Re: [Gendergap] He/she vs. she/he
I think the way grammatical gender and gender inequality relate is an interesting topic, but this debate will get off-topic and technical quite quickly. Nevertheless, I gave it a stab in my inline replies below, along with hopefully a more useful observation. On 12/28/11 8:08 PM, Theo10011 wrote: Incidentally, the person credited for popularizing for this male-centric usage, is Anne fisher[1], an 18th-century British schoolmistress, and one of the first woman to write an English grammar book. [...] This is not entirely relevant (though quite fascinating). There is no single definition of feminism, and its meaning is especially dependent on cultural mores of their time and place. You might call Boudica, Elizabeth I, or Abigail Adams feminists, but that doesn't mean they necessarily even supported most of what we'd call women's rights. I see where you are coming from, but I could just as easily point out that Martin Luther King referred to his own race as "Negro" if I wanted to defend its modern usage. On 12/28/11 8:07 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: Yes, the traditional usage has been predominantly masculine, but in modern usage, "they" is the dominant form. See my reply at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Gender-neutral_language#She_before_he.3F This is also not entirely relevant. Manuals of style *prescribe* usages in formal language, rather than describing common usages. Some of the things you can find in the English Wikipedia's manual of style are actually quite uncommon in everyday writing, but still sound policy. On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 6:06 AM, Ryan Kaldari mailto:rkald...@wikimedia.org>> wrote: I responded to the inquiry and replaced all the gendered pronouns at issue with singular they. On a related note, I'm very disappointed to learn that the Chicago Manual of Style (which provided the basis for the original Wikipedia Manual of Style) has stopped recommending the use of singular they. As the use of singular they has been steadily increasing since the 1960s (Pauwels 2003), it is curious that the Chicago Manual would be moving backwards. I have to wonder if there was some sort of political pressure involved. On a positive note, the 2011 edition of the New International Version Bible now uses singular they. I don't think it was political in the sense you are imagining. They have a page in their FAQ about the issue: <http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/Pronouns/Pronouns15.html>. Briefly, the singular "they" was only ever endorsed in one edition, after which they changed their mind. Chicago does not disapprove of the singular "they"; rather, they essentially describe the controversy and refrain from taking a strong stance. The reason is pretty obvious: the singular "they" is justifiable for several reasons, but it can't really be justified on modern grammatical grounds---which is problematic since grammar tends to be somewhat important when it comes to formal writing. On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 6:20 AM, Theo10011 mailto:de10...@gmail.com>> wrote: And I defended the reverting editor. (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3AGender-neutral_language&action=historysubmit&diff=468184170&oldid=468179760 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3AGender-neutral_language&action=historysubmit&diff=468184170&oldid=468179760>). [...] I'm sure Dominic can correct me if I'm wrong on this one. Since you asked... I kind of agree more with Theo here. I think the stance which most Wikipedians, including feminists, would agree to would be to adhere to the original author's language---like we do with regional spellings---with respect to singular "they" or "he or she", but to frown upon stylistic changes from one or the other solely due to an editor's preference (and certainly to always frown upon a generic "he"). Let's step back, though. To me, the more important issue here is that a new, possibly female, editor made an innocuous change in good faith and was reverted and branded a vandal. Whatever we think about the grammatical debate, it was not vandalism, and he or she (or they!) are a potential new editor we may have scared away. Our response should not simply be to forget about that and start a discussion about arcane policy, as if that's the solution. For example, I think you may have even given the impression to the new editor that the revert was justified because she didn't use the singular "they" (your "fix"), Ryan(!). Looking at the reverter's talk page history, this seems to be a pattern. We'll do more to
Re: [Gendergap] "anonymous (street meat)"
