When you go to Wikipedia these days, you see a banner than has nothing to do with fundraising. (Full Disclosure: I have contributed to Wikipedia in the past.) It reads:
Amending Our Terms of Use: Please comment on a proposed amendment regarding undisclosed paid editing.
What follows is a notable, and I think noble, attempt to fight back the practice of glossing entries with slanted versions of reality.
Contributing to the Wikimedia Projects to serve the interests of a paying client while concealing the paid affiliation has led to situations that the community considers problematic. Many believe that users with a potential conflict of interest should engage in transparent collaboration, requiring honest disclosure of paid contributions.
And so that's the amendment they put forth, with a month of commentary and a detailed explanation to catch anyone up on the issue before the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees begins to consider it. It's the kind of transparency that be a model for many content companies.
Now, maybe the next such endeavor could address an even bigger problem. Because if bias is frowned upon, then the contributions by and about women should become a serious, and public, issue at Wikimedia.
This is not particularly new news, but just in case ...
Consider:
"Many female scientists are either not there at all on Wikipedia or just [have] stubs," said Dame Athene Donald, fellow of the Royal Society and professor of experimental physics at Cambridge University. "It's not just the historical characters, it's the current ones, and these very eminent women just somehow get overlooked." (From the Guardian)
And this:
One of those women, one of the Edit-a-thon's organizers Jacqueline Mabey, thinks most of the Wikipedia gender gap comes down to socialized gendering. “We don’t raise young women to consider themselves authorities on anything,” she said. “We raise them to doubt, constantly, their work and themselves.” (From New York Magazine)
And this:
For instance, there’s a growing army of women who are trying to end Wikipedia’s well-documented gender gap — fewer than 15% ofWikipedia editors around the world, it acknowledges — which has given the crowdsourced information site an arguably sexist bent. (From Business Insider Australia)
This:
Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. (MIT Technology Review)
And just in case you doubted:
The significant and stable under-representation of women results in persistently unbalanced coverage (e.g. articles related to football are much more developed than articles related to motherhood) in Wikipedia. The gender gap may be driven significantly by Wikipedia's conflict-oriented culture. Experienced female editors can be very successful—they are more likely to become administrators than men—but they are more likely to leave if treated aggressively in discussions, especially as new editors, when their good-faith contributions are more likely to be reverted than a similarly good-faith contribution by a man. (From Wikipedia.)
Oh, and Jimmy Wales agrees:
“The biggest issue is editor diversity,” says Wales. He hopes to “grow the number of editors in topics that need work.” (Also from MIT Technology Review)
It's not that the issue has gone completely unaddressed by Wikimedia. That would almost be impossible, in fact. In several of the articles I linked, you'll see women taking up the cause themselves, which is very much in the Wikipedia spirit. It just has not been enough, nor should it have to be. As Adrianne Wadewitz writes:
Sexism is a problem for everyone and everyone needs to combat it - it is not a problem that affects only women and it is not solely the responsibility of women to fix it. When one group is mistreated, systematically denied a voice or rights, that reflects poorly on the entire community and lessens the legitimacy of that community.
A new, top-level, fully open and critically considered solution is in order. One that creates an environment that encourages and empowers a greater diversity of voices.
It's important, as Tom Simonite at MIT Technology Review put it last fall, because, "Wikipedia matters to many more people than its editors and students who didn’t make time to read their assigned books. More of us than ever use the information found there, both directly and via other services. "
Noting a glossed entry leaves a Wiki reader with a bad taste. Broader biases are poisonous.
