User:Francis Schonken

I didn't find much time yet to make this a page with the facts and figures about myself - too many interesting things going on in the several WikiMedia projects I'm engaged in.

However, the basics: I live in Ghent, Belgium. Though speaking Dutch, I prefer working on English Wikipedia articles. I want to apologise here for my English being sometimes all but perfect.

I worked mainly on articles connected to Erik Satie and the Bloomsbury Group, and on the Copyleft article.

Also on articles of the genre "French expressions difficult to translate in English": Entr'acte, Fin de siècle, Succès de scandale (b.t.w. has anybody a good English translation for this last one?).

You can e-mail me at Francis.Schonken(at)wikipedia.be

My most recent contributions to Wikipedia: [1]

This is me too!

Since 20/12/2004 the website of my family is in the air - of course in MediaWiki format.

The things I'm interested in, like the lists below, are also a way to get to know me (lacking the more formal bio up till now). The lists below are free for anybody to edit.

(Yes, I know, I should find some time to archive the below properly - soon, I promise)

List of articles that have been subject to Heteronormativity

(Removed general "categorization" issue, while tackled at wikipedia:categorization of people)

If you have suggestions for this list, please feel free to add them. Note that this list is about factual information, that has to be explained (of course in a NPOV way), like the examples I give. One of the first questions I'd like to sort out, and to which this list might help, is whether Heteronormativity is by definition non-NPOV (which, if positive, might lead to inclusion in NPOV guidelines contained in Wikipedia).

• Virginia Woolf: August 14, 2004 user "UtherSRG" tried to remove two consecutive times the "Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual people" category assigned to this article. I found no other references of this user in the "histories" of Wikipedia articles on Bloomsbury Group members than reducing LGBT-related references.
• Lytton Strachey: The only paragraph of this article treating Lytton Strachey's social life (i.e. where for heterosexual people would be mentioned whom and when they married), reads: "Strachey's unconventional private life was revealed in a biography (1967-8) by Michael Holroyd (see below). His relationship with the painter Dora Carrington was portrayed in the film Carrington (1995)." Heteronormative, while:
  • (1) however unconventional his private life might have been, Lytton Strachey was conventionally gay, for which the Holroyd book is not the exclusive reference.
  • (2) One needs less than a sentence to reveal the essentials of Lytton Strachey's private life in a NPOV way, if limiting oneself to what is essential in understanding what this person was about: instead, the book reference is used as a gloss-over for revealing nothing essential in the Wikipedia article itself, that might collide with heteronormativity.
  • (3) The most heteronormative part of the paragraph above is however the cunningly set-up suggestion of the relationship with Dora Carrington. Relationship has so many meanings that as such it would maybe better be mentioned on the Wikipedia:Words to avoid page. And here the non-cautious reader is made to believe that Lytton Strachey might have had some excesses in his private life (documented in a book) while there is however a film about his relationship, which happens to be with a woman. In other words: it is supposed that one knows about Lytton Strachey's private life before reading the Wikipedia article, or one learns nothing about it when reading the article. Note that the film is rather about Dora Carrington's relation towards Lytton Strachey (and other men), than about the relation of Strachey with Carrington.
  • (other side-note: This is all the more surprising while Strachey wrote several biographies himself, none of them wishy-washy about the private lives of his subjects: while an encyclopedia article of a person is always something of a miniature biography I don't see why it should be less to the point.)

List of articles that are non-NPOV by omission

Preliminary remark: I don't use POV and non-NPOV as synonyms, because they are not: a NPOV is by any means a POV, only the most neutral POV one is capable of: this "neutral" POV is reached, according to Wikipedia, by including ALL relevant POV's one can lay hands on, not by avoiding any particular POV for any particular reason.

I found this on Wikipedia:NPOV_tutorial#Space_and_balance:

An article can be written in neutral language and yet omit important points of view. Such an article should be considered an NPOV work in progress, not an irredeemable piece of propaganda. Often an author presents one POV because it's the only one that he or she knows well. The remedy is to add to the article and not to subtract from it.

This quite well expresses how I think about the issue too. While the "non-NPOV by omission" happens so easily (this also applies to myself), and is probably the most difficult non-NPOV to spot (while it is generally difficult to spot something that is not there), I suppose that a list of such omissions might help to remind myself (and all other interested!) how subtly it works sometimes.

