Additional: I really love the first sentence here [1]: "Wikipe-tan is one of the personifications of Wikipedia." So if you see the following pictures (my favourites are this [2] and [3]) and see a child-eyed girl in french-roommade-dress and hold-ups cleaning so it says a lot about the picture of women a lot of Wikipedians (both genders!) accepted as normal. Very diagnostically conclusive for the picture of females in Wikipedia is this [4] But maybe I am just a comic-banause because I do not like funny mangas or animes. I am sorry about this... I worked very long in jobs women were just scored by optical an sexual clichees, maybe this made me a little bit touchy... J. 1 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipe-tan?uselang=de 2 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uncle_Wikipe-tan_%28show_some_WIKILO… 3 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipe_tan_by_SigurdHosenfeld.png 4 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jimbo_and_Wikipe-tan.jpg?uselang=de

I am not going to defend the stereotypical figure of Wikipe-tan. However, the rationale of using a female character in Welcome to Wikipedia can be seen in at least two ways: a) the way you described, and b) that we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't. If we had picked a male character in the learning position, that could have been seen as continuing to speak to men. We worked all the time (and several women were involved in this process, including Sue Gardner), trying to focus as her as a person, not as a woman. I am sorry if I am speaking out of turn here. I just wanted to explain the thinking behind it. Now, I'll shut up and hope that we come back to the important part about creating more female rolemodels. Best wishes, Lennart Lennart Guldbrandsson, Fellow of the Wikimedia Foundation / Wikimedia Foudation-stipendiat Chair of Wikimedia Sverige / ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige http://wikimedia.se Tfn: 031 - 12 50 48 Mobil: 070 - 207 80 05 Epost: l_guldbrandsson(a)hotmail.com Användarsida: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndare:Hannibal Blogg: http://mrchapel.wordpress.com/ Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 14:56:49 -0400 From: artisticaltruist(a)gmail.com To: gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Visible female faces for Wikim/pedia 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. 2011/3/20 Juliana da Costa José <julianadacostajose(a)googlemail.com> Additional: I really love the first sentence here [1]: "Wikipe-tan is one of the personifications of Wikipedia." So if you see the following pictures (my favourites are this [2] and [3]) and see a child-eyed girl in french-roommade-dress and hold-ups cleaning so it says a lot about the picture of women a lot of Wikipedians (both genders!) accepted as normal. Very diagnostically conclusive for the picture of females in Wikipedia is this [4] But maybe I am just a comic-banause because I do not like funny mangas or animes. I am sorry about this... I worked very long in jobs women were just scored by optical an sexual clichees, maybe this made me a little bit touchy... J. 1 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipe-tan?uselang=de 2 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uncle_Wikipe-tan_%28show_some_WIKILO… 3 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipe_tan_by_SigurdHosenfeld.png 4 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jimbo_and_Wikipe-tan.jpg?uselang=de _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- "Only the shallow know themselves." - Oscar Wilde _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap

hehe ;) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipe-tan%27s_past,_now_and_future2… 2011/3/20, Carol Moore in DC <contactme(a)carolmoore.net>et>:

Yes it is good to provoke a discussion this way. I myself hate this pictures, maybe this is overshadowing a neutral point of view. I am sorry J. 2011/3/20, carolmooredc(a)verizon.net <carolmooredc(a)verizon.net>et>:

--- On Sun, 20/3/11, carolmooredc(a)verizon.net <carolmooredc(a)verizon.net> wrote: Thinking out loud here: Having images that contain both a female and a male figure might actually be useful for young men, on a subliminal level. Having the two figures drawn in similar ways makes it more difficult to objectify the image, because there would be a natural tendency for men to identify with the male image. It's harder psychologically to objectify and identify with an image at the same time. To the extent that the viewer identifies with the image, they then also identify with the female figure in the image somewhat; the message becomes one of sameness and shared characteristics. I am obviously not talking about romantic depictions here. And it would help if the female figure weren't dressed like a maid. ;) If it's well done, it might convey an implication of comradeship, and a reminder that this is a joint effort involving both sexes. Wikipe-tan is pure objectification. For the male viewer, she is "other". The ones showing knickers and so on are in grossly poor taste. Males viewing those images are not encouraged to picture women working side by side with them, doing the same job they are doing. The whole vibe is of a boys-only environment, where the (falsely assumed) lack of actual female presence is compensated with a stereotypical fantasy girl. (That may also carry through into article illustration preferences sometimes.) It's good for men to be aware that they are in mixed-gender company. As the study on collective intelligence posted by Joseph the other day suggested, social behaviour and group intelligence generally tend to improve somewhat. Andreas

Per my vote: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Deletion_requests/Fi… Be bold: Delete them *all* and let the data gods sort them out. I think discussion in the early days of this list pretty much established from the get-go that Wikipe-tan was a major turnoff, that she conjured up some pretty unsavory stereotypes (of both female and male Wikipedians, I should add), that she was unrepresentative and that Jimbo was not a fan. A few years ago we got rid of Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense. I loved those pages; I had added quite a bit to them. But I could see the point of the deletion nom. It created licensing problems and violated WP:DENY. We moved it to Uncyclopedia (or did we?). Wikipedia survived, and grew up just a little more. We could certainly survive giving Wikipe-tan her walking papers. Daniel Case

I noticed that the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipe-tan just survived a second deletion attempt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:Wi… The main Wikipe-tan image obviously should be the focus of *Change*. Obviously there are lots of fans. But once there are alternatives, it might be easier to go for individual or mass deletion of the most problematic ones. Also, I searched "create anime character" and found a bunch of places where you can, which might solve artistic problem, depending on if programs exist for creating them off line and non-copyrighted. In case someone wants to check it out. On 3/20/2011 8:46 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:

Agreed, especially because the woman in the comic does not start out as a contributor. I think it's great that such a brochure exists, but it's nice to see actual human beings that you can contact and talk to in help documentation. In the wikiHow tour there are pictures of the contributors: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Tour/Community wikiHow also has something called Meet a Community Member, that you can see in the bottom right-hand column next to most articles that describes editors and the things they like working on. Since half of the active admins are female at this point, there have been many female faces. I thought I'd just throw these things out there in case they inspired any ideas. -Nicole/elocina 2011/3/20 Juliana da Costa José <julianadacostajose(a)googlemail.com> -- "Only the shallow know themselves." - Oscar Wilde