User:Larataguera

SEMI-RETIRED

This user is no longer very active on Wikipedia.

I edited broadly for clear and concise style, and for WP:overlink. There are always too many words, and usually too many blue ones.

Most of my contributions are found in the intersection between human rights and the environment.

I found that my work on Wikipedia was seriously hampered by missing information about the Global South and indigenous people in the Global North. I did a study about systematic bias on environmental justice related articles, and I once maintained a list of needed articles.

I don't intend to make future mainspace edits, but I will keep an eye on my talk page for a while to answer questions about any articles I've worked on should they arise.

Some of my work

I did a lot of work on, (in no particular order): Navajo water rights; Electric vehicle supply chain; Kabwe mine ; Man camp; Mirador mine; Recognition justice; Dolores mine; Environmental defender; Arun gas field; Kenticha mine; Lega Dembi Mine; Blockadia; Pueblo Viejo mine; Akyem mine; Rennell Island bauxite mine; Road allowance community; Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador; Environmental justice; Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People; Grassy Narrows road blockade; Mutanda mine; Kamoto mine; Fenix Nickel Project, a few others

I organised some content about environmental conflicts at Template:Environmental justice; in List of environmental conflicts and in Category:Environmental justice.

Systemic bias

My primary area of interest is environmental conflict. Worldwide, thousands of environmental conflicts affect hundreds of millions of people (and if we include climate-related conflicts, the number is easily in the billions). About 12.6 million people are killed every year by their environment; and yet, coverage of these conflicts on Wikipedia is extremely poor. This is clearly a failure to meet WP:NPOV policy.

Dozens of studies have confirmed the presence of systemic bias on Wikipedia, and there have been no educated arguments that dispute this bias.

What it looks like

In the context of environmental justice, systemic bias means that perspectives belonging to those who benefit from harm to the environment are much more represented than perspectives belonging to those that bear the costs of environmental degradation.

One example

For example the infobox template for mines has space for information about mine production in tons of ore or ounces of silver, but not quantities of arsenic or acid mine drainage released into the environment. It has a field for the mine owner, but not the Indigenous owners of the land where it is located. It has a field for the company's website, but not the website for environmental justice organisations opposing the project. It does not have space for the names of rivers polluted by the mine or the number of people displaced or killed in the course of the projects' development. All of these aspects of mining (people displaced, pollutants released, appropriation of Indigenous land) are absolutely fundamental to the process of mining. There are very few mines indeed where such fields could not be meaningfully filled out.

The template gives the perspective of people who benefit from the mine but not the perspective of people who bear the cost of the mine. Presumably because most Wikipedia editors benefit from mining and extractivism, so this other perspective is not well represented.

update: With encouragement from other editors, I have created an infobox extension to include some of these issues at Template:Infobox local impacts. It is currently included in several articles. This is a partial solution that works for infoboxes with a |module = {{}} element for embedding additional templates.

Implications

Even within the limited scope of a single environmental conflict, there is a huge amount of information missing from articles about the conflict itself; national and global social movements arising from that conflict; notable events, people, or lawsuits pertaining to those movements; articles about companies, banks, and governments contributing to the conflict; articles about commodities implicated in these conflicts; and articles about the places where the conflicts occur. Given that there are thousands of these conflicts all over the world, each with their own set of information missing from the encyclopedia, it is clear to me that I will not be able to remedy such bias on my own. So I attempted to revamp WP:CSB, but failed.

Appreciation

	The Original Barnstar
	Thank you for starting three important articles about topics that are badly under represented at Wikipedia. I hope my recent edits were helpful. CT55555(talk) 02:56, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

		The Systemic Bias Barnstar
		I first noticed you when you directed WP:CSB to the issues over at WP:MINING, and I admire your commitment to a lot of important topics. I'm also glad someone has been trying to clean up the WP:CSB materials, and I noticed today that you helped welcome a bunch of students who had been prematurely blocked. Keep it up!      — Freoh 11:42, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

	The Original Barnstar
	Rennell Island bauxite mine is a very good page. Well done! BoyTheKingCanDance (talk) 10:29, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Bookmarks

Environmental Conflict: Neomalthusians vs. Cornucopians.

• "traditional environmental concerns like air and water pollution kill more people than wars and armed conflicts in most years, although more gradually and not in a dramatic fashion suitable for daily news coverage"
• Connections between environmental degradation and conflict

The long environmental justice movement (Purdy 2018)