Tour of Puerta Vallarta

By bluerasberry on 2015-07-13

Puerta Vallarta is a resort town in Mexico. I am in Mexico for the 2015 Wikimania conference. Fabian is joining me for the travel. We left early for tourism and From Friday 10 July – Tuesday 14 we are in Puerta Vallarta.

I knew some about the place before arriving but there was not much of the information I wanted to see available online or in Wikipedia. I knew it was cheap among the resort towns, and that the beaches were nice, and that it is known for being a destination in Mexico hosting both a gay tourism industry and a gay expatriate community. I expected that the tourism industry was underdeveloped in the sense that it would be mostly one-sided – locals wish to provide to tourists, but there is not cultural exchange such that locals understand what tourists want. All of these things are true.

Fabian and I are staying on Amapas Street in an apartment. The place is nice and the rent is cheap, and it is across the street from the beach and in a city block with two vegan restaurants. Eating out here is significantly less expensive than buying groceries in New York, so it is comfortable here on our budget.

One of the vegetarian restaurants, Salud, is owned and managed by someone from Seattle. Willy, the owner, told me that many Seattle people have settled here, which is not surprising to me. He gave us travel suggestions and we planned our days. Our first day we stayed on the beach; the second day we played on the beach and went to some nightclubs; the third day we went to the botanical garden; today we will go to Las Marietas; and tomorrow we will be back on the beach.

The beach is nice. The water is warm. We are here in the off-season, with winter being high season, and there are hardly people anywhere.

We are staying in the gay district, which is near Los Muertos Playa (Dead Man’s Beach). Within a 10 minute walk there are maybe 15 stores selling tiny swimsuits and underwear, with about half of those also selling bongs and lube and a few also selling meth and crack pipes. There are pharmacies around the neighborhood advertising to tourists that they sell, without a prescription, xanax, anabolic steroids, viagra, and amoxicilin. Girls swimsuits are available on the otherside of a river into downtown, which also marks the boundary of the gay/straight area. We went to a couple of nightclubs. One had gogo boys and at the other there was a drag performance. During the drag performance there was a call for birthdays and everyone with a birthday came on stage at the bar. The hostess asked everyone who had a birthday (about 10 people) to announce to the bar their preference for being activo or passivo, the Spanish terms for top or bottom, then sent them back to the crowd. We met a guy at the bar who was at the end of his career in business in the United States and had just a few days before purchased a condo near the club. He was going to rent it to tourists for a few years until he retired, then he planned to live here. He told us he paid USD 250,000 for a nice 2-bedroom condo, and said that this was a typical price for a nice enough place with a beach view in the gay neighborhood in a condo with reliable services.

Near the bars there is a bathhouse and a place called Pinata PV. I did not notice Pinata the night we went out, but the next morning, Fabian and I were at a coffeehouse on the way to catch a bus to the botanical garden and we met this couple, Ron and David, who operate Pinata. Pinata is a building with a juice bar on the ground floor, a gym and yoga studio on the next level, then some apartments in the rest of the building. Ron and David were Americans who are here long term supporting the gay community. They provide apartments only to gay guys, and especially guys who are here providing gay services like tourism, yoga, or performance at the clubs. They also talked about real estate and a trend for gay guys to live in Puerta Vallarta and suggested that it could be a nice place to live for anyone who could work remotely. I thought that sounded like a nice idea for me.

Fabian and I took a local bus to the Vallarta Botanical Gardens. The bus leaves just a few blocks from the gay nightclubs. The road is bumpy and the bus bounces a lot anyway by design. When we got to the garden we found that it seemed more like a jungle with hiking trials. We went to the river which is narrow and shallow but has a fast enough current to be too much to swim in the middle, and is filled with rocks and little waterfalls. We were told that it was a good place to swim naked so we played like Mowgli in the jungle for most of the day, then hiked in the shade of the jungle seeing big lizards and hearing birds everywhere and seeing strange plants and flowers. We had to climb a bit in some places even on the trails. It seemed like rain so we started walking back to the visitor center and restaurant. On our way back the rain cam suddenly and hard so we were completely wet and though we had been sweating from heat now we were shivering in the cold.

The director of the garden was there and I mentioned to him that I wanted to talk about Wikipedia with him. He was an American from Georgia named Bob Pierce and was friendly, but then as we were eating he came to Fabian and me with his business manager Neil, an American from Pennsylvania. Neil was a casual Wikipedian who already had edited multiple articles and understood Creative Commons licenses, which meant that he understood the most difficult parts of what I routinely teach in my Wikipedia job. He and I talked for a while about the garden collaborating with the Wikipedia community and he proposed multiple options which all demonstrated his understanding of how Wikipedia and online collaboration work. In my opinion, it would be beneficial for the Wikimedia community, the garden, and Puerta Vallarta’s tourism industry if the garden were to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Neil brought his employee, a graphic design intern, to me and said that he also would like to learn Wikipedia. This person, Gerardo, was nice and also asked questions. I will be in touch because I never expect to meet people who are already well placed in an institution like this with such opportunity and who have strong interest in Wikipedia. It was fortunate that we met each other.

We took the bus back to town on the way back and the bus driver neglected to stop for one of the huge speed bumps. We were sitting in the back where it was the bumpiest and were thrown especially high. The locals did not think this was as funny as we did. I felt a little out of place – for me these things are fun because I can leave at any time.

Today we go to the islands! Right now Wikipedia has none of the strange pictures of this place that I have seen elsewhere on the Internet. I am trying to take more photos and will bring my camera there.

It has been nice to travel with Fabian. Travel introduces stress into any relationship. Fabian and I both travel well but it has been interesting for me to see how he handles stress. In New York I rarely see him out of balance unless we are debating social issues. He has the disposition of a night club host who brings contentment into any situation. In New York he was a bit worried about getting to the airport on time, when I was much later than he wished to be. He worried about the connecting flight from Mexico City to Puerta Vallarta, because I booked the flights through different services to be perhaps closer together than any one service would recommend. In Puerta Vallarta he is not quick to calculate exchange rates to think about the prices of things, and wonders about money on the principle of the issue. I am more comfortable with this. Fabian knows every street in Manhattan well and the location of every subway, but he gets lost around the little gay district here and does not recognize street names or landmarks. Part of the reason for these things is that Fabian in his past has traveled in the manner of a different social class, and especially in a place like Puerta Vallarta, might without me have had a more guided experience. I enjoy a cheaper sort of living and have enjoyed seeing how he reacts to things being a little dirty here. It has been fun.

