Re: [Gendergap] Liz Henry on women novelists, English Wikipedia, and labelling - Gendergap

27 Apr 2013

No, I'm 100% with you. It's not sexist to recognize that women are studied
separately, hell, we have a whole field dedicated to women and gender. I think its
incredibly helpful to have women in a separate category to assess our level of coverage
for women in that field; knowing where our coverage is deficient is the first step to
combating systemic bias. 

I think people should be up in arms about sexism on Wikipedia, but the sexism isn't in
the existence of "women x" categories, it's in how sparsely they're
populated. 

Kei

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----- Reply message -----
From: "Sarah Stierch" &lt;sarah.stierch(a)gmail.com&gt;
To: "Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects"
&lt;gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
Subject: [Gendergap] Liz Henry on women novelists, English Wikipedia, and labelling
Date: Sat, Apr 27, 2013 7:32 PM

????

Regardless...I'm beginning to feel like I'm the only person on earth who
feels having a category for "Women foo" is a good idea for the sake of
women's studies and feminist studies. I find immense value in categories
based around gender and ethnicity - it makes my writing and work a lot
easier (as a researcher who writes about women and minorities) when working
in Wikipedia and wanting to expand content about those subjects. As long as
they get listed in other appropriate non-gender/non-ethnicity/non-foo
categories, I think it's okay. We're not a library, we're an online
collaborative encyclopedia.

Even on Wiki, I feel like one of the few people voicing my opinion about it
only to get told I'm in the wrong. It's really depressing.

I almost feel like a jerk for feeling that way. Go figure.

-Sarah

On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 3:12 PM, Akhil Mulgaonker &lt;liberalufp(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote:

...
  Women are inferior to men and exterminated like ants.

 On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 7:17 AM, Andrew Gray &lt;andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk&gt;wrote;wrote:

  The recent discussion on this (which never really
came to a clear
 consensus):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_101#A…

 - Andrew

 On 27 April 2013 01:49, Ryan Kaldari &lt;rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:
  If people are concerned about sexism in Wikipedia
categories they  should be
  drawing attention to edits like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elizabeth_Gillies&curid=1968…

 While the rest of the world is moving away from gender-specific job  names
  (like policeman and actress), Wikipedia is moving
in the opposite  direction.
  That seems like a much worse problem than
categorizing women as women.

 Ryan Kaldari

 On 4/25/13 11:34 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:56:39 -0400
> Sumana Harihareswara &lt;sumanah(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:
>
>> Wikimedia community member Liz Henry blogs here:
>> 
 http://bookmaniac.org/journalists-dont-understand-wikipedia-sometimes/
 >> and does a little bit of digging into
edit histories.
>>
>> "Just from these three samples, it does not seem that there is any
>> particular movement among a group of Wikipedia editors to remove women
>> from the “novelists” category and put them in a special women category
>> instead. I would say that the general leaning, rather, is to stop  people
 >> who would like to label women writers as
women writers *in addition*  to
  >
labeling them as writers, claiming there is no need for Category:
> American women writers at all and that it is evidence of bias to
> identify them by gender. ... The sexist thing we
> should be up in arms about isn’t labelling women as women! It’s the
> efforts to delete entire categories (like Haitian women writers, for
> example) because someone has decided that that meta-information is
> unnecessary “ghettoization”..."

 Seems like good write-up and I tend to agree. It's too bad there was so
 much
 misunderstanding in the media about it.

 Regards,

         Shlomi Fish

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 - Andrew Gray
   andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

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 *AKHIL MULGAONKER *

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*Sarah Stierch*
*Museumist, open culture advocate, and Wikimedian*
*www.sarahstierch.com*