[Gendergap] High-heeled shoes as a case study

[Toby Hudson]

I've made a start on refactoring this category according to the principle of
least surprise.  Feel free to do this whenever you notice a "surprising"
image in a mundane category.

Regarding consent, if any of the identifiable women are in private
locations, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:PEOPLE<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:High-heeled_shoes>applies,
and the uploader should state that permission was obtained to take
& publish the image.  If this has not been done, please either contact the
uploader or propose deletion.

Toby Hudson  /  99of9


On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Sydney Poore <sydney.poore at gmail.com> wrote:

> Category:High-heeled shoes is an excellent example of the current problem
> WMF projects are having with creating and disseminating content that is
> unbiased.
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:High-heeled_shoes
>
> This category is different that most all the other categories about
> footwear because it contains many images that are not primarily examples of
> high-heeled shoes. Most other categories about footwear contain mostly
> images of shoes or the lower leg(s) with a shoe or shoes.
>
> The number of images in Category:High-heeled shoes is higher than most
> categories about footwear. Approximately one- third of the images are of
> full body shots of attractive females who are wearing high heeled shoes, and
> a significant number of them are nude or posed in sexually provocative
> positions.
>
> There are random women who are wearing shoes and are mixed in with the
> porn-stars and strip-tease dancers. These women are being objectified and
> sexualized without their consent because of the way the the images are
> displayed in  the category. See Wikipedia article on Sexualization
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexualization for a description of the term.
>
> In each language that has Wikipedia articles about high-heeled shoes, the
> content is about a type of footwear, so the links in the articles that lead
> to commons are directing people to nudity or sexual content that they would
> not anticipate. There are other problems with some of the images, including
> unclear consent for the image to be uploaded by the subject of the image.
>
> I see this category as a concrete example of systemic bias coming from
> having a male dominated editing community.
>
> Leather boots is only other category that I found that also has a large
> number of images of people. It also contain a disproportionate number of
> images of women who are nude or in sexually provocative poses.
>
> I think that it is important to continue to talk about these issues in the
> hope that more people with became educated about the problems with with our
> current methods to collect, categorize, and disseminate content.
>
> Sydney Poore
> User:FloNight
>
>
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>
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