On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 11:45 PM, Genevieve Afriat
<misssouris@live.ca> wrote:
> From: Genevieve2
> Subject: WikiProject Women's sport+
Bonjour
I above all want to thank Laura Hale for his work. My feelings are shared for the project Women's sport. At the beginning I believed in a real sports Women community. But each is taken in the different sport (ffotball, hockey, ...)and in its region (Australia, England, Canada). Thus there is not enough solidarity between us.
I've "discovered" this problem too. From sport conferences and journals, academic research tends to be sport specific. There is a conference on cycling, another conference on association football, a third conference on Australian rules, a conference on all footy codes in Australia, sport from the perspective of physical education. Women's sport can be a unifier of sorts as a topic, but it most often isn't in a context that I can see: Women's sport joins causes to help promote other women's sport and wider women's fitness issues. I've looked at editing patterns on English Wikipedia regarding this and it bears out. You don't have editing nodes joining women's sport. Rather, women's sport tends to have crossover with in the individual sport. (The person editing the Mia Hamm article is going to be editing other USA soccer articles and maybe soccer articles more broadly, not articles about women's ice hockey in Canada, or netball in Australia.)
Disability sport seems to be the one area that gets a fair amount of crossover across all sports, but even that has its issues because it is often treated like something completely different, non-notable and not something average sport fans are interested in. (Completely unrelated,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ID_Basketball_ACT_State_Team.ogv is I believe the first video or pictures of ID basketball on Commons. Sadly, no article about it. The players are men, but the exhibition match was played during the half time of the women's professional team in Canberra.)
A male americain contributor caused me many concerns on the Women's ici hockey in the United States.
I had a similar problem with an American male and Australian women's sport articles. I love being told things like "There is not article about the sport generally, so this article should be speedily deleted" and the other fun one of "There is not article about this sport in the United States, so this article shouldn't exist" or variants on that theme. If there are no articles about women's sport in the United States, it might be because Americans in America are not writing them. Rather than going after Australian women's sport content to make it go away, the solution could be writing article about women's sport in the United States. (This issue of American men involving themselves in other country's women sport articles and claiming they don't matter because not in the USA is hugely frustrating. It has happened repeatedly to me.)
No solidarity of my main Canadian associate (user Maple Leaf) brought me towards a resignation: I withdrew from the project.
I saw that and it made me sad. :( I just don't have access to the Canadian ice hockey sources to make it feasible to really work on them.
If you had a Bachelors degree, I'd strongly support you coming down to my university to do an Honours, Masters or PhD related to using wikis and women's sport to promote women's sport at my university. We have some fantastic connections. If there had been money around for me to use, I'd still have liked to have used it to bring you down here so you can talk to a few people about some of the things we've done here, show you around our local facilities, etc. :)
It would have been fanstatique that the women have a sports gratitude and recognition but I believe that it interresse only 1 or 2 persons on thousands of contributors, I believe that soon I shall leave Wikipedized.
Sad to see that happen :( The work you do is really good. :) I sincerely appreciate it and it delights me to see women working on sport articles in other spaces than my own. (Which at the moment tends to be narrowly confined to Australian and New Zealand women's sport. I do have a whole slew of articles at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LauraHale/Women%27s_sport_country_sections_needing_articles , which I one day would like to get back to well enough to have them in the main article space.)
I see not many advantages for the Women ice Hockey and for me as the reporter in formation. However I shall give some photos (via my wiki commons) of competitions of Canadian Women ice hockey
There are a lot of advantages, though they aren't always the obvious ones. I've found it tremendously helpful as a fan to be able to look up articles about my favourite basketball team individual players during the game. The Wikipedia articles are better than the profile in the team's media guide and the Basketball Australia and WNBL website. Pictures go a long way towards helping promote the sport. Female athletes I've spoken to really appreciate having articles existing about them, as it helps to validate their importance as individuals and inside their communities. It also helps raise their profile because having a Wikipedia article suggests you are some one who matters. Sadly, some of these factors regarding who has an article and how good is that article often down to who is a "fan" of the team and athlete and will push for it.
I can tell you it does matter in terms of recruiting women contributors to articles on their own sport. Creating and having high level of articles about women's roller derby in Australia has meant Australian roller derby leagues come in and try to create, maintain and improve articles about their teams. There are enough of us active in this space (probably 4) that when they do, the existing community can help take these articles to DYK, find sources to help with notability, find sources to improve the article, help with formatting, etc. My experience with the Paralympic community in terms of female contributors is similar: Higher quality articles that get attention beget more editors. Are both groups consistently editing? No. Are they necessarily editing beyond their very narrow focus? No. Are there contributions still important? Yes.
When I graduate, I'm really hoping that I can get together the resources and time to put together either a full fledged academic conference on women's sport articles and Wikipedia, an industry conference for those involved in promoting women's sport, or an international conference similar to GLAM Camp with a focus on women's sport. (Just don't have the time. Going completely nutty as the final days of my dissertation being due get closer.) I'd also like to revisit
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/UCNISS/Women_and_children%27s_sport_research_centre_proposal at some point.