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(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 7 May 2018 at 10:01, FRED BAUDER
<fredbaud(a)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(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)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(a)gmail.com>om>:
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.
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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(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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