From The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/women-novelists-wikipedia-female-authors-american_n_3149345.html
Attention female authors: you may be being segregated from your male
peers on Wikipedia. On the online encyclopedia's "American Novelists"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_novelists> page, women
authors are hard to find. Instead they have been filed primarily under
"American Women Novelists."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_women_novelists>
/Vanity Fair/ contributing editor Elissa Schappell
<https://twitter.com/ElissaSchappell> made this observation and posted
on Facebook Wednesday:
Women Writers take heed, you are being erased on Wikipedia. It would
appear that in order to make room for male writers, women novelists
(such as Amy Tan, Harper Lee, Donna Tartt and 300 others) have been
moved off the "American Novelists" page and into the "American Women
Novelists" category. Not the back of the bus, or the kiddie table
exactly--except of course--when you google "American Novelists" the
list that appears is almost exclusively men (3,387 men). The
explanation on the pages is that the list of American Novelists is
too long, therefore sub-categories are necessary.
Idea: What about, "American Novelists with Penises" "American
Novelists Who Are Vastly Over-Rated and Over-Paid" or "American
Novelists Who Aren't Being Read But Should Be" (Here you'd find a
lot of women, people of color...)
Want to see where you're sitting for eternity? Take a peek.
A disclaimer at the top of the American Novelists page reads, "This
category may require frequent maintenance to avoid becoming too large.
It should directly contain very few, if any, articles and should mainly
contain subcategories." Schappell suggests that Wikipedia dealt with
this space issue by moving the female authors off the page.
The Huffington Post reached out to Wikipedia for a response to
Schappell's claims but so far has not heard back.
This is far from the first time that someone has expressed ire over the
"second-class" treatment of female authors. VIDA, an organization
dedicated to women in literary arts, pointed out that in 2011 the New
York Times Book Review <http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count> printed
reviews of 520 male authors' books and only 273 books written by women.
In a recent blog post on The Huffington Post, author Liza Palmer wrote
about thedouble standard that exists
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liza-palmer/all-books-are-equal-but-s_b_3131794.html> in
the literary world:
All too often, when a woman writes a book about family and
relationships the reader will sigh that she felt the narrator's
inner monologues were "whiny" whereas when a male writer
contemplates these same topics he is being "introspective." If a
female writer uses humor in her dialogue she will be dismissed as
"snarky", whereas if a male writer uses humor, he has a "biting
wit." So called chick-lit writers get pinned with "predictable"
endings, while male writers writing about the same topics have
endings that are "satisfying."
Perhaps it's time that Wikipedia realized that both men and women are
great American novelists and should show up when you search for them.
--
/Sarah Stierch/*
Wikimedia Foundation Program Evaluation Community Coordinator
*Donate
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Visit me on Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarahStierch>!
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