No, I'm 100% with you. It's not sexist to recognize that women are studied separately, hell, we have a whole field dedicated to women and gender. I think its incredibly helpful to have women in a separate category to assess our level of coverage for women in that field; knowing where our coverage is deficient is the first step to combating systemic bias.

I think people should be up in arms about sexism on Wikipedia, but the sexism isn't in the existence of "women x" categories, it's in how sparsely they're populated.

Kei

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----- Reply message -----
From: "Sarah Stierch" <sarah.stierch@gmail.com>
To: "Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects" <gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Gendergap] Liz Henry on women novelists, English Wikipedia, and labelling
Date: Sat, Apr 27, 2013 7:32 PM


????

Regardless...I'm beginning to feel like I'm the only person on earth who
feels having a category for "Women foo" is a good idea for the sake of
women's studies and feminist studies. I find immense value in categories
based around gender and ethnicity - it makes my writing and work a lot
easier (as a researcher who writes about women and minorities) when working
in Wikipedia and wanting to expand content about those subjects. As long as
they get listed in other appropriate non-gender/non-ethnicity/non-foo
categories, I think it's okay. We're not a library, we're an online
collaborative encyclopedia.

Even on Wiki, I feel like one of the few people voicing my opinion about it
only to get told I'm in the wrong. It's really depressing.

I almost feel like a jerk for feeling that way. Go figure.

-Sarah




On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 3:12 PM, Akhil Mulgaonker <liberalufp@gmail.com>wrote:

> Women are inferior to men and exterminated like ants.
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 7:17 AM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk>wrote:
>
>> The recent discussion on this (which never really came to a clear
>> consensus):
>>
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_101#Actresses_categorization
>>
>> - Andrew
>>
>> On 27 April 2013 01:49, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> > If people are concerned about sexism in Wikipedia categories they
>> should be
>> > drawing attention to edits like this:
>> >
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elizabeth_Gillies&curid=19682193&diff=536982107&oldid=536980531
>> >
>> > 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@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
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Gendergap mailing list
>> > Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> - Andrew Gray
>>   andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Gendergap mailing list
>> Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
>>
>
>
>
> --
> *AKHIL MULGAONKER *
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gendergap mailing list
> Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
>
>


--
--
*Sarah Stierch*
*Museumist, open culture advocate, and Wikimedian*
*www.sarahstierch.com*