Michael, I think that response is overly harsh, even if it is true that Migdia's contributions were not appropriate for the encyclopedia. While there are certainly spammers who act in bad faith, often what Wikipedians see as self-promotion is not seen or intended that way by those who contribute it. In particular, when we are talking about biographical material and issues of notability, it is very easy for the issue to become personalized, and for the subject to feel like they are being persecuted on a personal level (being accused of "vanity," called not "notable"). I am not certain why Migdia says that the comments were gender-related, but the feeling of having been singled out and insulted is a common one for those who have had to go through the deletion process, and we hear it a lot. It is important to remember that Wikipedia's definition of terms like "notability" is jargon and confusing. To a normal person, being notable means you've done something important; to a Wikipedian, it means reporters or academics have written about you. In fact, it is quite possible to debate the merits of an article without accusing anyone of self-promotion, even if you believe it's true. The self-promotion issue is beside the point: in general, we delete articles if they fail our criteria for inclusion and we keep them if they meet them (self-authored or not). Dominic On 10/18/11 2:10 PM, Michael J. Lowrey wrote: > On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 10:53 AM, Nathan wrote: >> I looked at the discussion >> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Anonymous_(Street_Meat)) >> and didn't see personal remarks or innuendo. Can you point me to them? >> >> On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Migdia Chinea >> wrote: >>> tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(Street_Meat) >>> >>> This deletion was filled with personal remarks and innouendo. It was >>> discouraging of the posting bny any women. I'm angry and frustrated to have >>> been singled out. Is that treatment to be expected? Thank you -- >>> >>> Migdia Chinea >>> >>> -- >>> Migdia& Cicero& Ulla& Tullia-Zoe& Clodia& Aurelius& Cato the Younger > Migdia Chinea's only purpose on Wikipedia has been to promote herself > (whom she deems to be notable as an up-and-coming filmmaker) and her > film (ditto). She considers any challenge to her self-promotion to > constitute an assault on herself as a human being and creative worker, > and refuses to heed any of the advice given her. This is not a gender > issue in any way; I ran into similar problems with the male comix > artist Colin Upton, who left Wikipedia after not liking the way other > people treated the article about him. > ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs of women
I think we need to be clearer about who is the audience here. It seems to be directed at the customer, rather than at Wikimedians, but then some of the text is unnecessarily detailed and distracting. We have to assume that most people are not actually reading pages like this for comprehension, but just scanning it for what is relevant to them, or even just scanning through it to get to the contact address they are looking for. I think we want direct, simple sentences in the active voice, and maybe a few boldings or a bulleted to break up the text and draw out specific points. For example, "/The customer service team is a small group of volunteers who have demonstrated the ability to work on difficult and sensitive issues, and to act with appropriate discretion. This team respects requests for privacy, and as a matter of regular practice does not share personal information disclosed in email communications./" could probably boiled down to "All messages will be confidential and handled with respect by our experienced volunteers." I was going to take a stab at this myself, but my other, larger question is about where this is intended to fit in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us is already quite full, and doesn't really have space for prose text like this. Linking to a page like this one in that sea of bulleted items is unlikely to have much of an effect, though. Is this a customer service portal intended to be reached from some more specialized access point? I realize you may not have thought much about that yet, but I think the answer determines how we should write the page. Dominic On 9/18/11 2:33 PM, Pete Forsyth wrote: Update, and a request: The discussion thread John started has been very active, with I think about 30 posts from a wide variety of customer service (OTRS) volunteers. Summary: * Many people agree that there is an important concern about readers who find personal/traumatic content about themselves, and have reservations about contacting an unknown email support team. * Philosophical questions have been raised about addressing this with a "women-only" support team * There are also practical concerns about how that could be implemented So, in consultation with several of the people on this list, I've made an alternative proposal, which would not shake the foundations of the OTRS team. Basically, that we should improve our public descriptions of Wikimedia customer service, and encourage people to *ask* for what they want -- whether it's a woman to work with them privately, or any other kind of special request. Along with a brief observation that such a request might delay action a bit due to limited volunteer resources. Please take a look at what I've written up here, and share your thoughts: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Peteforsyth/Customer_service -Pete On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 2:45 PM, John Vandenberg <mailto:jay...@gmail.com>> wrote: On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Pete Forsyth mailto:petefors...@gmail.com>> wrote: > It seems like we have strong consensus that a separate "customer support queue", run by and for women, would be a good idea. I certainly think so! > > Who here is active on OTRS? I'm on it, and on the email list, but I'm not active there. It might be best for somebody float the idea over there, see how it's received, and if there's agreement, figure out the steps to get it up and running. (I'm sure that having a small corps of female volunteers willing to staff it will be an essential element!) I'm not very active, .. :/ I've initiated a discussion thread on the private otrs wiki, copying your email text and linking to this thread. http://otrs-wiki.wikimedia.org/wiki/Café#queue_for_verified_females <http://otrs-wiki.wikimedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9#queue_for_verified_females> -- John Vandenberg ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] wikisource