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Class struggle and the July 2015 reddit Blackout

By bluerasberry on 2015-07-05

As a paid professional who is employed to encourage volunteers to donate their labor so that Wikipedia can be developed with their crowdsourcing, I feel that I have expert insight into the relationship between staff and volunteers in online collaboration. This is a niche field and the relationships between staff and volunteers are broadly misunderstood, because there is little precedent in any community, company, or social organization in which these kinds of relationships can exist. In the case of Wikipedia, or in the reddit (spelled “r”) case on which I am about to comment, the nature of the relationship is as follows: there is a media outlet which is a valuable resource, either Wikipedia the encyclopedia or reddit the community discussion forum, which came to be popular. Its popularity could not have been predicted, and its “creators” were less architects of success than among the thousands of bright minds who had the same ideas simultaneously but distinguished themselves because they actually had the capital to invest in an attempt to develop the idea as a website. Reddit was among the first popular instances of its founding idea to work, even though obviously it is built from close ideas and even took its community from other similar projects. At present Reddit and other similar crowdsourced media outlets exist as places which a community of volunteers indisputably contributes not less than 99% of the value, work, and success of the projects, and paid staff who somehow receive pay associated with the project might guide the community a bit in some directions but overall, the success of the website is the result of the community’s presence. No valuable patents, unique resources, or special insight are offered by the website or staff hosting the community, except that the host has an attractive brand and attractive real estate where people are currently meeting.

It is nice when the people who get the majority of benefits from this arrangement – the website hosts – acknowledge that their success in life is because a lot of volunteers donate their labor to the enrichment of their hosts. In the case of Wikipedia, this acknowledgement is made with gestures including Wikipedia’s nonprofit status, the staff taking salaries lower than they might get at commercial companies, having half the board of trustees elected by the community, and making staff of the Wikimedia Foundation available as targets to be terrorized by loony Wikipedia community volunteers in all sorts of absurd and unreasonable ways. All of these things are friendly deprecating signs of submission on the part of the paid staff to the community of volunteers, and do a little to make up for the unfairness that all contributors to Wikimedia projects (staff and volunteer) experience in all that they do.

In the case of reddit, a commercial enterprise of Conde Nast and some very wealthy Internet entrepreneurs, there is heightened tension because the staff at reddit does less kowtowing. Reddit is a cheap platform and yet one of the most successful media channels in history in terms of audience size, audience engagement, and ability to attract star talent to provide media content. It is not entirely true to say that the creators, founders, and developers of reddit contributed nothing to its success, but it is mostly true. Some credit for reddit’s creation and success should go to Aaron Swartz, because he is the person who most understood, embodied, and stood for the rights of community volunteers when no one else associated with the website is really associated with that kind of spirit. I am not sure how much of his values became a part of reddit – maybe they were, or maybe reddit is just a business that he touched.

Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter) used to be associated with reddit, she had that Aaron Swartz spirit, and she advocated for reddit community interests. She was fired from her position 2 July, and in response, the volunteer moderators of reddit shut down most of reddit 3 July. Already I am saying something that few traditional media outlets could understand, and I am not going to explain all of reddit here, but to summarize: reddit’s content is presented by volunteers and some of the forums published in reddit have millions of subscribers and tens of millions of daily readers, and could be shut down at any time by certain volunteer contributors who operate semi-anonymously in their free time for fun. Outsiders might not understand what is happening here, because they might not understand the nature of the relationship between paid staff and volunteers in community crowdsourcing projects, but this sort of situation is nature to me because I get paid to do Wikipedia. I hardly knew Victoria, and I do not know other reddit staff, but I know Wikipedia and I know these kinds of relationships as well as anyone else. I read the sources covering the reddit blackout. The New York Times, Forbes, BBC, Hindustan Times, Gawker, Gizmodo, and as best as I can tell with translators Le Monde, Die Zeit, and Italian, Vietnamese, Spanish, and other language news outlets are all saying the same things and missing the point of the blackout. They fail to cover the issue because they preferentially report comments from reddit’s paid staff and less understand what the volunteers are doing, because in a crowdsourced semi-anonymous volunteer community there is no spokesperson or leader to consult for a news comment. The reason for the blackout was not Victoria’s firing, but that reddit fired the only employee they had who advocated for the community of volunteers and directly brought benefits to the volunteer community. This happened in the context of all other reddit staff continually seeking short-term business advancement even when it increased the work burden on the volunteers who contribute all the work that makes reddit successful. The community went really wild when Alexis, an executive at reddit, insulted the volunteers for complaining even while expecting them to continue to donate their time.

Victoria’s job was to facilitate AMA interviews. “AMA” means “ask me anything”, and the interviews take the format where someone says “I am (whoever), AMA”. The two most popular interviews reddit hosted were Barack Obama and an interview of a guy with two penises. Beyond that, I think the majority of newsworthy English-speaking celebrities have presented on reddit in the past few years. Professionals in all fields even when not celebrities have also presented on reddit, for example, when any science discovery is made often that will get a 1-minute mention on mainstream news or a paragraph in a newspaper but then the scientist will come to reddit and talk for hours answering every question asked and creating a public record of comments. Victoria’s particular role in this included that she would verify the identity of the interviewee – this sounds trivial, but is actually a real pain for volunteers and a huge help that often means the difference between having the interview or not. For big celebrities, she would also manage the interview by being on hand for technical support, or sometimes even reading questions and typing their responses so that they would not need to learn the reddit interface. As a special benefit to reddit’s moderators, she would also provide audience and impact metrics. I support Victoria because she is such a big help to /u/nallen (Nate), a moderator of /r/science who for years has brought a scientist to give an AMA every day. Nate is one of the greatest interviewers ever and one of the most important journalists ever, even though he does nothing more than facilitate a crowdsourced conversation and not actually do journalism or interviews himself. The body of interviews which he has produced is a treasure of civilization. Whenever a science story is published in academic journals, and when it is hot, he invites the scientist to reddit to present their research. The record of conversation that is created is one of the most amazing scientific and cultural outputs ever in any context and is unprecedented in its scope, candor, accessibility, and level of engagement between professional scientists and the general public. Victoria used to provide Nate with the metrics that he used as evidence to convince scientists that giving presentations in reddit was a legitimate way to bring scientific discourse to the public. Nate probably has facilitated more and deeper conversations between scientists and the public than anyone else, and he has done it as a volunteer. Just like everyone else on reddit, Nate depends on other people who volunteer their labor in giving and participating in discussions, but Nate is a volunteer in facilitating these things, and considering that reddit makes a lot of money because it hosts content like this it is nice when reddit makes investments in the infrastructure which allows Nate to proceed with his activities with minimal hassle. When reddit fired Victoria, they disrupted Nate’s routine activities on reddit and left him in a state of uncertainty about whether he would get the support he needed to do his routine. Nate was just one reddit volunteer contributor of many who depended on Victoria as a cornerstone of community support. He only needs a light touch and a little help in some places, only a fraction of Victoria’s working time, but with that little support he has been able to encourage great things that were much bigger than what any individual could have produced.

The most hurtful part of Victoria’s firing was that it was done with malice to reddit’s community of volunteers. When she was fired, it was under reddit staff presumption that her role in reddit’s workings were insignificant to reddit’s success, because more pointedly, the reddit staff had the assumption that that reddit’s volunteer contributions were insignificant to reddit’s success and therefore did not need staff support. The core premise was that reddit was successful because of the assets held by it as a commercial entity, and because of the merits of its paid staff, and that the volunteer community contributed their labor and volunteer time to reddit because they recognized reddit as a superior and worthy recipient for their free labor and time. Reddit staff presumed that volunteers were expendable and could be perpetually recruited from a limitless pool, so they need not show respect to the volunteers. These are mistaken notions and the height of hubris and arrogance; the reality is that the community of contributors to reddit would much prefer that any nonprofit entity duplicate what reddit does and present the same location that reddit does but in a more ethical and less exploitative way.

