Stuart, Yes there are lots of institutions we could work with, given the proper funding and volunteers to monitor efforts. However, we can also use the GLAM contacts we already have. I believe the proper channel to propose something like this is the Wikiproject Women artists. We need to be careful though about partner selection, because we don't want to get involved in political discussions with activist groups. The Guerrilla girls don't seem to be an institution, but more a group of performance artists. When you look at GLAMs that we have worked with in the past, generally the work relationships are through image donations and/or data donations. I advocate using the lists we already have access to as a basis for making statements about "black holes" in our data. Making a statement about how many women vs. men there are in any given list of names (french engravers, dutch architects, and so forth) is useless, because those lists are not based on any finite list from an institution. When you publish a list of "french engravers in the collection of the British library" then you can make valid statements about that specific set of data.
I am a bit unclear about what you mean about a non-straight-white-male-wheel, because the list I published is from the PCF (via Magnus) and there is nothing about it that re-invents a wheel (though we should probably be doing that anyway as well).
Jane
On Feb 23, 2014, at 8:06 PM, Stuart A. Yeates wrote:
Not discounting the excellent points made above, I can't help but feel that there are groups that have been fighting discrimination in institutions for decades and that maybe we need to work with them rather than reinvent a non-straight-white-male-wheel ourselves. People like http://womenintheartsfoundation.org/ , http://www.guerrillagirls.com/ , http://www.ifuw.org/ , etc. It seems to me like the kind of activity that WMF might have funds for.
cheers stuart
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