Yes I totally agree with this. The problem is actually two-fold; we lack
the women contributors, and the current notability rules cause us to talk
in circles about how to protect new female contributors from being put off
by the systemic bias inherent in our internal processes. You don't have to
go back that far in time to find women listed as property and not people,
even in Western society. "Fauna" is a new one for me though! Writing as a
woman is of course different than writing about women. Everyone is welcome
to write about whatever they like. We miss the "female gaze" however - it
really doesn't matter what the women want to write about, as long as they
write. Massively as a large international group they choose to write
elsewhere and not on Wikipedia or any of the Wikimedia projects. The
question of why not may be simply technical or it could be the off-putting
challenge of learning to navigate our notability standards for things that
have historically only been academically documented by young white men.
Diving into things like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica shows huge gaps in
knowledge as well as amazing detail for things that don't interest us so
much today, such as geological survey data. Back when people grew their own
vegetables or made their own asphalt that may have been very useful to
know, but increasingly the stuff we eat and build with comes from places
very far away from us. Sadly, the information we use to build articles
about local stuff also comes from farther and farther away.
I was originally coaxed into my first local WLM meetup by a direct
invitation on my user talk page. Whether this direct approach that has
proven so successful with WLM helps for the gendergap specifically is an
unknown, because our group of female contributors to invite is so
small. The trick is to make the invitation as informal as possible and as
easy as possible to accept. I guess it is easier to think about the concept
of local heritage than it is to think about "female living", whatever that
may be. The point about diversity is you need to get people's attention so
they just add that extra little bit of focus when they are doing their
thing. In my case, I like to work on paintings and it takes me much more
time, sometimes years, to track down paintings by women, or portraits of
women, or paintings that have been in collections located in Africa and
other places not in the usual museum or art world circuit. I used to just
ignore the hard cases, but now I know I should pay extra attention and make
that extra bit of effort. In my small corner of the wikiverse I am slowly
tilting the scales from "paintings of women always show nudity" to
"paintings of women are mostly portraits". The point is to apply an extra
filter to the gaze we all have, to alert us to the female angle or the
non-Western angle.
The women who do contribute to our projects tend to have other interests
than just biographies or anything else gender-related. I think that's
normal.
On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 12:05 PM, Gnangarra <gnangarra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think the problems not in trying to fix the
imbalance in knowledge,
something for which history has big role in what and how information was
even still is recorded. I think the presumption that when we ask women to
edit about women we predispose the assumption that women are only
interested in women and only women can or want to write about them. We
have had a lot of concepts that have improved content about women and they
have focused on getting women to do the contributions.
sorry Fred to quote as an example
Women editors might have something to add about nursing and the history
of nursing that adds gender-specific value,
increasing our coverage of
the
subject. So a workshop at a nursing convention
might be valuable.
What we need to do is shift our train of thought from women can contribute
to subjects about women to providing environments that let and encourage
women to contribute to topics that interest them not us. The same applies
to other "minorities" where the subject being written is less important
than enabling participation. For that we need to consider in broader terms
what is notable, what defines notability, how do we draw in those
intangible knowledge sources to broaden the base for both contributors and
contributions.
We have the ridiculous case of Indigenous people in Australia being
considered as fauna until the 1960's, so that when an Indigenous person was
written about historically(even now its still applies) that in itself is
significant but we measure the notability of a person based not on the
uniqueness of such but on whether there is sufficient volume of other
works about the person. We have created an inherently bias system that
favours those of colonial heritage with colonial records over those who
dont have that historical privilege, we encourage this as Romaine put its
with a tokenism of participation and expectation of contributions
conforming to maintain that bias. While we do that we dont actually value
the contributor or the contributions nor what else can be brought to the
community.
On 7 May 2018 at 17:31, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7 May 2018 at 10:01, FRED BAUDER <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:
> > Women editors might have something to add about nursing and the history
of nursing that adds gender-specific value,
increasing our coverage of
the
subject. So a workshop at a nursing convention
might be valuable.
>
> Fred
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Mon, 07 May 2018 04:52:31 -0400 (EDT)
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Gendergap approach causing problems
>
> 2018-05-07 9:55 GMT+03:00 Jane Darnell <jane023(a)gmail.com>om>:
>
>> Amir,
>> It's funny - after reading your mail I wondered if I had read
Romaine's
>> mail correctly.
>
>
> You had probably read it correctly.
>
> Generally, I'm wondering whether direct invitations to women or people
of
> color (or women of color, etc.) work as they
should. Many people say
that
they
work. They may be right, at least in part. If I understand
correctly,
Romaine says that he has doubts about it, and
he's probably right, too,
at
> least for some people.
>
> I'm just trying to say that diversity is important. How do we reach
it?
I
don't
have very good answers. Probably not "one size fits all".
I mean, I want that woman about whom Romaine was speaking to contribute
her
knowledge. I want everybody to contribute their
knowledge. Unless I
missed
> it, Romaine didn't write what is her expertise, but just for the sake
of
the
example, let's make something up and say that it's Astronomy.
Do I want her to contribute her knowledge about Astronomy? Of course I
do.
> Should I tell her that I hope that she contributes her knowledge about
> Astronomy? I probably should. (Do correct me if I'm wrong.)
>
> Do I think that she has something to say about Astronomy that men
don't?
Yes,
it's quite possible. Should I tell her that? Hmm, I don't know.
Maybe,
maybe not. I think that this is the question that
Romaine is trying to
raise. And again, please correct me if I'm wrong.
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Thanks for reminding everyone that we live in the 21st Century, where
there are plenty of women role models at the top of previously male
dominated professions, not just nursing.
The Wikipedia community has the most success at correcting gender bias
by encouraging interested volunteers of any gender to create articles
which help correct that bias, in all subjects.
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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Out now: A.Gaynor, P. Newman and P. Jennings (eds.), *Never Again:
Reflections on Environmental Responsibility after Roe 8*, UWAP, 2017.
Order
here
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