Re: [DIYbio] Wikipedia clean up

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:39 PM, Michael Turner wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 11:06 AM, Bryan Bishop wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:00 PM, Michael Turner wrote:
>>> There is no biohacking outside DIYbio membership? If, in Wikipedia
>>
>> There is no DIYbio membership. DIYbio the organization itself is
>> rather unnotable save for the massive amounts of news coverage people
>> on this list generate. DIYbio the concept is as just as blurred with
>> "biohacking" and "biopunk" and "amateur biology".. they are all the
>> same thing.
>
> OK, let me try to think of an appropriate overarching category,
> something a little more elevated than "hobby." Unfortunately, there's
> already a category on Wikipedia for "Biopunk"
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Biopunk
>
> and NO category for "Biohacking".

I understand that Biopunk is well known in the science fiction
circles. But the citations in the biopunk article are referencing
biohacking, biopunk, amateur biology, do-it-yourself biology, which
all blurs together. Still, that doesn't mean that biopunk is the word
that is all-encompassing.

>>>> The biopunk article is rather peculiar, because it describes a
>>>> "subculture within a subculture" which isn't really true, it's the
>>>> same culture and the same people.
>>>
>>> If that false distinction were disclaimed in an independent reliable
>>> source, it's something you could use as the basis for a claim of
>>> equivalence. Or if there's a quote from some reasonably notable figure
>>> in the movement saying they are they same, it could be reported in the
>>> article as a quote.
>>
>> There's no primary source that says there is a
>> distinction in the first place.
>
> Thanks. I'm just asking what basis there would be for drawing
> distinctions (if any) between article topics. Suffixes "-hacking" and
> "-punk" can have significant effects on discourse -- or not. I'm new
> to all this, so the distinctions or lack thereof are not so clear to
> me.

It is possible that -punk could refer more to the science fiction
genre, but I find that a little harsh.

> To cite a precedent: there are hackers interested in computer security
> issues in general, going back to the late 1970s if not earlier. But
> then you also had the "cypherpunks," a movement that arguably peaked

Sure. The cypherpunks were a very specific group of people. You could
name all of them. Well, you could name all of them if it wasn't for
their anonymous email addresses. (Additionally, you could probably
count some cryptography peeps not explicitly on the cypherpunks
mailing list as being in that crowd as well. But overwhelmingly, their
mailing list and that group of people are what people refer to when
they say cypherpunks these days. A few of them are floating around on
this list, too.)

Since the original author of bitcoin has chosen to remain anonymous,
the article could probably conjecture that the author was a member of
the cypherpunks group. But it's also possible that there is no
connection to those folks at all.

>> From what I recall happening, Patrik
>> got upset about diybio.org using a mailing list, and registered
>> biopunk.org because he wanted to use forums to communicate with
>> people.
>
> And that gave "biopunk" shinier coinage as a term? I'm not sure of
> your point here.

Sorry, yes, that is what I was trying to communicate. But at the same
time, I should also point out that Marcus' book is titled "Biopunk"
and talks about biohacking the whole time, and not the subset of
science fiction referred to as biopunk. So these terms are definitely
all intertwingled.

>>>> The news refs back this up for at
>>>> least the past 10 years.
>>>
>>> Do they do so directly or indirectly.
>>
>> Go read them. In one article I'm called a biohacker, and in the next
>> I'm called a biopunk or whatever.
>
> And what do you call yourself?

Any of those terms would work for me. I am not picky about myself. I
am just trying to figure out how to make the articles less awful - and
a merge seems to be the right thing to do, given the lack of
distinction. However, I don't know how to handle the science fiction
genre issue.

>>> How about a merging of the articles "biopunk" and "biohacking," with a
>>> redirect from biopunk to biohacking?
>>
>> I think that would be a very sane change.
>
> I've put a merge tag into the biopunk article. It's a little weird to
> merge an article into a smaller article, and googling on "biopunk"
> gets more hits than "biohacker". Moreover, "biopunk" seems to be an SF
> subgenre now. But sanity trumps everything (Wikpedia's "IAR - Ignore

I think a biohacking/biopunk article would have most of the same
content already featured on the biopunk article relating to
do-it-yourself biology, without the language trying to mark a
political difference between gene hackers and gene hackers. It's
possible that the SF genre should be a separate article ("Biopunk
(science fiction genre)"), but I'm not sure. I mean, we could just
stuff everything into one, and say the SF genre article was hijacked
by DIYbio peeps, but that seems rude. :-P

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

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