Yes, Wikipedia Is Sexist -- That's Why It Needs You (original) (raw)

In a New York Times op-ed, writer Amanda Filipacchi shared her discovery that sexism on Wikipedia is intrusively shaping how women are represented, and in this case, how women are sometimes categorized as a special subset within a broader occupation. [Disclaimer: one of the services my agency offers is teaching webinars and workshops on the principles of Wikipedia editing.] While the veracity of this claim is being debated and questioned within the Wikipedia community (many are pointing out that the edits Filipacchi describes were rejected strongly, and that there are more structural problems with the entries discussed), there's no doubt that gender and other biases, both conscious/intentional and unconscious, are common on Wikipedia. Over the years, any number of flare-ups around gender have occurred, ranging from harassment via vandalism of women's pages, to using language and informational structures that marginalize or even erase entire genders, and more.

But saying that "Wikipedia is sexist" and hoping its users change their ways misses the mark on the bigger opportunity we have culturally to shift how we represent our information and stories on Wikipedia. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but over 80% of Wikipedia's editors are young, white, child-free men, which means that their perspective is what largely dominates how information is organized, framed and written. There's nothing inherently wrong with a young, white, child-free man's perspective, of course-- it's just that there are tons of other perspectives in the world that should influence how a story gets told. Think about how many Americans, for example, learned about white colonists' relationships with the indigenous peoples that lived on the continent. The purely-Manifest-Destiny version of the events that's often given to children in school definitely isn't how people who've been nearly eradicated would tell that story.

Thus, it's critical that we have as many perspectives as we can find creating the information that we share with one another, and this is a driving force behind one of Wikipedia's main principles: neutral point of view. One person's take can never be completely neutral, but Wikipedia's guidelines hope that with many people participating, the most neutral version of a story will arise.

Which is why it's not enough to sit back and hope for the best when finding sexist, racist, homophobic, trans*phobic, etc., language or information on Wikipedia. In order to fix it, we need lots of different kinds of people to jump in and start editing Wikipedia, too. That's a scary prospect, but there are tons of resources available for beginners to get started.

One of my own first forays into understanding the sexism of the Wikipedia community, and learning how it could right itself, was back in 2005. A very public conversation took place about the fact that the entry for "Woman" contained a list of (mostly derogatory) slang terms for women. On top of the abject negativity that section offered for the entry, there was also no comparable list in the entry for "Man." But instead of simply kvetching on blogs and listservs, the Wikipedians who cared about the issue took to the "Talk" page of the "Woman" entry -- this is where anyone can discuss the content of a page -- and started to hash out how and why to improve. Eventually, everyone agreed to move those terms to the "Misogyny" entry.

Not every discussion ends up working out so neatly, of course, but Wikipedians have worked hard on hammering out editing guidelines together (there's even a mediation process for people who can't agree on how a page should be edited). Where things start to get sticky is figuring out how to handle the bias that may influence those guidelines. For example, one of the principles of a Wikipedia entry is notability. How notable an item is can depend on how much it's been referenced in 3rd-party sources, like academic journals or news articles. With the case of the novelists in the Times piece, verifying that a novelist who is a woman is notable could get complicated based on that guideline. Tech entrepreneur and author Lauren Bacon brought this to my attention in an email discussion: "If [writers who are women] can't get equal representation in the literary review pages, then how can they get the necessary 'credible source' citations that Wikipedia demands in order to deem them a noteworthy individual?"

I don't expect Wikipedia to solve the sexism that exists in the world, but I do see it as a place for us to challenge the status quo of the sexism that surrounds us. And it's not enough that we create an open system and say that everyone has the opportunity to work on it-- we need to make intentional interventions into the status quo that involve raising the voices of those who are not heard as often. That's just starting to happen, and I'm looking forward to seeing where we take it, together.

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Many thanks to Sarah Stierch for sharing WikiWomen and the Teahouse resources with me.