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Introductory note: the person who prompted this story, Aaron Schwabach, is to the best of my knowledge a nice guy—not a Nice Guy, but a person who is proceeding in good faith and, as will become important below, gives prominent and substantial credit to his predecessors in the field of his writing, which is the legal analysis of fan fiction. He is a nice guy; he is also a beneficiary of male privilege.
Schwabach wrote an article, The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright, that appeared in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review in 2009. After the article appeared on SSRN, he noticed that the Wikipedia coverage of legal issues surrounding fan fiction had been turned into its own article, with material he thought significantly derived from his article. Being a good Wikipedian, Schwabach didn’t resent the apparent copying, especially since he well understood that copyright doesn’t cover facts or ideas; he merely added a citation to his article. (Other present citations are to Sonia Katyal, Charles Petit (a nonfan and nonacademic), and Rebecca Tushnet.)
The story seems to be that Wikipedians accepted the page as appropriately significant so that it was not deleted and edited it to follow his lead. (At least one page editor is quite fannish, and in examining her/his history I noticed that Whedonesque had been flagged for deletion as nonsignificant, though apparently this was beaten back.)
Excluding (1) pieces written from the copyright owner’s perspective or about Internet issues generally and (2) pieces about scanlation, fansubbing, and manga, here are the names of the people on Fanlore’s Legal Analysis page who wrote about fan fiction and fanvids in law reviews before Schwabach did (and most of whom, I emphasize again, he himself cited): Rosemary, Rebecca, Deborah, Meredith, Cecilia, Simone, Krissi, Leanne, Sonia, Mollie, Christina, Anupam & Madhavi, Ernest, Jacqueline, Casey, Christina, Edward, Nathaniel, Sarah, Steven, Megan & David, and Shira.
Notice anything?
As a baseline point of reference, 20.3% of law review articles at top journals have a sole female author, while adding articles with at least one female author brings the percentage to 25.2%. By contrast, of the 23 (including Schwabach) law review articles focusing on fan fiction through 2009, 8.7% are by male-female partnerships, 21.7% are by men, and 69.6% are by women.
So, a subfield of knowledge largely created and explored by women became interesting to Wikipedia when a man talked about it, and citation-wise looks on Wikipedia--increasingly the first place to which people turn for information online--like a field in which male sources of authority are at least equal to female sources.
Tell me again that Wikipedia doesn’t have a woman problem?
And, you know, I reserve most of my limited editing energy for Fanlore, though I did correct the faulty reference to Fanlore in that one Wikipedia entry. I suppose I could, like Schwabach, edit the Wikipedia entry, though that might be considered to run afoul of the self-promotion policies, which, of course, have generally admirable purposes and effects. Given various forms of policing feminist-friendly entries on Wikipedia, though, I'm not inclined to switch my focus.
Introductory note: the person who prompted this story, Aaron Schwabach, is to the best of my knowledge a nice guy—not a Nice Guy, but a person who is proceeding in good faith and, as will become important below, gives prominent and substantial credit to his predecessors in the field of his writing, which is the legal analysis of fan fiction. He is a nice guy; he is also a beneficiary of male privilege.
Schwabach wrote an article, The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright, that appeared in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review in 2009. After the article appeared on SSRN, he noticed that the Wikipedia coverage of legal issues surrounding fan fiction had been turned into its own article, with material he thought significantly derived from his article. Being a good Wikipedian, Schwabach didn’t resent the apparent copying, especially since he well understood that copyright doesn’t cover facts or ideas; he merely added a citation to his article. (Other present citations are to Sonia Katyal, Charles Petit (a nonfan and nonacademic), and Rebecca Tushnet.)
The story seems to be that Wikipedians accepted the page as appropriately significant so that it was not deleted and edited it to follow his lead. (At least one page editor is quite fannish, and in examining her/his history I noticed that Whedonesque had been flagged for deletion as nonsignificant, though apparently this was beaten back.)
Excluding (1) pieces written from the copyright owner’s perspective or about Internet issues generally and (2) pieces about scanlation, fansubbing, and manga, here are the names of the people on Fanlore’s Legal Analysis page who wrote about fan fiction and fanvids in law reviews before Schwabach did (and most of whom, I emphasize again, he himself cited): Rosemary, Rebecca, Deborah, Meredith, Cecilia, Simone, Krissi, Leanne, Sonia, Mollie, Christina, Anupam & Madhavi, Ernest, Jacqueline, Casey, Christina, Edward, Nathaniel, Sarah, Steven, Megan & David, and Shira.
