Wikipedia’s Sexism
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Childish behavior like this is much more damaging to Wikipedia's reputation than any critical article in the media. And as long as the editors of Wikipedia act this way, Wikipedia will never get a single cent from me, no matter how many banner ads they slap over the top of the page pleading for donations.
Seriously, there's no army of anonymous trolls out on the Internet capable of a sustained edit campaign on a single page that just about manages to stay within Wikipedia's rules. It's editors and their sock puppets.
More generally, I'm getting tired of people acting like anonymous trolls are a completely separate set of people from normal members of the community. Like it or not, they're the same people. We don't log onto a different account and suddenly become a 14-year-old boy that's scared of girls, we channel our inner 14-year-old boy. Sooner we accept that, sooner we can grow up.
If you consider the context of what that editor is going through right now, his reaction makes more sense.
> Due to my policy edits in removing promotional materials from articles relating to Amanda Filipacchi, I have been harassed, stalked and threatened both on- and off-wiki. I have received death threats.
For example, there are lists of cities by population for most countries; if you could manually select a subgroup for -a- country and submit that as a search group along with other terms, might be within reach ... but to do that for -all- countries, imagine the complexity. Maybe when WP gets a few more million-core supercomputers.
On the other hand, that would be a -great- project for some enterprising startup.
This is an important subcategory, but Wikipedia's categorization guidelines clearly state that subcategories defined by ethnicity or gender are non-diffusing. As such, American women novelists should be listed here as well as in the American novelist category
Which implies that if the wikipedia editors were following the basic rules, adding the sex-specific categories wouldn't do anything to solve the "this list of novelists is too long" problem.
I admit I am curious how she feels about contests, prizes, scholarships targeting American women novelists. https://www.google.com/search?q=scholarships+women+writers+a...
Not to mention that some first names can be either male or female and that the genders of foreign names may be hard to figure out if you've never heard them before (there are plenty of American novelists whose families came from elsewhere). This would make it easy for Wikipedia editors to misclassify somebody.