At Victoria’s firing, there were immediate objections from people who had AMA interviews scheduled. They were profoundly disrupted and given no recourse from reddit staff, which was confusing because a lot of community volunteers were depending on the interviews going forward. This confusion could have been prevented by any reddit staff taking the time to assume Victoria’s duties and assist the volunteers in doing their interviews. This could have been 3-4 hours of labor, at most, but it was not offered by reddit staff. When the volunteer moderators realized that their volunteer participation was being disrupted over reddit staffs’ petty refusal to help them with their interviews, they became indignant that a wealthy commercial enterprise like reddit would fail to acknowledge the routine needs of its most committed and generous contributors. The situation became more intense when innocently, Victoria offered to help the volunteers in a volunteer role herself – she was fired, but still could donate her time for reddit like anyone else, and was going to do some of what was formerly her paid work duties as a community member until reddit corporate sorted out a paid staff replacement for her.

One of reddit’s founders then began to insult reddit’s moderators, which are key volunteers on the website. They manage the workings of individual subreddits (forums) and sometimes take on roles of community leaders. Alexis Ohanian said several rude things, but the triggering phrase was “popcorn tastes good”.

screencap of a reddit conversation

Alexis Ohanian says “popcorn tastes good” with intent to insult reddit’s volunteers for participating in the website

He said this when one of the moderators closed a subreddit, knowing that the moderator had closed it in response to Victoria being fired without respect for the community volunteers who needed Victoria to help with their routine volunteering. Victoria could have been fired with someone else filling in with her, and if that had happened, there would have been no protest. If no one was available to fill in for her, then at least reddit staff could have avoided conflict by saying, “Thanks for being moderators. I am sorry that we are unable to provide support for you now. We will replace Victoria as soon as possible so that you can have good assistance. Sorry for the inconvenience.” Instead, Alexis immediately turned blame on the volunteer moderators by saying it was unfortunate that they began to protest. It is unprecedented on reddit for there to be mass protests, and he trivialized the feedback he was getting that volunteers were being hurt by his actions. When he said “popcorn tastes good”, he meant that he acknowledged that reddit volunteers did all the labor that made him a multimillionaire, and that he knew that firing Victoria harmed these volunteers by burdening them all with a lot more volunteer work than they wished to commit to do, and that it embarrassed the volunteers in the eyes of the audience that read their content and the interviewees that were appearing that day to speak, and that the unnecessary pain that the volunteers were experiencing as they labored for his enrichment was so futile and seemed so entertaining to him that he intended to eat popcorn while listening to their cries, much as he would eat popcorn during an entertaining movie. It was like saying “let them eat cake.” The reddit community wanted him dismissed for being so ungrateful, and with CEO Ellen Pao defending and condoning his behavior, the reddit community sees both of these as traitors to community goodwill. There is never a good reason in crowdsourcing to ridicule the volunteers for contributing constructively to the project, and treating them as fools for volunteering to develop your product. Many volunteers felt a very personal offense to this. The emotion would be comparable to having a demographic called with an insulting epithet based on race or gender or sexuality or other hot social issue – what happened was felt as the maximal dehumanizing insult. Forgiveness could come, but the price would be a sincere apology and something on the order of a public commitment to attend 1-2 years of weekly anger management classes and therapy along with public speaking in opposition to harassment and discrimination.

What happened was a class struggle, in which wealthy people who had been made rich because of volunteer donations spoke badly of their donors. They acted like slaveholders, because it is human instinct that when people get extremely wealthy they start to think that they are better than the people who serve them, and start to imagine that those in their service respect their lordship. In the case of reddit, the servants (volunteer contributors) are much less bound to their masters (reddit staff), and much more able to voice resentment. Reddit staff were not at the focus of reddit’s money because of their own merit or hard work, but because they were in the right place at the right time to benefit from community volunteer labor. The people with money were very proud of themselves, which was permissible, but they crossed the line when they started to insult the people who voluntarily served them. In The New York Times, CEO Pao says, “the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours”. That vocal minority are the moderators who facilitate most of the content contribution, and not the readers who just enjoy the benefits. She also said, “We should have informed our community moderators about the transition and worked through it with them” – this is not sincere. The firing of Victoria was not the major issue – the major issue was that Alexis as executive staff did the firing while taunting the community that because they are less empowered individuals, reddit’s volunteers would willingly humiliate themselves by tolerating the hostile treatment of wealthy reddit staff.

It is very sad when rich people leverage their wealth to position themselves to harm less fortunate people. I started the Wikipedia article “Victoria Taylor” because contributing to Wikipedia is what I do when I feel like sharing information and I feel that it complies with Wikipedia’s inclusion guidelines.

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Reflections on health media and Consumer Reports at the Spotlight Health 2015

By bluerasberry on 2015-06-28

I attended Aspen Ideas Festival Spotlight Health from Thursday 25 June – Sunday 28 June. It was educational, pleasant, and insightful for me.

The most striking characteristic of this conference to me was the frequent talk of entrepreneurship and market forces. In most of the conferences which I attend there is a lot of community participation, whereas the attendee roster for this conference was mostly innovators and policymakers. I was able to attend because Consumer Reports was a sponsor of the conference. I asked how we had the money for this, because sponsorship is expensive. Consumer Reports got a deal because it is a nonprofit organization with a nice reputation and expertise closely related to many of the talks of this year’s programming.

In the talks, speakers frequently referred to addressing social determinants of disease as a way to improve health. Providing health care to people who need treatment is expensive and complicated, but if certain social issues can be addressed, then fewer people will need health care and when they get it, they can have better outcomes. Some social determinants of a person’s health include poverty status, having access to whatever health information is necessary to make health decisions, and having whatever is necessary to encourage a person to eat a healthy diet and exercise. Consumer Reports frequently talks about these things and tries to empower layman consumers to recognize when they can make health care decisions with their doctors, and I was pleased to hear in several talks the speakers spoke the ideas which Consumer Reports promotes. Sometimes inside Consumer Reports I wonder how aligned we are with popular thought in the consumer, health care, government, and nonprofit sectors. It made me feel proud to come to this event where everyone was representing the ideas of whatever organization was backing them, and they were saying the things that Consumer Reports has been saying. I read as much as I can in health policy and education, and I know that Consumer Reports routinely adopts advocacy positions before they are popular. I like getting the feedback that Consumer Reports’ campaigns are at the start of social trends.

a row of people sitting on a stage

Panel titled “Getting it right: Health in the Media” at Spotlight Health Aspen Ideas Festival 2015. From left to right Jackie Judd, Jason Beaubien, Jonathan LaPook, Neal Baer, Joanne Kenen, and Sarah Kliff


