I sent this to the Communications mailing list; am also sharing it here :-)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org Date: 9 February 2011 01:09 Subject: [PRESS] Ottawa Citizen: The world according to men To: Communications Committee wmfcc-l@lists.wikimedia.org
I am happy to see continuing coverage of our gender gap: I particularly like that most of the articles seem to take the stance of "let's try to help." :-)
And I am happy that Katherine Govier is writing about us. She's actually a quite important Canadian novelist, (Like Pat Barker's, her article should be richer & more complete.)
Thanks, Sue
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http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/world+according/4246585/story.html
The world according to men BY KATHERINE GOVIER, OTTAWA FEBRUARY 8, 2011 BE THE FIRST TO POST A COMMENT
We were treated to the news last week, via the New York Times, that Wikipedia, increasingly the go-to reference for historical and contemporary general knowledge, has a dark secret. It is chiefly written by 25-year-old males.
Help us and save us.
It’s true. A study has shown that only 13 per cent of the hundreds of thousands of contributors to the “collaborative” online encyclopedia are female. Of the 87 per cent who remain, and are male, the average age is mid-twenties. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, (a woman, oddly enough) says this came about because of Wikipedia’s nature. It is skewed toward aggressive hacker-types who are obsessed with facts and reflect the male-dominated computer culture. They are, furthermore, imbued with a sense that it is really important for everyone to know about Niko Bellic, a character who is a former soldier in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. He gets an article five times as long as does Pat Barker, a (female) British novelist in her late sixties. That is, he did until Gardner herself added background to Pat Barker’s entry.
So this is how it works. Women have to step up and become Wikipedia contributors. This suggestion has engendered comment, the best of it being that women are too busy with their famous “double shift” (remember that? Another thing that apparently hasn’t changed) of working full-time and doing much of the child care and housework, to also get down to writing the history of our time. Experts suggest the dearth of female contributors is due to modesty. Women need to be persuaded that their input is valuable.
I became a Wikipedia contributor once. I’d been chatting with Professor Donald Smith of the University of Calgary, a longtime contributor to the massive and authoritative Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He told me a story about how his students found many errors in a Globe and Mail story about General James Wolfe. They traced these errors back to, guess where, Wikipedia. One of them was so incensed she corrected Wikipedia’s entry. He was proud of her, but shocked and distressed that our national news media use the amateur encyclopedia to find their “facts.”
I was intrigued. Like many people, I hadn’t realized it was that easy to make (up) history. I looked myself up. There I was. Birthdate, education, books, etc. Also, rather prominently, a reference to the man I had formerly been married to. I had no real objection to that. It’s true. However I didn’t think that this fact was important enough to be included in a two paragraph summary of my life and work.
I decided to do something about it. I registered as a contributor — I remember this didn’t take very long — and I altered the entry, beefing up the other information and removing the bit about the ex-husband. Fine. What a feeling! It took half an hour. No one contradicted me. I looked like quite a solid citizen, if I didn’t say so myself. So easy.
If only. A few months later I checked the entry again. The ex-husband was back! But at least the present one is in.
I can live with that. I guess. As Gardner says about history-making the online, collaborative way: “Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table. If they are not at the table we don’t benefit from their crumb.”
As a novelist, I spent years recreating the life of a superb woman artist who was briefly famous and then disappeared. She was left off the record, in her day. How did that happen? The answer complex. It started with crumbs of information, to be sure. Because of her gender she was left out of drinking parties, and the annual “famous men” lists in a way that was more negligent than deliberate. But then social mores kicked in. She was sidelined by family duties; she even colluded to see her signature overwritten because her father’s would bring in more money. Perhaps, ultimately, she was robbed of her birthright in an act of violence by desperate disciples. We don’t know. Because no one wrote it down.
Now, as writers and historians everywhere broaden their focus to include the marginalized and the voiceless, we have to include the computer-bereft. Unofficial information from the past — about family life, social habits, folk beliefs, relationships of all kind — is what we want most keenly. We know about the battles and acts of parliament — high-placed record-keepers of old tell us. We look in attics and prisons and temples for private information and news about the unimportant people who are not in the textbooks.
In its idealistic stage, Wikipedia seemed set to change history-in-the-making to reflect a broader constituency. But these figures suggest that we’ve just changed mythmakers.
Wikipedia disdains rules, hierarchies, and orthodoxies. It pledges to be open “even to misogynists.” It will not adopt a new way to gather information. The result is that “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” is in danger of losing its legitimacy. Meanwhile we have more work cut out for us. Become a contributor. Go to any entry — presumably one on which you have some expertise — and click on “edit.” Log in as a new contributor. And start writing. It’s quite exhilarating.
I checked out my ex-husband’s entry. I haven’t changed it. Much.
Katherine Govier’s latest novel, The Ghost Brush, HarperCollins.ca, tells the story of Oei, daughter of the great Japanese printmaker Hokusai and a great artist in her own right.
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/world+according/4246585/story.html#ixzz1DR...
Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!