The thing occurred to me when reading the Bayreuth Festival article: the only sentence about what happened with the Bayreuth Festival in the war years reads: "The Festival was closed during World War II and the town of Bayreuth sustained heavy bomb damage." Now I know pertinently this is not true, e.g. some years ago I saw a documentary on television, with an interview of Richard Wagners daughter-in-law (then leader of the Festival) who had served tea to High Nazi officials on a terrace that could be viewed by all people going to the festival, a ritual repeated during all war-year Bayreuth festivals (happens that in old age this woman was still proud about that accomplishment). Also: if I remember well there was heavy bomb damage to the the town of Bayreuth, including its old opera (mistaken to be the Bayreuth Festspielhaus by allied bombers), but the "Festspielhaus" was relatively spared. So the non-NPOV impression given in the sentence quoted above is that there couldn't have been Festivals anyhow, while Bayreuth was under siege (the Festspielhaus is however quite out of town, and was out of any war zone for the largest part of the war), and that the Festival was closed for everyone. There is a Winifred Wagner article on Wikipedia which fills in the details of this period of the Festival (so maybe by the time you read this the "omission" in the Festival article is mended), but at present there is no link from the Festival article to that Winifred.

I start the list with two examples:

• The Lytton Strachey article mentioned above: the example is also about having non-NPOV gaps in the over-all information.
• The Bayreuth Festival example given in the introduction to this section.

Recent Jimmy Wales interview for Slashdot

This section is still in very embryonic stage in my head, but I had some thoughts regarding:

• Wikipedia: Complement or Competitor to Traditional Encyclopedias
• "Stable" Wikipedia version and/or fully exploiting internet potential: where do these visions come together, where do they differ?
• ...

Just hope to find some time some day to write this down

Symposium Rotterdam (27/11/2004) and "Power structure within wikipedia"

Everything moved to: User:Francis Schonken/Dutch, except (well, this is linked from several pages now, so it's difficult to move):

Power structure within wikipedia

Since yesterday a topic was started on Dutch Wikipedia regarding reorganistion of the power-structures of that wikipedia, as a proposal to be discussed at the symposium: see

I take part in that discussion, and promised to post here a piece I once wrote about how wikipedia basicly works in the context of copyleft. The piece itself is only meant as a things to consider contribution in the context of that discussion (a sort of documentation), as people were asking how things were structured in the english wikipedia.

The following paragraphs were previously in the copyleft article, "Art - Documents" section, but as that article was growing above the standard acceptable size, they were removed there (with "self reference" as argumentation). In order to understand the concepts used in these paragraphs it will however be useful to read the copyleft article first.

The possible pitfalls described (in the copyleft article) for copylefting art, can also be an issue when copylefting non-artistic creations outside the context of software licensing. This can be clarified with the example of how Wikipedia deals with such issues, while applying the copyleft GFDL license:

• First it has to be remarked that Wikipedia uses none of the standard GFDL exemption techniques like "invariant sections" etc... (see Wikipedia:copyrights), nonetheless the Wikipedia Main page can be considered as something similar to what GFDL intends with the notion "Front cover text".
• While the complete content of Wikipedia can be copied, nonetheless the version of Wikipedia at the wikipedia.org webdomain can be considered as a "unique object": so it has not to surprise that Wikpedia has to protect itself from Vandalism or other disruptive behaviour towards the unique object. The remarkable aspect is that Wikipedia allows these rules to be constructed by Wikipedians themselves (in the "wikipedia:" subdomain), instead of hinging to a legalistic frame outside the copyleft/copyright framework. In fact this is the (largely self-regulating) mechanism with which Wikipedia addresses the broader notion of "respect", the same issue that is described (in the copyleft article) in relation to copylefted art.
• While there is a large confidence that these self-regulating techniques will be able to cope with respect-related issues, nonetheless some fundamentals of Wikipedia (outside the GFDL license description) are in a way "untouchable", like the NPOV principle which can be largely filled in by Wikipedians (see e.g. Wikipedia:importance), but not overturned in its essence: so this is not what GFDL calls an "invariant section", but nonetheless deals with a "declaration of intent" issue, comparable to what is described (in the copyleft article) in relation to copylefted art.
• And of course, ultimately, if self-regulating mechanisms fail, eventually after being escalated to the arbitration committee, there is still the special statute of Wikipedia-founder Jimbo Wales, who is as well the ultimate protector of the copyleft mechanism implemented in Wikipedia, as the only one who could bypass this mechanism without further explanation if Wikipedia itself would be in danger. Note that this is in essence different from the kind of benevolent dictatorship which is needed when applying copyleft in software development: in software development the central figure in the process at least has to "manage" contributions, and to some extent contributors, while none of this is required from the central figure in a largely self-regulating copyleft endeavour like Wikipedia: so copylefting outside "software" can have certain advantages too (when applying a sound system for avoiding the mentioned pitfalls...).

--Francis Schonken 10:54, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)