Heh, I see I've been upstaged. But, yes, and John is an even better Wikisource advocate than I was on the other thread. :-) Dominic On 9/15/11 3:44 PM, John Vandenberg wrote: > On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 11:17 PM, Sarah Stierch > wrote: >> Yes! I have never edited or contributed anything to wikiquote. I have >> contributed to Wikisource, and I'm starting to think I'm the only woman who >> ever has, even though it was two documents. I don't even think there is much >> of anything related to women's history on Wikisource... > Ahhh, a topic worth talking about! If we want more women in our > community, I very strongly believe that wikisource is our greatest > chance of bringing them in. librarians and local studies in Australia > are mostly women, and they are usually led by women as well, who can > be good champions for our community. It is a nice quiet environment, > the editing tasks are 'simpler', which provides a nice training ground > for newbies, and the ability to shine new light on old information > gels well with information workers who prefer to blog about insights > into old texts rather than fight to have their text added to > Wikipedia. > > FloNight is active whenever she can find time. > http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:FloNight > (i.e. I am confident you can twist Sydney's arm to help you on Wikisource) > > One of the two 'crats on English Wikisource is a women. She is very > active in moderating the tone of the community. > http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:BirgitteSB > > There are many more ladies who have been very involved over the years, > and they usually arnt far away. > (people dont rage-quit Wikisource. Wikisource looses contributors > because they rage-quit English Wikipedia, and they stop editing > Wikisource at the same time.) > > If you're looking for a topical place to start, we have portals such as > http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Portal:Women > > When preparing for a training sessions for Australian > librarians(mostly women) in Miles, Queensland, I extracted a list of > women from a book of notable Australians > http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index_talk:Johns%27s_notable_Australians_1908.djvu > Sadly the Wikipedia training session went over the allocated time and > we didnt look at this. We have another training session for > Queensland librarians coming up soon. > ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Wikiquotes
Hey all, check out Wikisource's main page right now. :-) There are several users whose gender I don't know, but one of Wikisource's currently most active editors, and an administrator, is kathleen.wright5. One of its bureaucrats and village elders is also a woman, BirgitteSB. Inspired by some of the uploads from the National Archives, we recently created a women's suffrage portal (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Portal:Women%27s_suffrage), which is slightly misnamed, because a few other documents from related non-suffrage political activism have been since added. I think several of the sister projects are actually places where it would be easier for women to thrive than the English Wikipedia, especially Wikisource and Wikiquote. These are small communities that have the luxury of nurturing newcomers (and lack the culture of competitive patrolling which puts off newbies), have less bureaucracy, and have less conflict. We can only speculate, but I think a main reason that there is a gender gap on such other projects is just because most projects live in Wikipedia's shadow and new editors only find them through becoming Wikipedia contributors, and those demographics carry over. Dominic On 9/15/11 9:17 AM, Sarah Stierch wrote: Yes! I have never edited or contributed anything to wikiquote. I have contributed to Wikisource, and I'm starting to think I'm the only woman who ever has, even though it was two documents. I don't even think there is much of anything related to women's history on Wikisource... We were discussing in #wikimedia-gendergap a few days ago about the need for more featured images of women and related subjects on Commons. I kept rolling my eyes everytime I saw the ATV that was a featured image the other day. I'm actually developing a wikipage that will showcase a collection of topics that need expansion, watching, clean up, etc, and/or photos for English Wikipedia, which I naturally assume will be the same for other languages. Once it's a little fleshed out we can see if it's useful in any way. I think it's interesting just to see what we're lacking on...on top of the 1009232 other things I'm doing... -Sarah On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 9:08 AM, <mailto:carolmoor...