On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
On 7/30/12 2:14 PM, Laura Hale wrote:
Did you hear any stories about how Patrick Mills
left the NBA early in
order to spend more time training with the national team in order to try to
get gold? No. Of course not. The men are not expected to win gold. They
don't want to hold early training camps. No one expects them to win even
medal. The Australian question should be: Why are we even bothering to
send the men? They should sit home. The Australian media largely does
not care about them.
<sarcasm>Of course they have to send the men! They're the ones that really
count. And why aren't the women wearing skirts like they're supposed
to!</sarcasm>
No, they do not have to send the men. I would bet there will be a real
discussion in the sporting community here about this behind the scenes.
There are different local conditions that impact national priorities for
sport. The USA men's and women's teams continue on with their sport until
the very last minute and for the major sport, they spend very little time
in training camp as a team. The Australian women were in training months
before the start of the Olympics. Team USA women's were busy playing their
WNBA season and, based on their tweets and reading USA media coverage, no
one was concerned about the WNBA season impacting on their medal chances:
it didn't feel like a national priority.
Winning is very important on some level in Australian sport... especially
since the government funds this. If the USA is third in the medal count,
will the USA politicians in the USA House and Sentate and the USA president
talk about the need to invest in top level sport? Talk about how the
federal government needs to invest money into sport to increase the USA's
Olympic performance? I would be willing to put good money on it that they
will not. The US Olympic Committee was created by federal statue but
relies primarily on sponsors and doesn't get government funding on the
national level.
The narrative you're suggesting here is not reality. (And why would we
want them in skirts? We have netball for skirts. Netball is an all women's
sport, which has been locked out of the Olympics alongside softball.
Softball has a parallel men's competition, but in order to even begin to
look at Olympic inclusion again, it needed to marry itself to baseball.
Meanwhile, men's softball really gets short shrift. And introducing the
real and systematic bias that exists against women sport and
non-USA/European sport as demonstrated by selection of sport becomes POV
pushing on Wikipedia, no matter the number of sources that can be provided
by credible sources.)
The bigger Australian gender stories are actually Michelle Jenneke's butt
jiggle, (which ironically, the USA paid more
attention to then Australia)
and Leisel Jones fat story, which was a very deliberate story on the part
of the Australian media. Media watch shows how this story was crafted:
http://www.abc.net.au/**mediawatch/transcripts/**s3556770.htm/<http://ww…
Reminds me of the U.S. obsession with the appearance of female
politicians, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:Articles_for_*
*deletion/Michelle_Obama%27s_**arms<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Michelle_Obama%27s_arms>
Wikipedia has problems. Real growth for women's participation on Wikipedia
won't come from improving articles about feminist topics, but in articles
about popular culture and sport. Sadly, there is a bias against such
content on Wikipedia because it detracts from the serious nature of
Wikipedia.
That said, Wikipedia's main page has generally been dominated by female
Olympians instead of male Olympians on Did You
Know. If you want to submit
for DYK about women, I highly urge you to. It is one of the best ways to
highlight topics that might otherwise get overlooked because of systematic
bias.
Thanks for the tip. I did a couple of female athlete articles recently,
but forgot to DYK them :(
DYK is probably the best tool for addressing bias on Wikipedia by
highlighting new, quality content on Wikipedia.
There are plenty of female medalists that do not have articles. There are
plenty of articles about African women at the Olympics that don't have
articles. It would be great to see some of these worked on. There are
still DYK slots available for the Olympics and if people want to nominate
something, I'm happy to help by either assisting with the nomination or by
reviewing an article.
If you want to help with another group that faces systematic bias in
general and on Wikipedia specifically, I urge you to work on articles about
Paralympic athletes and to take those to DYK for the special prep area that
will run during the Games. There are many Wikipedians with disabilities of
various kinds, which makes improving these articles all the more
important.
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
--
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blog:
ozziesport.com