I like that you brought up the age difference, I do think that is valid
in many areas. As a 30 year old who knows more about Hentai film than I
care to admit I think for me it's more of a professionalism and
"quality" thing over offensive. I just think it's stupid and lends
itself to the invalid-ness that Wikipedia is trying to shake off.
Other wiki's like Encyclopedia Dramatica thrive on cartoons and
obnoxious tacky stuff (yeah ok, Pedobear is funny, but...) to represent
it. I don't need my scholarly labor and research to be associated with
that crap.
On 2/3/2011 4:57 PM, Nepenthe wrote:
I wonder if Wikipe-tan is more of a generational issue
than a gender
one. I'm pretty much as humorless feminist as they come, but being in
my early 20s, I grew up with anime and Wikipe-tan is no more
disturbing to me in the Wikipedia context than if we had come up with
a Disney-style mascot not wearing pants. (Granted, that OS-tans are
pretty universally female is undoubtedly a gender issue and the anime
style is a legitimate concern as well, but I think it's part of
culture at large, not one that Wikimedia can really address.)
I guess my point is that it might be a wash whether Wikipe-tan drives
off more older editors who find her offensive than she attracts
younger editors who find her friendly and familiar. It's really a side
point though. It never occurred to me that Wikipe-tan might be
considered embarrassing or inappropriate and I'm finding this
conversation eye-opening.
Nepenthe
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 3:06 PM, Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org
<mailto:swalling@wikimedia.org>> wrote:
On Feb 3, 2011, at 12:40 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case wrote:
On Wednesday, February 02, 2011,
jidanni(a)jidanni.org
<mailto:jidanni@jidanni.org> wrote:
K> our "mascot"? An overtly
sexualized, large-breasted woman
who people
K> regularly draw in bikinis and maid costumes? I mean, I know
K> Wikipe-tan is not actually The Problem. But she's the most
egregious
K> example I think we have of the sort of unconscious "boyzone"
culture
Ah,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipe-tan .
I had never seen that, and now that I have I find it
embarrassing for
Wikipedia.
IIRC Wikipe-tan was only originally meant to be the mascot for
WikiProject
Anime and Manga; how she became the avatar for the project as a
whole, I
don't know. She's hardly an inclusive or representative figure
(I'm not a
anime/manga otaku, aside from the other issues) and we can
certainly do
better.
My own personal notes on signs of a "boyzone" culture at
Wikipedia: the
appearance of [[Lindsay Lohan]], [[Reese Witherspoon]] and [[Uma
Thurman]]
as Main Page FAs within a two-year timespan. And also the one FA
that Raul
quite sensibly (IMO) has decided will never be on the Main Page.
In the same category, there's also the discussion from the top of
[[Talk:KaDee Strickland]] downwards, that ensued after that
article was on
the Main Page. It's hard for me not to see some of it as
misogynistic ...
Daniel Case
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The whole Wikipe-tan issue isn't limited to Wikipedia itself
either. I participate regularly in the Featured Picture process on
Wikimedia Commons, and have lately been struggling against media
in a similar vein.[1]
There is a substantial editorial debate around fan art like
this that is in flux on Commons. On the one hand, it's relatively
easy to make the argument that they're not educational media.
However, you still get people who in all seriousness support
promotion of media like this with comments such as, "I like her
big tits." (That's one extreme example, but it's still a direct
quote.)
Additional voices would be welcome, especially since Commons is a
much smaller community. I think perhaps one of our first
commitments should be to filling the informal leadership gap
others have mentioned by stepping up and saying what we find to be
unacceptable.[2]
1.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anime_Girl.svg
2. This talk was humorous, but I think there's some truth in the
slide:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steven_Walling_Wikipedia_mascots_-_I…
Steven Walling
Fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org <http://wikimediafoundation.org/>
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