When we’ve focused on making article content more gender-inclusive here,
we’ve usually considered only the text. But a recent edit of mine reminded me
that that’s not the only place we can do this.
A month or so ago, on a short train trip to a city near us, my son (at my
suggestion) took a video of the conductor of what was to be our train home
lining the switch (point to those of you English speakers outside of North
America) to bring the train onto the track next to the platform for boarding. He
and I have been making videos for Wikipedia since Wikimania (when I realized
that we could do it, and it occurred to me for other reasons that this might be
another way to make the encyclopedia more welcoming to female readers and
editors) and I had noticed that [[railroad switch]] had neither photo nor video
of someone actually making the adjustment, an operation that takes place
thousands of times a day on railroads all over the planet and is fundamental to
rail transport (yes, there was a video of some tracks in Hong Kong being
switched, but it was so short and subtle as to be nearly useless).
It took me a while to get around to editing the video and convert it to
.ogv format, then upload it (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NJ_Transit_conductor_lines_a_switch_in_Port_Jervis,_NY.ogv).
Only after I did, and then added it to the article, did I pleasantly realize
that it showed a young African-American woman (so score that double for
diversity of representation) doing something not always associated with women
(although, of course, as we all know, there are many women who work as passenger
rail conductors).
Daniel Case