Nemo, that is so cool you said that, because it proves as I have long suspected that I have developed some sort of blind eye to such things. I recognized your snippy response as only being a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived anti-Italian remark, not to an anti-male remark!
Anyway as I said in my first mail in this thread I am also reacting to a self-interpreted attack for being perceived for the shameful underrepresentation on women's topics (I think way less than 10% of what I have contributed onwiki is female-oriented). For the record, I am a huge Glam fan and i think Caravaggio rocks, so don't shoot me for these observations, which are I think fascinating. I will continue to compile these lists on museum collections, because exploring the data of the institutions Wikipedia bases its own content on is important to our understanding of the perceived biases.
I am somewhat confused about your comment on warfare and trenches. I simply advocate one-on-one coaching of women in the tips and tricks that male contributors discover easily on their own.
Like you I am also interested in learning more about such social dynamics and feel a yearly editor survey would be a good place to start. Jane
Sent from my iPad
On Feb 23, 2014, at 12:44 PM, "Federico Leva (Nemo)" nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jane Darnell, 23/02/2014 10:37:
Men, when perceiving anti-male behavior tend to do the opposite, namely they become aggressive and stand their ground.
True, and in laughable ways even. Is such an attitude, however, so peculiarly true of this "male" label, which seems so secondary and useless? The "males under siege" attitude I sometimes saw (never on Wikimedia projects though) is ludicrous and looks crazy fanaticism. However, earlier this morning, I experienced something like that with Jane's observations. The hint that I may be considered evil for the shameful underrepresentation of non-Italian (or even non-Ariosto/Tasso) ottava rima poems authors in my personal library... made me feel under attack. And I bite back automatically. Suddenly I understood how one can stupidly feel attacked for one's own inner self. It would be interesting to know more about such social dynamics in a more general way. They're certainly not new, see e.g. an Ariosto example in Walter Scott's "Waverley", chapter 54.
The key way to entice more women to contribute is to give them the tips and tricks [...]
Sounds like warfare and trenches. The real solution is making people not feel attacked, not making your attacks stronger or more subtle. Like, admit that a user writing about "underrepresented painters" is just the ordinary story of a volunteer who contributes to a wiki with the bias of their own personal interests, because that's how volunteers and wikis work, compensated by the other people's interests, NPOV, NOR etc. The same story as with users exclusively writing about [male] catholic bishops, [male] soccer, [ungendered?] pokémons, or [mixed!] English modernists writers. (Though I intimately and strongly despise the first three, and I do the latter.) Unilateral proclaims of one's own higher moral and intellectual stance rarely result into durable peace treaties.
Nemo
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