[Gendergap] Fwd: [PRESS] Ottawa Citizen: The world according to men

[Sue Gardner]

I sent this to the Communications mailing list; am also sharing it here :-)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org>
Date: 9 February 2011 01:09
Subject: [PRESS] Ottawa Citizen: The world according to men
To: Communications Committee <wmfcc-l at lists.wikimedia.org>

I am happy to see continuing coverage of our gender gap: I
particularly like that most of the articles seem to take the stance of
"let's try to help." :-)

And I am happy that Katherine Govier is writing about us. She's
actually a quite important Canadian novelist, (Like Pat Barker's, her
article should be richer & more complete.)

Thanks,
Sue

--

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/world+according/4246585/story.html

The world according to men
BY KATHERINE GOVIER, OTTAWA FEBRUARY 8, 2011 BE THE FIRST TO POST A COMMENT

We were treated to the news last week, via the New York Times, that
Wikipedia, increasingly the go-to reference for historical and
contemporary general knowledge, has a dark secret. It is chiefly
written by 25-year-old males.

Help us and save us.

It’s true. A study has shown that only 13 per cent of the hundreds of
thousands of contributors to the “collaborative” online encyclopedia
are female. Of the 87 per cent who remain, and are male, the average
age is mid-twenties. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia
Foundation, (a woman, oddly enough) says this came about because of
Wikipedia’s nature. It is skewed toward aggressive hacker-types who
are obsessed with facts and reflect the male-dominated computer
culture. They are, furthermore, imbued with a sense that it is really
important for everyone to know about Niko Bellic, a character who is a
former soldier in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. He gets an
article five times as long as does Pat Barker, a (female) British
novelist in her late sixties. That is, he did until Gardner herself
added background to Pat Barker’s entry.

So this is how it works. Women have to step up and become Wikipedia
contributors. This suggestion has engendered comment, the best of it
being that women are too busy with their famous “double shift”
(remember that? Another thing that apparently hasn’t changed) of
working full-time and doing much of the child care and housework, to
also get down to writing the history of our time. Experts suggest the
dearth of female contributors is due to modesty. Women need to be
persuaded that their input is valuable.

I became a Wikipedia contributor once. I’d been chatting with
Professor Donald Smith of the University of Calgary, a longtime
contributor to the massive and authoritative Dictionary of Canadian
Biography. He told me a story about how his students found many errors
in a Globe and Mail story about General James Wolfe. They traced these
errors back to, guess where, Wikipedia. One of them was so incensed
she corrected Wikipedia’s entry. He was proud of her, but shocked and
distressed that our national news media use the amateur encyclopedia
to find their “facts.”

I was intrigued. Like many people, I hadn’t realized it was that easy
to make (up) history. I looked myself up. There I was. Birthdate,
education, books, etc. Also, rather prominently, a reference to the
man I had formerly been married to. I had no real objection to that.
It’s true. However I didn’t think that this fact was important enough
to be included in a two paragraph summary of my life and work.

I decided to do something about it. I registered as a contributor — I
remember this didn’t take very long — and I altered the entry, beefing
up the other information and removing the bit about the ex-husband.
Fine. What a feeling! It took half an hour. No one contradicted me. I
looked like quite a solid citizen, if I didn’t say so myself. So easy.

If only. A few months later I checked the entry again. The ex-husband
was back! But at least the present one is in.

I can live with that. I guess. As Gardner says about history-making
the online, collaborative way: “Everyone brings their crumb of
information to the table. If they are not at the table we don’t
benefit from their crumb.”

As a novelist, I spent years recreating the life of a superb woman
artist who was briefly famous and then disappeared. She was left off
the record, in her day. How did that happen? The answer complex. It
started with crumbs of information, to be sure. Because of her gender
she was left out of drinking parties, and the annual “famous men”
lists in a way that was more negligent than deliberate. But then
social mores kicked in. She was sidelined by family duties; she even
colluded to see her signature overwritten because her father’s would
bring in more money. Perhaps, ultimately, she was robbed of her
birthright in an act of violence by desperate disciples. We don’t
know. Because no one wrote it down.

Now, as writers and historians everywhere broaden their focus to
include the marginalized and the voiceless, we have to include the
computer-bereft. Unofficial information from the past — about family
life, social habits, folk beliefs, relationships of all kind — is what
we want most keenly. We know about the battles and acts of parliament
— high-placed record-keepers of old tell us. We look in attics and
prisons and temples for private information and news about the
unimportant people who are not in the textbooks.

In its idealistic stage, Wikipedia seemed set to change
history-in-the-making to reflect a broader constituency. But these
figures suggest that we’ve just changed mythmakers.

Wikipedia disdains rules, hierarchies, and orthodoxies. It pledges to
be open “even to misogynists.” It will not adopt a new way to gather
information. The result is that “the free encyclopedia that anyone can
edit” is in danger of losing its legitimacy. Meanwhile we have more
work cut out for us. Become a contributor. Go to any entry —
presumably one on which you have some expertise — and click on “edit.”
Log in as a new contributor. And start writing. It’s quite
exhilarating.

I checked out my ex-husband’s entry. I haven’t changed it. Much.

Katherine Govier’s latest novel, The Ghost Brush, HarperCollins.ca,
tells the story of Oei, daughter of the great Japanese printmaker
Hokusai and a great artist in her own right.



Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/world+according/4246585/story.html#ixzz1DRHluRfF




Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation

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415 816 9967 cell

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