There was a panel called “Getting it Right: Health in the Media”. Participants in the panel were some popular health care journalists from respectable organizations. Everyone on the panel does terrific work in their media channels and ought to be praised. What surprised me is how fragile their legitimacy is. I supposed that the best health care journalists are well backed with resources for fact checking and access to expert views. Definitely everyone on the panel had access to a lot of resources, but I was struck to learn that they did not have as much support as I imagined. I imagined that leading health care writers did perfect work, and now that I think about it, of course they cannot. They have deadlines, they have big social networks but still not perfect connections to everyone, they have to prioritize their energy, and they rely a lot on their own journalistic instincts as all journalists do. Since moving to New York and meeting so many people in media I have gained a new respect for journalism as a profession, because journalists really can acquire the skill to do something magic to write about the heart of an issue even if they themselves are much less knowledgeable about the issue as the people engaged in it. These journalists are not doctors, but they interview doctors and somehow report the health issues in a better way than doctors could. Still – they talked about how sometimes they get their information from chance encounters or sometimes they get things wrong because it is the nature of journalists to consume information around them and report it as best they can, even if it is not perfect. This made me think about the health journalism process at Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports is in a privileged place in its reporting because I know now that we have much better access to fact checking, expert opinions, and the time to get things right before making our reports. Some of the people on this panel were backed by very big companies or organizations – I did not until now realize that Consumer Reports’ prioritization of accuracy is unusual and not the norm. It also makes me wonder if Consumer Reports ought to be spending extra resources for extra accuracy – to give example numbers, should we pay for expensive 98% accuracy when other media outlets seem to have happy audiences for their 80-90% accurate content which is less expensive. Do we really get that much extra accuracy from all the extra fact checking that we do, or is a good try from a health journalist enough to replace on-hand advice from actual physicians?

In any case, I was surprised to hear that many health journalists are not better supported with resources, and that Consumer Reports is actually very well equipped. Being at Consumer Reports and not knowing anything else, I had not realized how different we were. I could be mistaken about the actual difference in accuracy, but I think I am not, because they reported a difference in quality control. I will have to think about what they said.

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Lazy workers in Aspen

By bluerasberry on 2015-06-28

The “Aspen Ideas Festival Spotlight Health” conference is over. It is late Sunday afternoon and I am having tea at a restaurant listening into the conversation at a table nearby. A table of four people are talking about how their employees fake job injuries so that they can get payments from employers while enjoying time being lazy when they ought to be working. The consensus at the table is that laborers are sneaky thieving cheats and that employers are continually the victims of fraud and conspiracies of employees. The nature of the cheating may be completely fabricated injuries or can be actual broken bones or serious injuries which are less fake but then the lazy employees take extra time in recovery. They are saying that employees who can sit on a couch at home can sit around at work, even if they are injured. They are saying that the law favors cheating employees over honest employers. They are saying that a good way to defend oneself is to hire a lawyer to request papers from lazy fake injury workers because employees are too stupid to be able to complete papers – they say nothing about the power differential of them having lawyers and the laborers presumably not having them. When an employee gets an

I have been listening to this for about 30 minutes and all four people at the table continually say how awful workers are.

Aspen is one of the most expensive places to live. The people here are either rich or they are here to serve the rich – there is no industry or work here except to serve the people who are passing time in leisure. The Aspen Institute hosts a conference, but with tickets being $2500 for their main 3-day event, it is an exclusive gathering for select people. I attended a less expensive pre-conference for people in health policy, but still, it was a luxurious conference.

It is beautiful here for sure and the weather is nice.

I dislike the attitude that the rich sometimes have when they spend time in isolation among themselves and come to resent people without money. I favor government infrastructure which promotes equality of wealth distribution such that at least everyone’s basic needs are met.

I do not recognize a tendency of workers to fake injuries. I feel that human nature is to take pride in one’s work and to be productive when their needs are met and they feel secure in their lives. I feel like it is the duty of people with money to promote health and well-being among those whom they employ, and for so long as poverty and ill-health exists, it is the responsibility of the government and regulators to be more aggressive in taking wealth from the rich to uplift the status of their workers.

People who are able to live in Aspen and employ workers are elite and wealthy. They ought not be in conflict with workers at all. I dislike that inequality has made some rich people antagonistic toward people with less means.

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Talking about antibiotic resistant superbugs at Aspen Ideas Festival 2015

By bluerasberry on 2015-06-24

Right now I am on a plane from New York to Colorado going to the Aspen Ideas Festival Spotlight Health, which is a medical spin off of the Aspen Institute conference. A team of us from Consumer Reports are coordinated to present and promote some Consumer Reports projects, including education about unnecessary health care and especially on preventing the development of bacterial “superbugs”. A superbug is bacteria which is antibiotic resistant. Consumer Reports has three major complaints about the use of antibiotics: in routine family health practice, physicians provide antibiotics to patients when they are not indicated; in livestock industry, the meat industry feeds huge amounts of antibiotics to livestock to boost meat production; and in the pharmaceutical industry, the company leaders who ought to be stewards for protecting antibiotics instead deny responsibility and maliciously promote the use of antibiotics in circumstances in which everyone agrees that they ought not be used for the sake of meager short term profit. In the short term, Consumer Reports is concerned with restricting the use of antibiotics by individual consumers to whenever there is a medical indication for them to use them; in other words, antibiotics should be used when a family doctor knows that they should be used. In the longer term Consumer Reports is concerned with curbing the evolution of superbugs, which are brought into existence by patient overuse and use in meat production. This is a big issue for me and I have come to have personal concern about this, even though I remember 1-2 years ago when this issue was presented to me I did not feel as strongly.

At Consumer Reports I am employed to share information on Wikipedia. The nonprofit mission of Consumer Reports is to empower the public to make informed decisions in the marketplace. Coming here from Seattle I already had adopted the relatively unusual perspectives of Cascadia activist culture. After having lived in New York, I have become aware that in the Pacific Northwest more people have time and interest to consider the relationship between individuals and corporations, and how when individuals and businesses have differing goals each one wants their own benefit. This is a trivial notion, but in practice has complicated implications in that the public creates an environment in which business is supposed to operate to benefit the world, but actually businesses frequently behave badly to their own end. There is a range of political discussion about the best way to govern society and the marketplace, and the problem which I address in my work is how to most efficiently deliver information so that better and more production discussion can happen among the public for the benefit of individuals whenever a business is promoting a product or service which is not good for a consumer to purchase.

In a capitalist marketplace the market will correct itself so that the best value products and services become more common. The problem is that this takes time, and as the products and services being offered continually change, corporations continually make offerings which no one should take. Corporations are aware that they do this, but because they have invested capital in outdated systems, they are entrenched in sustaining outdated marketplaces which harm all consumers and they invest in advertising and propaganda to manipulate consumer demand with intent to harm the public in exchange for profit and the promise of continued dominance in the marketplace.

I regret that in the case of misuse of antibiotics, too much of the blame is placed on consumers, when I feel that the responsibility for addressing the problem should more heavily lie on the more powerful and informed players in the chain of antibiotics delivery. The chain is pharma companies and government regulation at the top, then branches to livestock production on to consumers who eat meat, and in another branch to doctors on to consumers of personal antibiotics.

