On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2008@reagle.org wrote:
On Friday, February 04, 2011, Steven Walling wrote:
Joseph Reagle's op-ed explains this argument further I think: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wikip...
I think that argument is often implicit, though, I haven't heard it expressed explicitly by any Wikipedians. *But* you can find plenty of examples of this argument explicitly in response to the NYT's article itself.
Implicit and long-standing in a lot of discussions, I'd say.
And a more complicated issue than it appears for Wikipedia, too. There is of course a long-standing principle (in our culture, in many wikis) of {{sofixit}} -- meaning, you can edit any page right now, go for it, you can fix it yourself if it's broken -- and I'd argue that principle, whether articulated or not, is deeply fundamental to the success of our projects and a core part of Wikipedia. It's even our tagline: "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Anyone means you: that's the point.
So it's easy enough to extrapolate the idea. Something's broken? So fix it. Not enough women are editing? So fix it. Why aren't you editing? etc. But I think there's a negative and a positive way to say and to mean this: "it's your fault" rather than "you're empowered to help".
-- phoebe