[Gendergap] High-heeled shoes as a case study

[Sydney Poore]

Hi Toby :-)

You made my day by cleaning up this category!

I thought I was going to have to make room in my schedule to do it today. If
you look through my contributions on Commons, you see that for the last 18
months the bulk of my edits to Commons is cleaning up mis-categorized
controversial images.  I usually do the most outrageous ones because there
just too many to do.

So, I greatly appreciate you do it, and invite other people to give us a
hand.

Warmest regards,

Sydney Poore
User:FloNight




On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 6:48 AM, Toby Hudson <tobyyy at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Gendergap mailing list
>> Gendergap at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gendergap mailing list
> Gendergap at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/attachments/20110904/030469a6/attachment.htm