Most of the narrative about antibiotics in the meat industry is that consumers need meat and livestock producers should serve this consumer demand. All things being equal, I would leave this sector to its own, but actually, there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that antibiotic use in livestock production is quickly (over 40 years or so) producing superbugs. The financial value of the entire meat industry is relatively small compared to the global healthcare value of antibiotics in health care, and the cost of producing new antibiotics is extremely high and not an option, so I feel that the economic value of protecting antibiotics outweighs the financial interest of the meat sector. I see it as a natural conclusion that antibiotic use should be regulated in the meat industry because there is no reason to expect that any market forces in that industry would make the stakeholders in that industry examine their impact on the domestic and global health market. The routine and intensive use of antibiotics in livestock production is not a sustainable practice. 70% of all antibiotics are used in meat production. The antibiotics are fed to healthy animals as a growth stimulant and as a counter to the diseases which breed in cheap, filthy conditions. Antibiotic use needs to be curbed in this sector. As an alternative, animals can take longer to grow naturally, they can be given more space and cleaner living conditions, and the price of meat can go up. I think that the public would enjoy learning more about antibiotic use in meat production and not enough media resources are presenting this social issue to people who wish to learn more about it.

In personal health care, Consumer Reports has campaigned that patients talk more with doctors about whether they really need antibiotics, and for doctors to not prescribe antibiotics when they know that they are not supposed to do this. There is a problem that patients perceive antibiotics to be safe and without side effects, when actually they carry risks which are uncommon in individuals but within society happen a lot because antibiotics are cheap and commonly prescribed. When patients have health problems which would not be improved with antibiotic treatment, they often still want antibiotics, and many doctors are comfortable giving antibiotics to patients because when they do not, that makes patients unhappy. The global effect of this is that excessive use of antibiotics creates or at least speeds the diminished efficacy of antibiotics.

We have been talking about how to explain antibiotic resistance more effectively to the public. It is a concept which a person has to consider for a while, and when they understand it, they begin to take it for granted. If I were to explain it I would say “evolution based on LD-50 natural selection” but I am not sure that is effective to create passion in others like I have it.

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Vegan philosophy and The Seed 2015

By bluerasberry on 2015-06-22

On June 20 I went to a conference in New York called The Seed. It is organized by a consortium of activists and nonprofit organizations who promote the vegan lifestyle, and this annual conference is a special event to complement a monthly vegan market and meetup which they group also hosts. At their events they have caterers selling vegan food, and educators sharing vegan philosophy, and then physicians talking about diet and health. Doctors who publish books and papers like Neal Barnard and T Campbell present at these events. When I go I feel humbled that so many people are so eager to ask for health information, because I hear them asking for the kind of information which I share with Consumer Reports. It makes me a little sad that so many people seem so eager to ask questions about their health, and it seems so awkward to me that the doctors who present at these things have the public asking them intimate questions about health problems that one would only wish people would have time to discuss with their personal physician.

At The Seed the focus is on people avoiding the consumption of animal products for a range of reasons especially on the basis of compassion for animals, but in the health talks, the conversation turns to avoiding eating animal products for personal health reasons. Doctors will say there that patients present with health problems, and the problem is caused by eating animal products, and by switching to a vegan diet the person’s condition improves.

I have looked at these issues on Wikipedia, and I know that Wikipedia articles on diet and nutrition are among the more popularly consulted health topics. People have a lot of questions in this space and there are not ready answers. There are a range of reasons why there is not good information. In my opinion, a major contributing factor in the lack of good information in this space the tendency of grassroots nonprofit activists to conflate a range of ideas and lower the respectability of all of a set of differing social movements such that the worst aspects of each one tend to taint all of the others.

As an example, there is an organization called PETA which seeks to promote compassion for animals. PETA was founded in ??? and has a public image for doing shocking things, including showing gruesome pictures of industrial animal processing, running a campaign called “I would rather be naked than wear fur”, and encouraging its activists to throw red paint as a representation of blood on wealthy people who wear luxury furs. Nowadays all of these behaviors are just considered to be expected behavior from PETA. From one perspective PETA has a victory because their brand and mission is known and people are broadly aware of their positions. From another perspective, PETA’s brand influences all conversation on the use of animal products, and people who wish to share any opinion on consuming animal products will be judged based on the public perception of PETA.

It might be fair to say that PETA is the leading promoter of the vegan diet in the United States. Because of this, PETA led the narrative of activism for the vegan diet to focus on compassion for the feelings of animals. That is a worthy cause, but it is not a convincing justification to all people, and in my opinion, not the most persuasive justification. Other reasons for promoting a vegan lifestyle include environmental conservation; reduction of global resource consumption; protection of antibiotics as livestock production increases antibiotic resistance; social equality in that in unregulated market, meat is a luxury product and ought to be more expensive than vegetables; and personal health.

After reading what I can in the medical literature I am not convinced that eating animal products is unhealthy, especially in moderation. I am more convinced that almost no one who eats animal products does so in moderation, so the idea that meat and animal products is healthy is more of a theory than something that is practical to live. I think that people who had their diets managed by a dietician could eat meat and be healthy, but in the United States, consumption of animal products seems to me to be the most obvious cause of obesity and obesity is the most serious health problem in the United States. From my perspective, the best reason for an individual to adopt a vegan philosophy is because by being conscious that eating more plant based food is the easiest way to avoid eating too many calories. Of course in this scheme, there is the problem that vegan food offerings in the marketplace are trending to become increasingly unhealthy. The most common vegan diet includes too much oil, too much sugar, and a lot of processed food with little nutrition. Still, I think the vegan philosophy is the most likely path to raising consciousness about obesity, protecting the health of individuals, and increasing public health by overall encouraging societal weight loss. It is wonderful that we live in a time when people have enough to eat and I recognize that we got to this point because in the past, there was a healthy way to consume animal products and it was in a more ethical context without industrial animal production.

A second argument which makes me support a vegan lifestyle is that industrial livestock production creates antibiotic resistant superbacteria, or “superbugs”. Almost all antibiotics are created and sold to be fed to animals because they boost meat production. For well-understood reasons in the theory of antibiotic resistance, this leads to bacteria evolving to become resistant to those antibiotics. The bacteria that become resistant in this way then can infect humans, and subsequently, the cheap and safe medicines which used to treat humans are becoming less effective. It is extremely expensive to develop new antibiotics and we need to protect the ones we have. Future generations will despair at how casually we mistreated our antibiotics through meat production, and good stewardship of antibiotics means that it is profoundly unethical for pharmaceutical companies to produce antibiotics for the purpose of providing them to industrial meat production.

While editing Wikipedia I have done my best to find apologies or explanations from either the pharmaceutical industry or the meat production industry about how they justify the intensive use of antibiotics in meat production. So far as I have been able to determine in searching Google, Google Scholar, PubMed, books on Amazon, and meat industry trade group websites, there is no published statement anywhere by anyone that the use of antibiotics in meat production is a sustainable practice. There are many prominent scientists which call for stopping this kind of use. Based on all the information I have been able to find, the driving force behind continued use is that the pharmaceutical industry does not feel responsible for regulating how antibiotics are used and simply seeks to provide them to meet market demand. On the meat industry side, they are concerned by profit, which is regrettable because meat production is not a high profit market sector for investors and not a high value market sector for consumers. The meat industry in the United States is heavily subsidized in a range of ways because of legacy lobbying from a time when Americans wanted greater food security. Nowadays there is enough food generally but not enough healthy food, and having inexpensive meat on the market causes strange market pressure in which animal products, although resource intensive to produce and unhealthy to eat in large quantities, is affordable in the marketplace to the poor; while vegetables, although less resource intensive to produce and healthy to be diet staples, are relatively expensive and even a financial burden for the middle class to consistently have.

