Jimmy Wales: belief

Transcript context

…… truthful depiction of that topic. Yeah, a great example that I really loved this morning that I saw someone left a note on my user talk page in English Wikipedia saying it was quite a dramatic headline saying racist hook on front page. So we have on the front page of Wikipedia, we have little section called Did You know? And it’s just little tidbits and facts, just things people find interesting. And there’s a whole process for how things get there. And the one that somebody was raising a question about was, it was comparing a very well known US football player, Black. There was a quote from another famous sport person comparing him to a Lamborghini. Clearly a compliment. And so somebody said, “Actually, here’s a study, here’s some interesting information about how Black sports people are far more often compared to inanimate objects. And given that kind of analogy, and I think it’s demeaning to compare a person to a car, et cetera, cetera.” But they said, “I’m not pulling, I’m not deleting it, I’m not removing it. I just want to raise the question.” And then there’s this really interesting conversation that goes on where I think the general consensus was, you know what, this isn’t like the alarming headline racist thing on the front page of Wikipedia, holy moly, that sounds bad. But it’s sort of like, actually yeah this probably isn’t the sort of analogy that we think is great. And so we should probably think about how to improve our language and not compare sports people to inanimate objects and particularly be aware of certain racial sensitivities that there might be around that sort of thing if there is a disparity in the media of how people are called. And I just thought, you know what, nothing for me to weigh in on here. This is a good conversation. Like nobody’s saying people should be banned if they refer to, what was his name, The Fridge, Refrigerator Perry. Very famous comparison to an inanimate object of a Chicago Bears player, many years ago. But they’re just saying, hey, let’s be careful about analogies that we just pick up from the media. I said, “Yeah, that’s good.” On the deprecation of news sources is really interesting because I think what you’re saying is ultimately you want to make a article by article decision, use your own judgment. And it’s such a subtle thing because there’s just a lot of hit pieces written about individuals like myself for example, that masquerade as an objective thorough exploration of a human being. It’s fascinating to watch because controversy and hit pieces just get more clicks.…

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