If people are concerned about sexism in Wikipedia categories they should
be drawing attention to edits like this:
While the rest of the world is moving away from gender-specific job
names (like policeman and actress), Wikipedia is moving in the opposite
direction. That seems like a much worse problem than categorizing women
as women.
Ryan Kaldari
On 4/25/13 11:34 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
Hi all,
On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:56:39 -0400
Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Wikimedia community member Liz Henry blogs here:
http://bookmaniac.org/journalists-dont-understand-wikipedia-sometimes/
and does a little bit of digging into edit histories.
"Just from these three samples, it does not seem that there is any
particular movement among a group of Wikipedia editors to remove women
from the “novelists” category and put them in a special women category
instead. I would say that the general leaning, rather, is to stop people
who would like to label women writers as women writers *in addition* to
labeling them as writers, claiming there is no need for Category:
American women writers at all and that it is evidence of bias to
identify them by gender. ... The sexist thing we
should be up in arms about isn’t labelling women as women! It’s the
efforts to delete entire categories (like Haitian women writers, for
example) because someone has decided that that meta-information is
unnecessary “ghettoization”..."
Seems like good write-up and I tend to agree.
It's too bad there was so much
misunderstanding in the media about it.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish