{"id":1059,"date":"2009-07-29T22:38:30","date_gmt":"2009-07-30T02:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=1059"},"modified":"2009-07-31T20:00:40","modified_gmt":"2009-08-01T00:00:40","slug":"what-it-means-to-be-a-wikipedian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2009\/07\/29\/what-it-means-to-be-a-wikipedian\/","title":{"rendered":"What it means to be a Wikipedian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part 1 in a series about being a Wikimedian<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

When people ask me about myself, I often say I am a Wikipedian and a physicist. \u00a0 A physicist in that I want to know how things work at different scales, and to estimate specifics from first principles, limiting factors, conserved properties.\u00a0 And a Wikipedian in that I want to understand what large groups of people can do to fix what needs fixing while learning and enjoying themselves.<\/p>\n

I regularly have to explain what I mean by this last bit – not a desire to add to Wikipedia itself, or to contribute tidbits of knowledge to something, but the quick check for the edit <\/strong>button when you find a mistake in any environment, the urge to improve things on the spot – the sense of turning to someone next to you<\/strong> and saying, “let’s fix this”<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"yozone_healthy_vending_machine\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Let me give you an example from recent memory.\u00a0 Last week I was visiting my local clinic in Cambridge.\u00a0 It is a quiet building, competently staffed, with more security and information desk staff than is absolutely necessary.\u00a0 Noone would say they were struggling to make ends meet.\u00a0 They have a few vending machines throughout the clinic – offering drinks and snacks that are decidedly <\/strong>unhealthy.\u00a0 I couldn’t find a single healthy product in them, aside from bottled water (and there are water fountains on every floor).<\/p>\n

Clearly a fine idea gone wrong.\u00a0 This didn’t sit well with me, so I started asking the staff about it.\u00a0 Noone could say for sure how they were chosen; and all agreed that while the convenience was nice, they should at least be limited to healthy foods.\u00a0 I asked if there was anyone I could talk to about it (not really), and left a request card suggesting a replacement.<\/p>\n

This was deeply unsatisfying.\u00a0 I wanted to fix this right away… it seemed clear this would make everyone better off,\u00a0 and I had an idea of what to do. \u00a0 I could imagine a process of replacement running like this:
\n<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Define a proposal to replace the machines with healthier options<\/li>\n
  2. Find the person in the clinic heirarchy responsible for such things and make the recommendation<\/li>\n
  3. Research alternatives and present a few options with their costs, including the general cost of replacement and of cancelling any existing contracts with the current vending vendor.<\/li>\n
  4. Talk casually to staff and patients to get their input, since as long as such a change is being made, it should be enjoyed afterwards.<\/li>\n
  5. Pursue this through the gears of hospital bureaucracy<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    All of this would take a fair bit of time and persistent followup.\u00a0 (Despite a personal fondness for things that vend, I don’t know the first thing about the world of vending machine vendors and their alternatives, and I doubted people reading that card would either.)\u00a0 Certainly more than my personal <\/strong>benefit would merit if I had to do it all myself.<\/p>\n

    But if there were a natural way to pursue this as a community, I would gladly get it started.\u00a0 And if there were a way to make such a proposal, and then extend it to all clinics in the country that might be in the same situation, I could recruit health advocates who would delightedly devote a hundred hours to the project — doing so would be the highlight of their year<\/strong>.\u00a0 The benefits are so obvious, and the implications for our culture as well as individual patients would be tangible.\u00a0 I’m inclined to find my local community-health group and see if they are up to the challenge.\u00a0 But they tend to think in terms of political advocacy. \u00a0 And my idea isn’t to stand outside with placards and digital petitions shouting for legislators to mandate clincial change — it is to research, plan, design, suggest, and help implement a change directly and quickly.<\/p>\n

    So among other things, being a Wikipedian means : the recognition that things can be directly changed; the sense that collaboration of neighbors, and the promise of scale, can make any challenge worth the effort.\u00a0 (As for what being a Wikim<\/strong>edian<\/em> means… there’s less consensus on that point!\u00a0 I tried to answer that in a recent Q&A<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Part 1 in a series about being a Wikimedian. When people ask me about myself, I often say I am a Wikipedian and a physicist. \u00a0 A physicist in that I want to know how things work at different scales, and to estimate specifics from first principles, limiting factors, conserved properties.\u00a0 And a Wikipedian in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[210,211],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chain-gang","category-international"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-h5","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1065,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions\/1065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}