Notice anything?
As a baseline point of reference, 20.3% of law review articles at top journals have a sole female author, while adding articles with at least one female author brings the percentage to 25.2%. By contrast, of the 23 (including Schwabach) law review articles focusing on fan fiction through 2009, 8.7% are by male-female partnerships, 21.7% are by men, and 69.6% are by women.
So, a subfield of knowledge largely created and explored by women became interesting to Wikipedia when a man talked about it, and citation-wise looks on Wikipedia--increasingly the first place to which people turn for information online--like a field in which male sources of authority are at least equal to female sources.
Tell me again that Wikipedia doesn’t have a woman problem?
And, you know, I reserve most of my limited editing energy for Fanlore, though I did correct the faulty reference to Fanlore in that one Wikipedia entry. I suppose I could, like Schwabach, edit the Wikipedia entry, though that might be considered to run afoul of the self-promotion policies, which, of course, have generally admirable purposes and effects. Given various forms of policing feminist-friendly entries on Wikipedia, though, I'm not inclined to switch my focus.
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Neither of which, in practice, are free from significant gender influence.
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My main experience of the Wikipedia community is when I was part of hosting/running a Wikimania conference several years ago. In terms of the really committed Wikipedians who did a lot of the work that keeps the place running, it seemed gender-even. Of course a lot of that work is behind the scenes, not necessarily leaving a public electronic paper trail to credit. The community *felt* fairly gender-balanced, and many women had real positions of social power. But then that equality isn't reflected in the operations that the rest of the world can see, or perhaps doesn't exist anymore, or never existed as much as it seemed to then.
At the time, at least, a lot of the people I met who were admins - users who'd earned enough power to be able to deal with banning vandals, etc. - were women. But I have no idea whether this kind of work is reflected in a way that someone analyzing Wikipedia contribution could see. And focusing on meta stuff like admin or community development takes a person's attention away from doing edits, which makes their contributions less content-based as well as less visible. I'd be really interested to see any internal analysis from the Wikipedia community on its gender issues.
It feels to me like a cascade of things that lead to the result of more men having more dominance and social authority in the editing side of building Wikipedia. Which makes it more complex to try to unravel. I think in a lot of mixed-gender communities, this dynamic ends up happening - the women with the most internal power end up in roles that aren't as visible as the roles the men with the most power take, so the perception and reality of male power as being more important or having more impact than female power get reinforced.
Tangentially, remember when danah boyd had to try for ages to get information in her Wikipedia page changed, because she herself and her own blog weren't acceptable sources to cite? There's a problem in what Wikipedia accepts as a reliable source and what it doesn't, and the increasing blurriness of those boundaries, plus the fact that there's a lot of authoritative writing by women that's published in the kind of sources Wikipedia doesn't acknowledge. Not that there's an easy answer to that, but Wikipedia in particular has a primary source problem, and IMHO would be better off allowing primary sources to speak for themselves so long as that potential bias was acknowledged in the text. It shouldn't have to run afoul of self-promotion guidelines to state a verifiable fact about your own research.
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love Ayn Randtend to be blind to systemic biases and to chase other styles of contributor away. Many of them are men, but I've seen the same cluelessness from a lot of female contributors too. It's true that Wikipedia does have a diverse pool of editors in some ways, but if you look at most debates there, it's one person with expert knowledge vs. a million upper middle class US college student objectivists who can't believe that the rest of the world isn't also upper middle class US college student objectivists. Wikipedia does attract women, but it does not attract the kind of women who are likely to correct its biases. (And I say this as a long-time editor with a lot of offline friends who are heavily involved.)I think it's also important to note, as most regular Wikipedia contributors forget to, that most content on Wikipedia comes from one-time editors, not regulars. Women with social power in the community are most likely cleaning up spelling errors, not contributing significantly to article content. (See the footnote on the first bullet point under Please do not bite the newcomers.) I still think Wikipedia is a great site with a lot of potential, but it's always going to have horrible bias because the people most able to contribute to debates are a completely different group from the people most likely to make substantial content edits.
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How to perpetuate a woman problem
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