I find it interesting that both comic images (Sara and WIkipe-tan) perpetuate female stereotypes:
- Sara gets to be the person who doesn't know what she's doing. I think the intentions behind this were probably good, but it seems like most ads have the woman as the clueless one. For example, when you want to explain something at the simplest level, you're often told to speak as if you are talking to "Aunt Agatha" instead of "Uncle Fred".
- Wikipe-tan is the one chosen to enforce wiki love, which is another role stereotypically given to females. I guess it's a Rosie the Riveter reference more than an Uncle Sam one, but still, one tells you to go and work, the other tells you to go spread wikiLove (and I don't exactly know what that means in the context of Wikipedia since I've never been the recipient of any wiki love for any of my work on the WMF projects). It does make me feel a bit better, however, that people are being encouraged to spread wiki love, even if I haven't benefited from this directly as a result of my editing on the WMF projects.
The worse one for me is this one of jumping Wikipe-tan with the tiny apron:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jumping_Wikipe-tan.png?uselang=de
I actually like anime and manga (see my Wikipedia edit history for proof), but that one is going way too far for my taste.
--
"Only the shallow know themselves." - Oscar Wilde
