Well I think it is even more basic than that. People (and myself as Wikipedian included) tend to google search for info and rarely pick up the pay-walled stuff if their searches are set to free knowledge. We all know how google favors Wikipedia, but this particular female academic has no Wikipedia page, while the guy who wrote the offending blog post does. I mean the one who wrote the book (which would probably have been on such a page) but the woman who wrote the blog about the blog doesn't have one either. So if the guy just googled the stuff there is a very good chance that he really didn't pick up the info that the blog is objecting to. In other words, the problem with systemic bias is even worse than she knows.
Oddly, there appears to be no solidarity among female Wikipedians that take this into account, because I assume we have lots of female academic Wikipedians who could easily write about other female academics in academic articles (or on Wikipedia) if they wanted to and don't. In fact, on Wikipedia they just hold them to the same biased standards and are probably (being detail oriented) even more careful with "the rules" as men are, which Yaroslav discovered to his distaste this week when I asked him (as academic) to take a look at an AfC for Nitasha Kaul which he successfully created after crossing swords with a (self-proclaimed female academic) AfC volunteer LaMona: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articl... (scroll down to Draft:Nitasha Kaul)
Even though I was annoyed enough to post about this on facebook (which is where Yaroslav responded) I don't even fault LaMona for her behavior, since she is "just following AfC rules" and has probably never even realized that what she did was not only not taking the wider academic community's female bias into account, but also the "Global South bias" and the "people of color bias". This is exactly why we organize things like Art&Feminism and Women's History month, if only to try and get the conversation started. You only start to understand the problem when you do something like what Yaroslav did (which I myself was unwilling to do, to my shame).
For the record, as Yaroslav is a common figure at AfD, his comment that it would be kept there is what allowed the article in main namespace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Nitasha_Kaul
On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 6:13 AM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
One exacerbating factor maybe worth adding in, which is also relevant for what Wikipedia cites imo, is that more popular or journalistic writing tends not to cite academic writing, even when very relevant, sometimes even when the journalist/author in question actually did read something by the academic in question during the course of their research. Partly this is because journalistic/popular writing has much less emphasis on citations as currency to begin with, and stylstically prefers to avoid citations and footnotes. And partly because they seem to only consider other things on a similar level of popularity worth acknowledging--- other best-sellers, well-known pundits, even high-traffic blogs, but not as much the lowly academic monograph or journal article.
-Mark
Heather Ford hfordsa@gmail.com writes:
There's an interesting discussion going on right now on the Association
of
Internet Researchers mailing list about the citing of women (and women of colour) in academia that I thought might be interesting. The comments are also really (as Gabriella Coleman noted) 'lively' so they're worth a read too. I'd be curious to learn more about how we as a Wikipedia research community fare here too...
https://merylalper.com/2016/02/22/please-read-the-article-please-cite-women-...
Best, Heather.
Dr Heather Ford University Academic Fellow School of Media and Communications http://media.leeds.ac.uk/, The University of Leeds w: hblog.org / EthnographyMatters.net http://ethnographymatters.net/
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