@verizon.net>> wrote: Looking at my wikiquotes talk page for the first time in a while, I was reminded that is another area women's contributions may not be taken as seriously. Example: the deletion in 2009 of poet Marcella Boccia's quotes from English wikipedia after her article had been deleted from En wikipedia. Actually, I just checked and it's not in the Italian wikipedia version either. Despite http://www.google.com/search?ned=us&hl=en&q=Marcella+Boccia&tbm=nws&tbs=ar:1 <http://www.google.com/search?ned=us&hl=en&q=Marcella+Boccia&tbm=nws&tbs=ar:1> notability in Italian I noted at time of deletion discussion. So let's not forget Wikiquote!! ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- GLAMWIKI Partnership Ambassador for Wikimedia <http://www.glamwiki.org> Wikipedian-in-Residence, Archives of American Art <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarahStierch> and Sarah Stierch Consulting /Historical, cultural & artistic research & advising./ -- http://www.sarahstierch.com/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Mostly about fem-edits dilemma
On 7/7/11 7:17 PM, Sarah Stierch wrote: > > I think we need to start thinking of "potential female editors" as not > only housewives, or moms. Which seems to be constantly a theme. If the > housewife mother isnt editing...who could be? > > The more outreach that continues (i.e. Public policy) to get funded, > or is practically grassroots (GLAM) can help bring more women who will > MAKE time to contribute. Everyday I get an email (no joke) during my > residency at the Smithsonian from someone, usually a woman, interested > in WP. > Yes! I can't emphasize this enough. The gender imbalance is symptomatic of the wider systemic bias on Wikipedia and lack of true diversity of interests and viewpoints. Though I am a male, as a non-techie working in the humanities and interested in things like libraries and non-American/European culture, I also sometimes feel like a sort of minority on Wikipedia. These are obviously related issues, because there is a real-world gender imbalance in fields like math and sciences in one direction, and, for example, in my field, library science, in the other. I work with professional women every day whose careers are in the world of information. They are avid Twitterers, expert Flickrites, Facebook fiends, and Foursquare addicts. At my library science grad program, everyone knows how to use MediaWiki, as it is used internally for classes. And yet, for whatever reason, Wikipedia is just not part of their skill set. That is what needs to change. There is clearly no lack of dedication or ability among such people. Dominic ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Today's featured picture
I am struck by how few voices of reason there are on this mailing list, and this post is a prime example of why those people have probably mostly thrown up their hands and left. If the suggestion that we put more hot guys on our main page was a joke, it was was not constructive; if it was serious, I think you need to reconsider your participation here. Just when the list seemed to be getting back on track, we're talking about Wikipe-tan again. I'm not a fan, but the idea that female editors aren't flocking to Wikipedia because of a mascot that most editors probably are unaware of---and likely wouldn't become aware of unless they were already quite involved with the project---is quite a stretch. It might be a symptom of the lack of female voices, but it's not worth the time the mailing list has devoted to it. Dominic On 3/20/11 11:09 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case wrote: Remote possibility: Would more front-page featured pictures like today's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MARTAKIS1.jpg perhaps entice at least some women to edit who aren't otherwise doing so? Or at least even out the Wikipe-tan effect? Cf. this album cover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frampton_Comes_Alive! and its purported effect on the sales of said album (not mentioned in the article, but maybe it should be). Just a thought; else, hold that thought. Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] [[w:List of female role models]]
On 2/21/11 12:57 AM, James Salsman wrote: > I noticed that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_role_models > is presently empty without a deletion log. How is that possible? How > can we have > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transgender_characters_in_film_and_television > but not [[List of female role models]]? Those are not comparable. There most certainly are lists and categories of actresses (though being female is less of a unique identity than being transgender), but a role model subjective category and not really encyclopedic. Do we actually have such lists for any other groups of people, or a general one? I don't see any. > Are there any arbitrators or former arbitrators out there who feel > that my depleted uranium ban should take precedence over WP:IAR for > this situation? Not really, and your ban isn't really relevant here (except to note that the stuff that you were banned for is precisely the kind of behavior that would turn me off to the project if I were new). There are proper channels you can use to make an appeal; contact me off-list if you are unsure of them. > P.S. For those of you interested in the 20th year of the use of > depleted uranium on people, which was three days ago, and its affects > on reproductive health outcomes, please see > http://health.phys.iit.edu/archives/2011-February/030524.html Definitely off-topic. Dominic ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
