I think the problems not in trying to fix the imbalance in knowledge, something for which history has big role in what and how information was even still is recorded. I think the presumption that when we ask women to edit about women we predispose the assumption that women are only interested in women and only women can or want to write about them. We have had a lot of concepts that have improved content about women and they have focused on getting women to do the contributions.
sorry Fred to quote as an example
Women editors might have something to add about nursing and the history
of nursing that adds gender-specific value, increasing our coverage of the subject. So a workshop at a nursing convention might be valuable.
What we need to do is shift our train of thought from women can contribute to subjects about women to providing environments that let and encourage women to contribute to topics that interest them not us. The same applies to other "minorities" where the subject being written is less important than enabling participation. For that we need to consider in broader terms what is notable, what defines notability, how do we draw in those intangible knowledge sources to broaden the base for both contributors and contributions.
We have the ridiculous case of Indigenous people in Australia being considered as fauna until the 1960's, so that when an Indigenous person was written about historically(even now its still applies) that in itself is significant but we measure the notability of a person based not on the uniqueness of such but on whether there is sufficient volume of other works about the person. We have created an inherently bias system that favours those of colonial heritage with colonial records over those who dont have that historical privilege, we encourage this as Romaine put its with a tokenism of participation and expectation of contributions conforming to maintain that bias. While we do that we dont actually value the contributor or the contributions nor what else can be brought to the community.
On 7 May 2018 at 17:31, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
On 7 May 2018 at 10:01, FRED BAUDER fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
Women editors might have something to add about nursing and the history
of nursing that adds gender-specific value, increasing our coverage of the subject. So a workshop at a nursing convention might be valuable.
Fred
----- Original Message ----- From: Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, 07 May 2018 04:52:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Gendergap approach causing problems
2018-05-07 9:55 GMT+03:00 Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com:
Amir, It's funny - after reading your mail I wondered if I had read Romaine's mail correctly.
You had probably read it correctly.
Generally, I'm wondering whether direct invitations to women or people of color (or women of color, etc.) work as they should. Many people say that they work. They may be right, at least in part. If I understand
correctly,
Romaine says that he has doubts about it, and he's probably right, too,
at
least for some people.
I'm just trying to say that diversity is important. How do we reach it? I don't have very good answers. Probably not "one size fits all".
I mean, I want that woman about whom Romaine was speaking to contribute
her
knowledge. I want everybody to contribute their knowledge. Unless I
missed
it, Romaine didn't write what is her expertise, but just for the sake of the example, let's make something up and say that it's Astronomy.
Do I want her to contribute her knowledge about Astronomy? Of course I
do.
Should I tell her that I hope that she contributes her knowledge about Astronomy? I probably should. (Do correct me if I'm wrong.)
Do I think that she has something to say about Astronomy that men don't? Yes, it's quite possible. Should I tell her that? Hmm, I don't know.
Maybe,
maybe not. I think that this is the question that Romaine is trying to raise. And again, please correct me if I'm wrong. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
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Thanks for reminding everyone that we live in the 21st Century, where there are plenty of women role models at the top of previously male dominated professions, not just nursing.
The Wikipedia community has the most success at correcting gender bias by encouraging interested volunteers of any gender to create articles which help correct that bias, in all subjects.
Fae
faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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