Like, how do you actually make it easy to edit them

6 min readNov 29, 2020

Despite this “jump” only 40% of movies in 2019 was centered around a female protagonist. This is probably still a much more respectable number compared to the past — for comparison even just a year earlier, in 2018 this number was a mere 31%.COWEN: Now, you don’t allow paid-for editing, but I’ve known people who are paid editors — on Wikipedia, they write things. They’re not, for the most part, slanting content. They’re trying to fill in gaps or add detail on, maybe, the person they work for. To what extent do you think Wikipedia is actually somewhat parasitic on nontransparent, paid-for editing, and you get rid of the worst manifestations of it, but it’s still a big part of the underlying foundation?Third, managers should consider leveraging third parties to help them accelerate at the beginning. IBM is among the companies that offer such a service, but there are others on the market, too.

But that gives rise to a lot of other problems. One of the problems is, there’s the old saying, which I should know who said it, but it’s very hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it. If you’re being paid to spruce up the page about your boss, and your idea of what’s neutral filling in the gaps and our idea might be substantially different simply because you come to it with an advocacy bias, and that’s problematic.

These examples probably only scratch the surface of the much larger underlying problem with the entertainment industry and media in general. This is also representative of the discriminatory practices across all spheres of life and society. However, as influencers who have the power to mold and shape society and its mindset, especially in the super-connected world of today, the forces behind the TV and Movie industries need to step up and make conscious efforts to change our society for the better.

That is a total shame, in a world where men and women practically form half of the world’s population each. Why, then, is the glorification always of the male character, and the woman is always the “behind-the-scenes” hand of support that makes a man.

Paid advocacy editing is really the problem. In that case, people are of different minds. I’m quite a hardliner on this. I just think it’s not something people should be doing at all. In fact, I think what we need to do to cope with it is have better mechanisms that are less combative for people who have a conflict of interest to actually contribute constructively by not editing pages, but by making suggestions in some organized fashion that will actually be paid attention to.

I’m deliberately speaking of decades and not years, though. For example, consider that 90 percent of companies are in the cloud — so many that it’s hard to even think about how our lives would be without it. On the flip side, clouds took several decades to gain widespread adoption.

Why is there always a woman behind a successful man and not the other way around? Rather, why is there anyone BEHIND another? Why aren’t there two people equal and successful together while also supporting each other?Then, in some sense, they’re being paid to edit Wikipedia, but they are not being paid in the same way that the PR department of the university would be paid to make the university look good. In fact, they probably wouldn’t have much interest in making sure that page about the university itself is good. That’s paid editing, but not paid advocacy editing.The difference is — let’s say you’re a university professor, and your university says, “Actually, as a part of your evaluation, we are interested in our professors being involved in public dialogue, in public debate. And actually, if you can contribute knowledge to Wikipedia and show us that, we consider that a positive thing, and you’ll get a good review based on that.”

I think what works for people is if they come in in good faith and talk to the community. That’s by far the most effective way to get things done. But we also know there are people who are doing paid editing, and it’s something that we basically disapprove of because we also see the abuses of it, where people go around trying to charge people a lot of money, pretending things that aren’t true about what they can get done, and so on and so forth.The next decade is bound to be revolutionary — just like the last one was. The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence is only one of many growing trends. The rise of the internet of things, advanced robotics, and blockchain technology count to this list, too.WALES: It’s a really good question. It’s something that we struggle with. We know that it does go on, and we know that we don’t approve of it. Around the margins, there are a lot of different angles on what that looks like. I think one of the first things to note is that we try to make a distinction between paid editing and paid advocacy editing.

A final caveat is not to strive for sophistication at all costs. If a cheap and simple model fulfills 80 percent of customer needs and could be shipped within a couple of months, that’s already a great feat. Moreover, the learnings of building the simple model will fuel the implementation of a more sophisticated model that, hopefully, makes customers 100 percent satisfied.

Then the content — it’s written largely on the desktop, and therefore there is a divide in a sense between reading and writing, but that probably doesn’t matter so much because I think the reading experience for Wikipedia on mobile is perfectly fine. In some ways it’s better because the scan distance for reading is a little shorter, but it probably could be a little more optimized for reading on mobile devices.

Like, how do you actually make it easy to edit them

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