[Gendergap] Women and Wikipedia by Barbara Fisher

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2008 at reagle.org> wrote:
> On Friday, February 04, 2011, Steven Walling wrote:
>> Joseph Reagle's op-ed explains this argument further I think: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wikipedia/open-doesnt-include-everyone
>
> I think that argument is often implicit, though, I haven't heard it expressed explicitly by any Wikipedians. *But* you can find plenty of examples of this argument explicitly in response to the NYT's article itself.

Implicit and long-standing in a lot of discussions, I'd say.

And a more complicated issue than it appears for Wikipedia, too. There
is of course a long-standing principle (in our culture, in many wikis)
of {{sofixit}} -- meaning, you can edit any page right now, go for it,
you can fix it yourself if it's broken -- and I'd argue that
principle, whether articulated or not, is deeply fundamental to the
success of our projects and a core part of Wikipedia. It's even our
tagline: "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Anyone means
you: that's the point.

So it's easy enough to extrapolate the idea. Something's broken? So
fix it. Not enough women are editing? So fix it. Why aren't you
editing? etc.  But I think there's a negative and a positive way to
say and to mean this: "it's your fault" rather than "you're empowered
to help".

-- phoebe


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