[Gendergap] Visible female faces for Wikim/pedia

[Nicole Willson]

I find it interesting that both comic images (Sara and WIkipe-tan)
perpetuate female stereotypes:

- Sara gets to be the person who doesn't know what she's doing. I think the
intentions behind this were probably good, but it seems like most ads have
the woman as the clueless one. For example, when you want to explain
something at the simplest level, you're often told to speak as if you are
talking to "Aunt Agatha" instead of "Uncle Fred".

- Wikipe-tan is the one chosen to enforce wiki love, which is another role
stereotypically given to females. I guess it's a Rosie the Riveter reference
more than an Uncle Sam one, but still, one tells you to go and work, the
other tells you to go spread wikiLove (and I don't exactly know what that
means in the context of Wikipedia since I've never been the recipient of any
wiki love for any of my work on the WMF projects). It does make me feel a
bit better, however, that people are being encouraged to spread wiki love,
even if I haven't benefited from this directly as a result of my editing on
the WMF projects.

The worse one for me is this one of jumping Wikipe-tan with the tiny apron:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jumping_Wikipe-tan.png?uselang=de

I actually like anime and manga (see my Wikipedia edit history for proof),
but that one is going way too far for my taste.

2011/3/20 Juliana da Costa José <julianadacostajose at googlemail.com>

> Additional:
>
> I really love the first sentence here [1]:
>
> "Wikipe-tan is one of the personifications of Wikipedia."
>
> So if you see the following pictures (my favourites are this [2] and
> [3]) and see a child-eyed girl in french-roommade-dress and hold-ups
> cleaning so it says a lot about the picture of women a lot of
> Wikipedians (both genders!) accepted as normal.
>
> Very diagnostically conclusive for the picture of females in Wikipedia
> is this [4]
>
> But maybe I am just a comic-banause because I do not like funny mangas
> or animes. I am sorry about this...
> I worked very long in jobs women were just scored by optical an sexual
> clichees, maybe this made me a little bit touchy...
>
> J.
>
>
> 1 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipe-tan?uselang=de
>
> 2
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uncle_Wikipe-tan_%28show_some_WIKILOVE%29.png
>
> 3 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipe_tan_by_SigurdHosenfeld.png
>
> 4
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jimbo_and_Wikipe-tan.jpg?uselang=de
>
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-- 
"Only the shallow know themselves." - Oscar Wilde
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