I would like farming subsidy law at the government level to be reformed to reduce tax breaks for the production of animal products. I think this should be done with intent to improve the health of individuals by overall allowing the free market to decide the price of animal products, probably leading to a doubling of the price of meat, dairy, eggs, and fish. It should also be done to be mindful of protecting antibiotics. If the prices of animal products rise then I think people will naturally reconsider their diets and shift to healthier eating as a response. Farming subsidies can shift to providing more vegetables to more people, and regarding the poor – we have enough wealth in America and beyond to provide everyone with vegetable staples so that everyone should have enough to eat even if they are otherwise in poverty. The changes that big data are bringing to supply chain management ought to bring huge efficiencies in verifying that everyone has enough healthy food to eat.

I regret that PETA’s narrative of animal rights overshadows these arguments. I also think that PETA supporters have a reputation for being an unreasonable fringe, which they really are. PETA makes some indefensible statements, like prohibiting the use of animals in medical research while simultaneously not saying anything reasonable about how medical research can be accomplished without using some animals in testing. I want ethical use of animals in research and compassion for animals. Frankly, animals in research are tortured, and I want them less tortured and treated with respect, and used in a controlled, regulated, and minimal way, but I am not prepared to say that an animal life is equally valued to a human life as PETA’s organization statements say. Medical research cannot be done in computer models or only in humans as it is inconceivable for a range of reasons that medical research could be reasonably effective with any amount of reform, except maybe human slavery and torture of the sort that is currently used on animals. Unethical human research already happens enough.

PETA done an excellent job of making themselves known and most people in the United States who reflect on the use of animal products eventually find PETA educational materials. Most people who continue to reflect on the issue come to the conclusion that PETA is a nutty organization with outdated ideas, but I respect its successful strategy for bringing people into the conversation. Perhaps it is best that PETA attempts to draw people in with unreasonable ideas, and a mark of success for the organization that people consider what they are saying, reject it, then go on to more moderate and practical positions after putting personal thought into the issue.

It intrigues me that there could be such a thing as activist outreach which begins with presenting ideas that necessarily have to be rejected, on the assumption that from that point people will do their own research and come to deeper understanding. Part of the Consumer Reports strategy is to provide enough information on topics to permit people to make informed decisions, ask questions, and do more research as they like. When I share Consumer Reports ideas on Wikipedia, I often find that when I list advocacy perspectives on Wikipedia I am remixing information in ways that neither Consumer Reports nor anyone else is doing.

As an example of this, I develop articles on antibiotic misuse. Consumer Reports advocates that antibiotics use in livestock production is excessive and should be moderated with regulation based on scientific consensus rather than meat industry decision. Consumer Reports takes no position on the vegan diet, but there is overlap in what I heard at this vegan conference and Consumer Reports’ interest in protecting antibiotics.

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Libraries, archives, journals, and access to information.

By bluerasberry on 2015-06-12

I talked with Alex Stinson (user:Sadads on Wikipedia) today about libraries and archives. The context was that Consumer Reports has a light relationship with Kansas State University because their library system holds some archives relating to the Consumer Movement, including Colston Warne‘s papers. I am not going to give context to our conversation, but I wanted to note some of the things we discussed.

The Digital Public Library of America and Europeana are collaborating to produce a white paper on the rights of the public to access their country’s public library holdings. Alex has been commenting on this paper, and he invited me to do so also in a public draft that he shared. I left some little comments. The issues in this statement are mostly concerned with copyright and access, which are the two big issues to address in the library / archive / museum sector. I do not enter discussions about whether content creators acting alone ought to apply free licenses to their work – that is the usual discussion in Wikipedia and the open access spaces – but when content gets to the library to be cataloged, I do worry about that. I wish for libraries to avoid making wild claims of copyright or ownership over their holdings, such as when they digitize public domain papers, and when they produce metadata to sort their holdings then I wish for metadata to be in the public domain or have CC-licensing so that it can connect with an API and be processed and remixed elsewhere. For example, if someone has cataloged some papers, I wish that an API could connect to their search engine so that people do not need to go to their library website to search their holdings, but instead can search through an international aggregator. Alex and I were talking about this in the context of Consumer Reports sending some of its archival materials to Kansas State, or maybe funding Kansas State to develop some of its consumer archives. This was just talk and I have no idea what is feasible. Alex had worked at this library, and I was asking him about how management thought of open licenses. He showed me their institutional repository for research and I was surprised again as I have been so many times before to see how confused professional understanding is of concepts of free licensing and open access. One problem in their repository was that they committed to open access, but at the same time had a list of things that they forbid including remixing the works, copying them in certain ways, and allowing commercial use. They even mentioned supporting the three Bs (Budapest, Berlin, and Bethesda), which are the three short statements which lay the ground for open access and dictate that these kinds of restrictions are opposed to open access.

We talked about BaGLAMa2, a alpha tool which looks at all of the non-text media files in a Wikimedia category and reports the traffic to the Wikipedia articles which contain them. I have long protested that the Wikimedia Foundation is adverse to talking about the traffic which Wikimedia projects get, except that they like to report the bottom line that Wikimedia projects are very popular. Whenever anyone says “Wikipedia is popular in X field” like for medicine, history, politics, or whatever – the staff there is under a range of pressures to avoid promoting that conversation and to stifle it whenever possible. I talked about this a bit before – it is because WMF staff use outsider branding for Wikipedia, and do not like Wikipedia presented alongside traditional social institutions. Anyway, I like BaGLAMa a lot because it demonstrates that if an institution shares its Creative Commons licensed media in Wikimedia projects, then the public will engage with that media.

We talked about the Wikimedia Library, for which Alex works. I said that someone had contacted me about offering subscriptions to a small journal, and he told me how they are still developing processes for promoting the partners who distribute through their subscription distribution service. There is a lot to praise about the Wikipedia Library and a lot to develop also. As with so many successful Wikimedia projects, I perceive the greatest barrier of success for it to be resistance from the Wikimedia Foundation staff. When a community project like this becomes successful it draws more attention and more problems to staff there. Of course they are paid to encourage Wikimedia community success, but as human individuals, they also wish to avoid having increased work burden and responsibility especially when there is no conceivable way that they can manage it.

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Wikipedia article on Jashodaben Narendrabhai Modi – the objections that I expect

By bluerasberry on 2015-06-05

painted portrait of Jashodaben looking forward

spouse of the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi

As I described in another post this month, the Wikipedia article on Jashodaben has been deleted four times already. In another post from September 2014, I discussed some reasons why I support Jashodaben’s demands for recognition as the Spouse of the Prime Minister of India. There is pressure on the Indian media to avoid discussing her, and that pressure ripples from India to all international media coverage, but I am glad that I have Wikipedia as an outlet for organizing what information is available that has come from good journalistic coverage. I am going to describe some reasons why I expect Indian people will object to the existence of a Wikipedia article about Jashodaben. My target audience for this post is people outside of India, who do not understand Indian culture.

