonly a concern of anthropologists) -- but in the present case it’s not clear that even that is true; one could plausibly arrive at the same terminological decisions as Wikipedia while having fairness and consistency as important goals.
(I agree that even if this weren’t so, there wouldn’t be much prospect of changing Wikipedia’s usage.)
one could plausibly arrive at the same terminological decisions as Wikipedia while having fairness and consistency as important goals.
While that’s true, when interacting with Wikipedia it’s useful to have an accurate model of how it functions. If you just look at the reasoning for why those terms might be generally good for society to use, you will likely be surprised when you are exposed to another conflict in Wikipedia over terms.
Even if there are good arguments for another term the answer is “If the wide society uses a bad term, engage with society Wikipedia isn’t the place for activism”.
I was trying to address it by saying: There are some areas where Wikipedia has flaws and there’s little or nothing we can do about it; there are other areas where Wikipedia has flaws and we can help fix them without too much effort and it can be very impactful and good. The point of (that part of) my comment was to point out that if you see the circumcision-vs-GM thing as a flaw, it would be a flaw that’s in the first category (i.e. practically unfixable), and we should shrug and move on, and we shouldn’t generalize from that to forget that the second category also exists.
The point of (that part of) my comment was to point out that if you see the circumcision-vs-GM thing as a flaw, it would be a flaw that’s in the first category (i.e. practically unfixable), and we should shrug and move on, and we shouldn’t generalize from that to forget that the second category also exists.
Whether or not the circumcision-vs-GM thing is a flaw depends what the purpose of Wikipedia happens to be. You might want Wikipedia to have a different purpose then it has, but I think that having an entity with the purpose for which Wikipedia was created is valuable.
Your argumention why it’s a flaw was also clearly faulty because it’s not about what terms the doctors who perform the procedure want to use.
There’s some complexity from seperating “X is a flaw according to my values” from “X is a flaw according to Wikipedia’s values” but it’s doable. And I do things that an institution with Wikipedia’s values provides value to society.
(If you look at what I wrote, I have never stated any opinion about whether it’s a flaw or not. It’s not relevant to the narrow point I wanted to make. You’re welcome to argue about it with other people.)
If you make the decision which term to use based on the merits of the term that’s a valid point. That’s not Wikipedia’s policy. Wikipedia’s policy is to use words the way they generally used.
Take a look at Google ngrams for “male genital mutilation” and “female genital mutilation”. The difference between usage is two orders of magnitude. Most people use the term circumcision in the male case and not in the female case and it’s Wikipedia’s rule to go with what has most usage. That rule is consistently applied in this case.
This happens also for political correct language that someone proposes and that differs with general use. The guidelines around talking about suicide (at least when I saw the discussion) for example go for terms that are in common usage and not the political correct ones that are engineered to reduce the chance of people committing suicide.
Having a Wikipedia that says “You might have an argument for why term X is benefitial over term Y for political reasons such as equality but we don’t care we go for the common usage.” is a useful heuristic to prevent a bunch of social justice activism from creeping into Wikipedia.
Complaining on the one hand that Wikipedia’s policy are biased towards the left and then objecting to Wikipedia valuing the principle of equality not enough is not very consistent. You need policies to fight people who come and tell you “obesity is a discriminatory term, the political correct term is X”.
It’s also relevant that “circumcision” is a fairly accurate description of what is done to boys, but not of most of the things that are done to girls; and that many of the things done to girls are more severe in their effects than circumcision. So it’s not at all obvious that calling the thing done to boys “circumcision” and the thing done to girls “mutilation” is wrong; they are not at all the same thing, the word “circumcision” is more appropriate to the former than to the latter, and the word “mutilation” is more appropriate to the latter than to the former.
(To be clear, I am not saying that you’re wrong if you call what is done to boys “mutilation” [EDITED to add: or, more to the point, that Vanilla_cabs is]. Only that using different terminology in the two cases doesn’t need to be a double standard; it suffices to be picky about the meaning of “circumcision” or restrictive about what you call “mutilation” or both.)
It’s relevant to the merits of using the term in general, but’s it’s completely irrelevant from the policy decision in Wikipedia. The policy decision inside Wikipedia is about what terms people actually use outside of Wikipedia.
If someone wants to change the usage of a term with a similar pattern in Google nGrams in Wikipedia they are very unlikely to succeed even if they have really good arguments (like in the case of suicide).
Yes, to be clear, I meant relevant to this discussion and specifically to Vanilla_cabs’s complaint that Wikipedia’s policy amounts to a double standard. The policy of using the most widely used terms could produce unfairly inconsistent results, if the populace at large were biased (e.g., differential outrage for things affecting men vs things affecting women, or for things associated with “Western” religions versus things associated with “weird foreign” religions), or if different topics were commonly discussed by different groups of people (e.g., if cutting off foreskins were widely talked about among the populace at large but cutting off clitorises were more commonly a concern of anthropologists) -- but in the present case it’s not clear that even that is true; one could plausibly arrive at the same terminological decisions as Wikipedia while having fairness and consistency as important goals.
(I agree that even if this weren’t so, there wouldn’t be much prospect of changing Wikipedia’s usage.)
While that’s true, when interacting with Wikipedia it’s useful to have an accurate model of how it functions. If you just look at the reasoning for why those terms might be generally good for society to use, you will likely be surprised when you are exposed to another conflict in Wikipedia over terms.
Even if there are good arguments for another term the answer is “If the wide society uses a bad term, engage with society Wikipedia isn’t the place for activism”.
That wasn’t my complaint. I just pointed that it was waveman’s point and Steven Byrnes failed to address it.
I was trying to address it by saying: There are some areas where Wikipedia has flaws and there’s little or nothing we can do about it; there are other areas where Wikipedia has flaws and we can help fix them without too much effort and it can be very impactful and good. The point of (that part of) my comment was to point out that if you see the circumcision-vs-GM thing as a flaw, it would be a flaw that’s in the first category (i.e. practically unfixable), and we should shrug and move on, and we shouldn’t generalize from that to forget that the second category also exists.
Whether or not the circumcision-vs-GM thing is a flaw depends what the purpose of Wikipedia happens to be. You might want Wikipedia to have a different purpose then it has, but I think that having an entity with the purpose for which Wikipedia was created is valuable.
Your argumention why it’s a flaw was also clearly faulty because it’s not about what terms the doctors who perform the procedure want to use.
There’s some complexity from seperating “X is a flaw according to my values” from “X is a flaw according to Wikipedia’s values” but it’s doable. And I do things that an institution with Wikipedia’s values provides value to society.
(If you look at what I wrote, I have never stated any opinion about whether it’s a flaw or not. It’s not relevant to the narrow point I wanted to make. You’re welcome to argue about it with other people.)