No, I'm 100% with you. It's not sexist to recognize that women are studied separately, hell, we have a whole field dedicated to women and gender. I think its incredibly helpful to have women in a separate category to assess our level of coverage for women in that field; knowing where our coverage is deficient is the first step to combating systemic bias.
I think people should be up in arms about sexism on Wikipedia, but the sexism isn't in the existence of "women x" categories, it's in how sparsely they're populated.
Kei
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----- Reply message ----- From: "Sarah Stierch" sarah.stierch@gmail.com To: "Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects" gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Gendergap] Liz Henry on women novelists, English Wikipedia, and labelling Date: Sat, Apr 27, 2013 7:32 PM
????
Regardless...I'm beginning to feel like I'm the only person on earth who feels having a category for "Women foo" is a good idea for the sake of women's studies and feminist studies. I find immense value in categories based around gender and ethnicity - it makes my writing and work a lot easier (as a researcher who writes about women and minorities) when working in Wikipedia and wanting to expand content about those subjects. As long as they get listed in other appropriate non-gender/non-ethnicity/non-foo categories, I think it's okay. We're not a library, we're an online collaborative encyclopedia.
Even on Wiki, I feel like one of the few people voicing my opinion about it only to get told I'm in the wrong. It's really depressing.
I almost feel like a jerk for feeling that way. Go figure.
-Sarah
On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 3:12 PM, Akhil Mulgaonker liberalufp@gmail.comwrote:
Women are inferior to men and exterminated like ants.
On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 7:17 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.ukwrote:
The recent discussion on this (which never really came to a clear consensus):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_101#Ac...
- Andrew
On 27 April 2013 01:49, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
If people are concerned about sexism in Wikipedia categories they
should be
drawing attention to edits like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elizabeth_Gillies&curid=19682...
While the rest of the world is moving away from gender-specific job
names
(like policeman and actress), Wikipedia is moving in the opposite
direction.
That seems like a much worse problem than categorizing women as women.
Ryan Kaldari
On 4/25/13 11:34 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
Hi all,
On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:56:39 -0400 Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org wrote:
Wikimedia community member Liz Henry blogs here:
http://bookmaniac.org/journalists-dont-understand-wikipedia-sometimes/
and does a little bit of digging into edit histories.
"Just from these three samples, it does not seem that there is any particular movement among a group of Wikipedia editors to remove women from the “novelists” category and put them in a special women category instead. I would say that the general leaning, rather, is to stop
people
who would like to label women writers as women writers *in addition*
to
labeling them as writers, claiming there is no need for Category: American women writers at all and that it is evidence of bias to identify them by gender. ... The sexist thing we should be up in arms about isn’t labelling women as women! It’s the efforts to delete entire categories (like Haitian women writers, for example) because someone has decided that that meta-information is unnecessary “ghettoization”..."
Seems like good write-up and I tend to agree. It's too bad there was so much misunderstanding in the media about it.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
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