Thanks, Sarah. I've got to ask...I've not seen some of those comments
before on the "public" lists, and I subscribe to most of them. Did I miss
something?
Risker/Anne
On 1 May 2013 11:12, Sarah Stierch wrote:
> Please see below
>
>
> via Matthew Roth at WMF.
>
>
> Sue published this blog post just recently:
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/01/of-wikipedia-categories-and-sexism/
>
>
> What’s missing from the media discussions of Wikipedia categories and
> sexism
> Posted by Sue Gardner on May 1, 2013
>
> Last week the New York Times published an Op-Ed from author Amanda
> Filipacchi headlined Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists, in which
> she criticized Wikipedia for moving some authors from the “American
> novelists” category into a sub-category called “American women novelists.”
> Because there is no subcategory for “American male novelists,” Filipacchi
> saw the change as reflecting a sexist double standard, in which ‘male’ is
> positioned as the ungendered norm, with ‘female’ as a variant.
>
> I completely understand why Filipacchi was outraged. She saw herself, and
> Harper Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Judy Blume, Louisa May Alcott, Mary
> Higgins Clark, and many others, seemingly downgraded in the public record
> and relegated to a subcategory that she assumed would get less readership
> than the main one. She saw this as a loss for American women novelists who
> might otherwise be visible when people went to Wikipedia looking for ideas
> about who to hire, to honor, or to read.
>
> In the days following, other publications picked up the story, and
> Filipacchi wrote two followup pieces — one describing edits made to her own
> biography on Wikipedia following her first op-ed, and another rebutting
> media stories that had positioned the original categorization changes as
> the work of a lone editor.
> For me–as a feminist Wikipedian–reading the coverage has been extremely
> interesting. I agree with many of the criticisms that have been raised (as
> I think many Wikipedians do), and yet there are important points that I
> think have been missing from the media discussions so far.
> In Wikipedia, like any large-scale human endeavor, practice often falls
> short of intent.
>
> Individuals make mistakes, but that doesn’t and shouldn’t call into
> question the usefulness or motivations of the endeavor as a whole. Since
> 2011, Wikipedia has officially discouraged the creation of gender-specific
> subcategories, except when gender is relevant to the category topic. (One
> of the authors of the guideline specifically noted that it is clear that
> any situation in which women get a gendered subcategory while men are left
> in the ungendered parent category is unacceptable.) In other words, the
> very situation Filipacchi decries in her op-ed has been extensively
> discussed and explicitly discouraged on Wikipedia.
> Wikipedia is a continual work-in-progress. It’s never done.
>
> In her original op-ed, Filipacchi seems to assume that Wikipedians are
> planning to move all the women out of the American Novelists category,
> leaving all the men. But that’s not the case. There’s a continuous effort
> on Wikipedia to refine and revise categories with large populations, and
> moving out the women from American Novelists would surely have been
> followed by moving out the satirical novelists, or the New York novelists,
> or the Young Adult novelists. I’d argue it’s still an inappropriate thing
> to do, because women are 50 percent of the population, not a variant to the
> male norm. Nevertheless the move needs to be understood not as an attack on
> women, but rather, in the context of continuous efforts to refine and
> revise all categories.
> Wikipedia is a reflection of the society that produces it.
>
> Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, and as such it reflects the
> cultural biases and attitudes of the general society. It’s important to say
> that the people who write Wikipedia are a far larger and vastly more
> diverse group than the staff of any newsroom or library or archive, past or
> present. That’s why Wikipedia is bigger, more comprehensive, up-to-date and
> nuanced, compared with any other reference work. But with fewer than one in
> five contributors being female, gender is definitely Wikipedia’s weak spot,
> and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it would fall victim to the same
> gender-related errors and biases as the society that produces it.
>
> Are there misogynists on Wikipedia? Given that anyone with internet access
> can edit it, and that there are roughly 80,000 active editors (those who
> make at least 5 edits per month on Wikimedia projects), it would be absurd
> to claim that Wikipedia is free of misogyny. Are there well-intentioned
> people on Wikipedia accidentally behaving in ways that perpetuate sexism?
> Of course. It would be far more surprising if Wikipedia were somehow free
> of sexism, rather than the reverse.
>
> Which brings me to my final point.
>
> I
