This is probably the wrong forum. Feel free to move it. I don’t know where to put it.
I know SE in particular has been complained about a lot, and I don’t want to be one of “those” people who has a fault with everything they do, but I have some really valid concerns here, so please listen.
I’m really, really worried about the work that Wikivisual and Seymour Edits have been doing as of late. I’m going to split this into two sections, starting with Wikivisual.
Wikivisual in particular needs
to be told that certain images for disability just can’t be used. I ended up having a panic attack this morning because the new images on Be an Autistic Parent used a blue ribbon for an autism symbol, when blue is known to be associated with Autism Speaks, which is essentially a hate group. ( Boycott Autism Speaks
goes into more detail on that; I don’t have the energy to describe this.) I’ve also seen puzzle pieces being used to symbolize autism, which is also connected to A$. Additionally, things like thumbs-down symbols have been used on articles like Recognize the Signs of Down Syndrome, which are actually still there. My article Cope with Being in a Teen Psychiatric Ward got classed onto the wrong list and ended up with incredibly insensitive (and flat-out frightening) images that I had to remove. I understand that mistakes happen, and I’m willing to accept that my article’s images were an accident, but there comes a point where this becomes ridiculous. How many times do we have to go through getting bad images before the Wikivisual team understands that disabled people do not appreciate when our voices are ignored? There’s so much complaint from the autistic community about the puzzle piece and the color blue, for example. I know Luna’s voiced concerns about these things as well, so I’m not the only one who’s upset.
As for Seymour Edits… I appreciate their attempts to help. Please don’t get me wrong. But when me, and other editors, spend hours putting in our own work that we know from experience will work and is accurate, it’s really disheartening to see it all get destroyed with a SE revision. I brought up my concerns with the SE revisions of Support Your Asexual Partner in another thread (how it basically portrays asexual people as all aromantic, all hating affection, as robotic, and overly focuses on the reader’s feelings when there has to be a balance between the reader’s feelings and their partner’s feelings), and another huge one that really upset me was Get Out of Special Education. I spent several hours on that one to add in my own advice from getting out of special education classes, including things like coping strategies and how to prove that you’re capable of being in normal classes, and when SE did the revision, they removed all of my advice that Anna had to merge back in while she dealt with me ranting about how angry I was that they removed everything I put in. That revision in particular absolutely infuriated me because the SE revision cut down the amount of steps that the student could do in the classroom to three steps
, pretty much all of which were complete crap and had almost nothing to do with actually doing well in the classroom.
I understand that the teams aren’t perfect. I’m not asking for them to be! Far from it. Nobody’s work is perfect, especially on the first go. But when there are members who are repeatedly voicing problems, it’s disheartening (and even frightening) to see bad symbols continuously used for disability. When users take the time to add in their own advice, it’s discouraging to see it get completely destroyed with a SE revision, which sometimes aren’t even accurate. Disability, LGBTQIA+ identity, mental illness, and so forth are already highly stigmatized and misunderstood, and I know wikiHow doesn’t support anti-accepting things! wikiHow is a safe space for many people who aren’t “normal”. So it’s really, really upsetting to see this sort of stuff slipping through the cracks all the time. There’s only so much “slipping through the cracks” before you have to admit that those aren’t cracks, that’s a hole in the wall.
I’m just asking for something to change. For Wikivisual to have a list of things that they shouldn’t use on more serious subjects. For SE to build off of what’s already in articles they revise, rather than just destroying the entire thing and sometimes communicating misinformation. As an autistic, trans, bisexual youth, wikiHow is my safe space; when stuff like this gets through and I or any other user who’s directly affected by that sort of thing is the one to see it, that’s upsetting. It’s worse than upsetting, but I don’t know how else to describe it.
Writing this has seriously made me feel bad, so I probably sound like an overdramatic whiny kid who’s overreacting to this. Nobody probably even cares anymore. But I just want the teams to work with us here!
