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Wikipedia Admin's Manipulation "Messed Up Perhaps 15,000 Students' Lives"
Andreas Kolbe writes: Recently, "ArbCom", Wikipedia's highest court, banned an administrator account that for years had been manipulating the Wikipedia article of a bogus Indian business school – deleting criticism, adding puffery, and enabling the article to become a significant part of the school's PR strategy. Believing the school's promises and advertisements, families went to great expense to send sons and daughters on courses there – only for their children to find that the degrees they had gained were worthless. "In my opinion, by letting this go on for so long, Wikipedia has messed up perhaps 15,000 students' lives," an Indian journalist quoted in the story says. India is one of the countries where tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet, making Wikipedia a potential gatekeeper.
"Verifiability not truth" is the shelter biased and power-hungry Wikipedia editors hide behind. Post an article or fact they don't like and they'll do their level best to claim it's not a good source using nebulous definitions and intra-Wiki politics. The author of a cited article can himself say, "that's not what I meant" and it will be rejected. One symptom of this source problem is a lack of consistently followed, useful guidelines for source material. Oh, there are guideline, they're just not consistently followed and entrenched interests have allowed their definitions of a good source to slide to support various point of view various editors want to push. NPOV is a religion they follow like a Baptist in his cups.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Ive worked with numerous indian H1B holders. The ones that are smart enough to apply for citizenship and get the hell out of whatever indentured servitude theyve been thrust into are the ones I love working with. Eloquently spoken as always, they will be the ones that bring insight and technical expertise along for any meeting or project.
On the other hand, ive had many experiences with ESL H1B holders that amounted to nothing short of a phone tech in the states. Any H1B hired for any oracle product for example is a roll of the dice. Ive worked with a senior level RDBM that after an entire year of working on a project and requesting funding, quit when it was revealed the funding had all been directly applied to Oracle Gold support and remote hands. H1B sysadmins that just reboot servers all day long to fix problems, or feverishly post to message boards with an irate "please respond immediately" seem to be the bulk of what ive encountered in linux and unix. Ive been present for meeting room meltdowns and phantom disappearances where H1B holders just quit showing up for a project as well.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Corrupt institutions in India are the NORM, not the exception. Long before Wikipedia existed, the country was filled with fake diploma mills and a million other institutional scams. The parents in this case are just looking for a convenient scapegoat (and playing their favorite game of "Blame the evil American/European companies for all our shitty country's problems!").
The next time you want to post a broad, bigoted claim that covers well over a billion people, at least have the courage to do so with your own account instead of AC. If you're afraid of the repercussions of doing so, maybe you should stop and ask yourself why there would be repercussions in the first place.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I used to do a lot of contractor hiring. I started with the attitude "if you lie on your resume, I won't even consider you". After realizing that I would never hire anyone - I backed off on the attitude. The interview process became an exercise in determining what the candidate knows, while the candidate made every attempt possible to deceive me. It was very disheartening and I hated hiring someone who lied to my face for 60 minutes straight because he lied less than everyone else and was the most likely of the bunch to get the job done.
BTW, this was at a really big company and 99% of the resumes that HR sent me were educated in India and came to the US to work in the previous three to five years.
Actually, the Just World Hypothesis (link ironically to Wikipedia) can help to explain the cognitive process behind the behavior that you observe with regards to "victim blaming". I found it fascinating when I first read about it (probably here on /.)
If Wikipedia wants more women to contribute, they really need to change the way that it works. All too often a single person will essentially take control of a page and reject any other contributions (and even improvements) from other people. That kind of adversarial behavior isn't something that most women tend to like working around. Even if their efforts to promote women to join are successful, I don't think it will have any long-term success as they, like many others will run into some asshole that won't work collaboratively.
Wikipedia really needs to change the way it operates and remove the ability for individuals to monopolize and control a page. I think if they moved to a system where multiple editors would work together to collaboratively make changes to a page over several weeks before pushing out the changes to the live version. While that isn't going to eliminate the petty squabbles, it at least results in a less hostile environment that prevents one power-tripping idiot from reverting all of your changes and trying to ban you.
Pandering to women while keeping the same environment that has been shown to drive so many women away isn't going to fix the problem. It's just trying to slap a band-aid on top of a gaping wound. Worse, it's a waste of resources that could otherwise be spent actually addressing the underlying cause of the problem.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you some speculation.
I've worked with a number of young Indian engineers and found them to be roughly comparable to American engineers with the same level of experience; if anything they have a slightly higher level of textbook knowledge because (I speculate) their educational system puts a higher premium on memorization. That turns out to be awesome when you're lucky enough to be hiring someone with that certain spark of talent it takes to be great at the job. On the other hand it also means you can easily end up hiring a dud who interviews great because he happens to have a prodigious memory. When the VC my company worked with asked us to take on some surplus H1B engineers he'd sponsored I had a range of experiences from absolutely top-notch talent to total cement-heads with an encyclopedic recall of the GoF book.
But what I've never run into an Indian H1B who didn't know anything at all about his field, although I'm sure it happens. Given the size and level of economic development in India I'd be shocked if there were not at least a few diploma mills, but you'd be a fool to turn your nose up at a diploma from U of Mumbai or IIT/Delhi.
It can be tricky evaluate a candidate from a different country and culture than you, so you've got to expect that a conscientious company may end up hiring a few clunkers. But if your Indian colleagues were *all* ignoramuses, it suggests to me the companies you worked for were incompetent or bottom-feeders when it comes to recruiting engineering talent.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.