  1. The main reason for avoiding discussion of Jashodaben is that there is a taboo in India on discussing relationship problems. There is no concise way to describe this to anyone who is from Western culture and who is not familiar with Indian culture. Some of concepts which both cause this taboo and are a consequence of it are the belief that marriage problems should not be discussed publicly, that shame comes to a woman if she is unhappy in her marriage, that typical people with religious devotion can pass their lifetimes without wanting love or sex, and that divorce or separation need not be addressed because those things require an examination of a relationship. Any Indians who would read what I wrote would not understand anything that I have just said, nor would many Western people, but it is the best way that I know how to express the situation. One thing that would surprise many Western people about India is that there is no concept of relationship counseling in India, and even almost no concept of mental health services. Whereas practically everyone in the Western world either uses mental health services either for themselves or for someone in their family at some time in life, in India, mental and social problems are handled outside the context of health services. It is very hard for Indian people to imagine stress as a health problem, especially if it is stress from a social relationship and even more if it is stress from a romantic or marriage relationship. From a Western perspective, having strangers probe and examine very personal relationships and sex issues is very common in mental health services, and the result is a different concept of freedom of speech and that all people can talk about personal problems much more freely than could happen in India. I am not suggesting that the Western way or the Indian way is better or worse than the other. Probably it is best to say that both systems have benefits and problems for the people in their respective cultures, and it would be good to exchange ideas. My opinion is that the Indian relationship model probably makes society have happier lives but creates very serious problems for a few people who are weak or poor, whereas the Western relationship model has more justice even for weak people but overall makes society more unhappy, paranoid, and confused. All of this explanations are a little confused, but the point is, Indian people do not like public discussion of very personal relationships when in Western society, this is expected.
  2. Another reason which is very important is that there is a taboo in India about having money. Again there is no easy way to explain this to someone who does not already have experience in both Western and Indian culture, but overall, the fantasy in India is that the best way to live is to have a bank balance of zero but to somehow still have comfort and nice things in life. A problem with discussing Jashodaben in Indian society is that Modi is rich and his wife Jashodaben is poor. Anyone outside of India would say “Yes this is completely obvious and no one could possibly argue with that” but then in India practically everyone would argue. Many people would say that Modi is not rich because he has no cash and only owns a small bit of real estate. By his bank account and tax filing he is poor, but at the same time, for decades he has lived a life where people around him provide him with whatever he wants. In Indian thought the sin and evil in money is in touching it, and not in getting the wealth that money can buy, so if a poor person receives expensive gifts then still Indian society would not call them rich. Leaving Modi aside, Jashodaben is very poor. She had a job as a teacher in a village. Now that she is retired, her pension is ?14000/month (USD 200), so when she worked, presumably she made about that much. It is true that many people in India make less money than this, but by any standard, she is poor. To talk about the marriage or Jashodaben and Narendra Modi is also to talk about the money that one has and that the other does not, and how Jashodaben is missing some of the things she needs financially for a happy life. Because there is the strange Indian idea that Modi is not rich, and because there is the strange idea that people do not need money to have fulfilling lives, and because it is absolutely prohibited to talk about family members sharing money, there can be no talk of the financial relationship between Jashodaben and Narendra Modi. From a Western perspective, the thing to do in the case of this relationship is to make a sum of the wealth (not the money) that Modi consumes in a month. This is not less than one crore rupees (150,000 USD per month). Send Jashodaben a fair percentage of this, or otherwise, negotiate a financial settlement with her. A marriage is a social contract, and also in the case of Jashodaben and Narendra it was religious, but also it is a legal and financial agreement and Jashodaben is owed cash money. From an Indian perspective, it is very wrong for a woman to ask for money as a result of a marriage separation or divorce. People would call her greedy or a prostitute or shame her religiously or say any bad thing about her if any Indian woman would ask to talk about separating finances in the way that is common in the Western world. It is a cultural difference.
  3. Most people in India would say that Jashodaben enjoys being alone. This is because in India being celibate is a virtue. People in India presume that other cultures respect celibacy also because the concept is so deep in Indian culture, but from outside India, living a lonely life and not having sex is an unfortunate problem that harms health and does nothing good emotionally or spiritually. Jashodaben has been compared to Yasodhara, the wife Buddha left behind; Ratanawali, the wife Tulsidas left behind. There are a series of women who would be called heros in Indian tradition but who are very unfortunate from a Western perspective Savitri, Shakuntala, and Sita, and commentators have compared Jashodaben to them because all of their circumstances are horrible and Jashodaben is supposed to enjoy her mistreatment and bad luck just like the other women did for the presumed and absent love of their husbands. Also from a Western perspective both Jashodaben and Narendra Modi should be having sex either with each other or with other people or by themselves, because sex is good for physical, mental, and spiritual health. From an Indian society perspective they are too old to think about sex and religious also so the religion has removed sexual desire from them. Only Indian culture would imagine this.
  4. It is only a minor reason to presume that Indian people would object to having access to the story about Jashodaben because of political support for Modi. Modi’s communication team has suppressed information about Jashodaben in various ways, and that should be noted because it has a real effect, but there is no emotional backing to the political barriers in telling this story. The problems are the others described above.
  5. Related to the general suppression of information, there is a bit of troublesome propaganda which Modi’s communication team has told. They frequently call his marriage to Jashodaben a “child marriage“. The idea is that Modi and Jashodaben were married when they were young, and that they are victims of society because this is an outdated practice, and that Modi should not be responsible for the marriage because he entered it as a child. Many people feel that Modi should get pity and that he is a hero for leaving a child marriage. A problem is that none of the media sources say that Modi was 18 years old when he had the wedding, and that they tend to suggest that the marriage was settled when Modi was about 5 years old when the parents first planned the arrangement. No doubt Indian parents put a huge amount of pressure on their children, but still, 18 years old is not a child marriage for Modi. Jashodaben was 15-16 at the marriage and an even bigger burden is on her, because in this part of India, it is socially impossible for a woman to get remarried after she has been married once. Already she was poor, and one parent was dead, then she married Modi at 16, then by the time she was 20 her other parent died and so parents could not even try to arrange another marriage for her even though that would have been very unlikely anyway. 18 years old is old enough to take some responsibility for what you do. If Modi had the courage and “guts” (Indian people often say Modi has guts) to leave his home to pursue a life of service then he should also have the courage to acknowledge his debts and duties. He owes Jashodaben something. In India, duty to parents comes before duty to spouse, but in other places, duty to spouse comes first.
  6. This is hardly a reason, but it is a point that I should make – both Narendra Modi’s supporters and opponents are united in agreeing that information about Jashodaben should not be generally available. Politics in India is important, but cultural practices relating to the treatment of women take precedence over getting votes and political support. There are many things that Narendara Modi’s political opponents could do if they wanted to raise the issue of Narendra’s treatment of Jashodaben as a political fault. I know very well that many politicians have done this a little bit, but as I know Indian politics and media I know that they could have done and said a lot more if they wished to do so. The reason why Narendra’s opponents did not complain more about Jashodaben is because most people in India would agree that the treatment she is getting is fair, so no political scandal can be made of this. If anyone speaks up, it would be have to be on the basis of a concept of justice which does not exist in Indian society.

