Re: [Gendergap] [Research] The encyclopedia must fail! - Notes on queering Wikipedia

Dear all, This follow up mail is in response to a couple of queries I received offlist. I thought I would share this on-list to avoid possible misunderstandings. First off, this article is not my perspective. I shared this article because I thought that this might be of interest to many members of this list. Second, the article seems to have a few factual inaccuracies: 1. Quoting from the article : "*By January 2012, having become a regular contributor, I decided to create an article on Bama. Within a few minutes of creating the article, it was nominated for deletion (Wikipedia). In the next two days, I argued my way out of my first Wikipedia deletion and the article survived. While having repeatedly heard about the unevenness of the Wikipedia’s knowledge geographies and the presence of fervent deletionism, that someone would decide Bama, a pioneer of marginalized women voices and a noted author with multiple web links, mentions and more, not noteworthy by Wikiverse standards within minutes of its creation, baffled me*." The edit history of this article gives me a different picture altogether. It looks like the deletion tag was placed not because of lack of notability, but because the BLP was unsourced. The author mentions that they argued for two days to make it survive, but I do not see any evidence of a discussion on the talk page of the article. It occurs as if the author removed the deletion tag minutes after it was placed, by adding one citation. Ref : https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bama_%28writer%29&diff=47006… Systemic bias against articles about women from non-English speaking countries does exist on English Wikipedia, but I guess this example is insufficient to prove this point. 2. Quote : "For two self-identified female editors including the author, it seemed logical to include news reports of the potency tests conducted on Asaram since details of the victim’s hymen examination existed already. However, as one male-identified editor, Mr K. argued..." The username of the author, as seen on the archive is User: Dr.K and not Mr.K. I do not find an instance on this user's userpage where they self identified as male. I do not find any evidence where the two editors in question self identified as female, either (Correct me if I am wrong here). The research may have tried to establish that the masculine voice of the editor tried to silence a feminine perspective, but this example, like the previous one, is not sufficient to prove this point. Ref : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Asaram_Bapu/Archive_4 I placed a comment on the original article 9 days ago pointing these out, but it looks as if it is still awaiting moderation :-( That said, the article gave me many interesting perspectives. + 1 to Valerie for the quote : I found it this quote as the best among all. I also greatly appreciate the hard work that went into the creation of this research paper. Regards Netha On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 6:07 AM, A. Mani &lt;a.mani.cms(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Netha Hussain Student of Medicine and Surgery Govt. Medical College, Kozhikode Blogs : *nethahussain.blogspot.com <http://nethahussain.blogspot.com>swethaambari.wordpress.com <http://swethaambari.wordpress.com>*