-----Original Message----- From: Sage Ross [mailto:ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 11:48 AM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium
Last week a Citizendium participant sent out this message on h-afro-am:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-afro-am&mont...
The whole thing is worth reading, but the gist of it is this paragraph:
"I am withdrawing from Citizendium because of the racist and sexist policy put in place by Larry Sanger, who claims that the disciplines of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies do not belong in the list of top level categories in Citizendium, or as individual categories at all. Sanger has unilaterally decided that all race and gender topics should be split up under traditional disciplinary headings, so that there will be, for example, a sub-group of "African American Literature," and "African American History," but no category -- at any level -- in African American studies, and he embraces the same tactic of fragmenting other Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies. The fact that his broad strokes of exclusion primarily effect women and minority scholars does not seem to matter to him."
I'm interested to know the reactions of the Wikipedians on this list who've been participating in Citizendium. This persistence of this kind of thing, especially entrenched at the policy level, would probably spell the doom of Citizendium's long-term prospects (which would be unfortunate in my view).
-Sage
Kali Tal's blog postings:
http://www.freshmonsters.com/kalital/archives/2006/11/racism_and_sexism_at_c... http://www.freshmonsters.com/kalital/archives/2006/11/update_on_racism_and_s...
I am not a participant, but have read her blog postings regarding this matter, and am well acquainted with Larry. Larry insisted that rather than fall under Ethnic studies, African-American Literature would fall under American Literature. Tal claims that enough knowledge has been generated by Ethic and Gender Studies to justify a separate expert review system for subjects which could fall within their purview.
She is rather like Larry, does not suffer fools....
I don't think this incident is particularly significant. We would have trouble with her here if she was or is an active editor. Like Larry, she knows the answers, learned them as a sophomore.
Fred