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Wikipedia article on Jashodaben Narendrabhai Modi – a picture for reuse

By bluerasberry on 2015-06-05

painted portrait of Jashodaben looking forward

spouse of the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi

When a topic is not well covered on Wikipedia, that is often an indication that a topic is not accessible or well covered in available sources on the Internet. When I was developing a draft for a Wikipedia article on Jashodaben I searched for all the information I could find. In November I set a Google alert for “Jashodaben” and got about 50 alerts between then and now. I went deep into Google searching for variations of terms. I searched Bing as well to see if there would be a difference. I checked Google Scholar, Amazon for books, and checked various discussion forums. The most comprehensive sources were easier to find and met all of Wikipedia’s inclusion criteria. Some of the minor sources gave insights which the major sources suggested, but did not explicitly state. An example of a surprise was Modi’s age at the time of his wedding. Practically all sources call the marriage a “child marriage”, which is true, but also Modi was 18 at the time of his wedding. In the context of Indian society an 18-year old is a child and gets zero respect from his parents or anyone else, but considering the international political narrative of Modi being forced into the marriage, the propaganda machines are conscious enough to not highlight that stating Modi’s age would sound strange when the emphasis from his camp is supposed to be on his innocence and ignorance and lack of personal agency. Anyway, the entire story is interesting and has not previously been told anywhere more fully than what I drafted on Wikipedia.

In the course of writing for Wikipedia I came to notice that almost every journalist wanted a picture to present of Jashodaben, but almost always they published low-quality images. Even some reputable news sources seemed to use pictures for which I doubt they had permission to publish. I am not sure how it works when publications use images from other sources, or maybe they got the images from a central authority. In any case, no one had particularly good pictures and most had bad images.

I wanted to make a good picture available online. Getting a photograph of Jashodaben would be difficult or impossible for me because she lived in a village where I would not be able to find an online photographer. Also I read that she has security which are limiting her access to media. I decided to collect all available online pictures and videos of her, take note of particular details of her appearance, and commission an artist to create a portrait of her.
I uploaded the result to Wikimedia Commons and I also listed some of the notes and sources used in the production of the work. I am pleased with the work.

I found an artist to create this through DeviantArt. On that site I searched for yaoi because that genre is familiar to me for gathering a community of artists who make nice portraits at a price point which matches my ability to pay. After seeing yaoi artists at comic conventions for so long, it came to my mind that if an artist in the sector wished to make a portrait for Wikipedia then it would turn out nicely. After checking some artists’ portfolios, I next had to consider who was likely to understand a copyright transfer, because I wanted to be the copyright holder so that I could upload the image to Wikimedia Commons and take responsibility and blame for it. I recommend Kodama Creative as an artist with great communication, an understanding of copyright, and lovely art.

Now the Internet has a picture of Jashodaben that anyone may reuse and republish for any purpose. I hope that other people similarly seek to create other pictures of Jashodaben and share them online and in Wikimedia Commons.

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Wikipedia article on Jashodaben Narendrabhai Modi – previous deletions of topic

By bluerasberry on 2015-06-05

painted portrait of Jashodaben looking forward

spouse of the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi

I have been the primary developer of a Wikipedia article on Jashodaben Narendrabhai Modi, the wife of the prime minister of India. Right now the article does not exist. Soon I will move my draft into Wikipedia’s article space. I anticipate that some people will object.

This article has been deleted in Wikipedia’s review process four times already. The first deletion in 2011 was because of failure to meet Wikipedia’s “general notability guideline” (usually abbreviated to WP:GNG), which is the usual reason that almost any article on Wikipedia would be considered for deletion. In the discussion WP:GNG is not mentioned but as a Wikipedian, I know that this rule was considered because immediately everyone starts discussing secondary criteria for inclusion, which is the extent to which this person’s title grants them a place in Wikipedia. Jashodaben’s title is “Spouse of the Prime Minister of India”, and people say rather arbitrarily that this title does not give WP:INHERITED notability because it is not significant enough. Even in this first discussion though it is apparent that some of the commentators know Jashodaben and are not making this judgment only based on what Wikipedia presents. The deletion nominator says “Claimed spouse (not proven as actual spouse)”, which is contrary to all the available English-language sources and never something that anyone involved in the issue has publicly said. Other people in this discussion support this claim, because there is a public perception in India that Jashodaben is not Modi’s spouse, and that she otherwise some kind of troublemaker. I have never seen any negative treatment of Jashodaben in any news source but I do see it in discussion forums.

The article was recreated some time later and in April 2014 was proposed for deletion again. A little more of the same happens – some doubt about the validity of the marriage, some doubt about whether the title is significant. Both of those points are bunk claims in my opinion but I understand that people might come to them without examining the sources, and especially for as long as the article does not meet WP:GNG. Even by this time the sources cited to back the claims made are weak. Although good sources are available, the Wikipedia article is not sharing them because even Google does not make them easy to find.

The third deletion was in May 2014. Of course the article is being considered more deeply at this time because of the 2014 Indian General Election. This discussion is the first time that someone presents what is by Wikipedia standards enough media coverage to establish WP:GNG. After one user presents a lot of references, another user responds “Which bit of WP:NOTINHERITED don’t you understand? All this coverage is because of her association with Modi.” The tone of this is rude and is an attempt to silence the other person with ridicule, and this kind of behavior is not the norm of what is allowed on Wikipedia. This person goes on to say “You seem to be under the impression that sheer volume of coverage is an argument for notability rather than the reason for the coverage.” This is an unusual argument, because in almost all cases, the volume of coverage is the only consideration for the inclusion of a topic in Wikipedia. There are differing opinions here, but the result is to delete the article, and I agree that it is not completely obvious that the article should remain rather than be deleted.

Throughout all the previous discussions people has said to include information about Jashodaben in the main article on Narendra Modi. Because of that, I made an article called “Marriage of Jashodaben and Narendra Modi”, which was immediately nominated for deletion in November 2014. Again discussion was mixed, with some people saying that the concept meets GNG, and other saying that content like this belongs in a biography rather than split into an article about an event. In retrospect I made a strange move to make a Wikipedia article about the marriage, because this does not happen often in Wikipedia. There might be Wikipedia articles about weddings, but an article about a relationship would be unusual in Wikipedia. Still, the discussion established that people do not want an article about the relationship, and discussion in Narendra Modi’s own biography has said that going into more detail about his marriage in that article would not be appropriate because it would be WP:UNDUE coverage of a relatively small part of his media coverage. Per WP:N, “A topic is presumed to merit an article if: It meets either the general notability guideline below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific guideline listed in the box on the right; and It is not excluded under the ‘What Wikipedia is not policy’.” So now at this point I feel that it is established that this coverage meets WP:GNG. We know that the information about the relationship should not be its own article and should be covered somehow in Modi’s article. Since this is a huge amount of information and beyond what would be merited to include in Modi’s article, I think it is best to give Jashodaben her own article and put all of this content there.

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purpose of this blog

This is Lane Rasberry's personal blog. None of the information on this blog is private, but it is personal and I have not written it with the intent to make it of public general interest. Anyone visiting this site has my permission to use anything they find here for friendly, share-alike purposes.