Fae,
No, I have come to disagree that "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." This is simply because of our rules regarding references. Oddly,
Wikipedia can at best only echo the systemic bias, but will never be able
to correct it. To see what I mean, have a look at the percentage female per
occupation over at the dicare project. Traditional female professions such
as "nurse" or even "nun" have lower percentages female than
traditional
male professions such as football players have percentages male. Wikipedia
currently amplifies systemic bias, and that is not Wikipedia's fault. If
you pick up any newspaper and count the gender per obituary you will never
approach 50% female (at least not in my lifetime). Of course if you mean by
"correct it" to increase efforts like "Women in Red" to inch our
percentage
of 17% overal to 18% then yes, I do believe that is feasible.
Yesterday I attended a Pieter Pourbus painting exhibition in Gouda and the
booklet states in the opening paragraph "He married the daughter of the
famous painter Lancelot Blondeel". My companion drily remarked "Didn't she
have a name?". I think you will find that such sentences are all over
Wikipedia, in all sorts of biography leads. The women are mentioned
implicitly more often for their wombs than anything else. Almost like
fauna! Here in the Netherlands, the Dutch Wikipedia chased off an editor
who was trying to correct systemic bias in the country's archives
databases. She ended up publishing a book of female biographies called
"1001 Vrouwen" that resurrected the overlooked biographies of notable Dutch
women up to 1900. The next one for women of the 20th-century is coming out
this year. Now we have references, so we have those 1001 women in Wikidata
and lots of new articles about Dutch women in various language Wikipedias.
To really help "correct" the gender bias, we need to do much more outreach,
because we will never get there with the academic aggregate databases
available to us today.
Jane
On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 11:31 AM, 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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