Friday, December 14, 2018

Women in Wikipedia, Woman's Commonwealth

Women & Wikipedia entries have been on my mind, for whatever reason, lately. Just last week I sent out these tweets:


And now I just came across this article in The Gaurdian: Female scholars are marginalised on Wikipedia because it's written by men.

I am thrilled to see that there's already an active tag for this on Twitter (#WCCWiki) though it is classics-specific and I'm no classicist. There is also this project on wiki called Women in Red which looks interesting, but I'm not used to Wiki projects formatting so I'm still scrolling through and trying to make sense of.

I am constantly searching for women who have no pages of their own (or are stubs), so this is a thing that I notice a lot and really bothers me. Most recently, it was learning about the "utopian" (broadly defined) community of the Woman's Commonwealth, a long-lasting (though single-generation), financially prosperous community of almost exclusively women. HOW does this not have it's own page?? Currently it's just a section within the Womyn's land page.


My mind is BOGGLED. The community lasted DECADES. Fruitlands (founded by Amos Bronson Alcott), by contrast, lasted less than one year, and look at the size of it's page:



I pictured working on Wiki pages after I wrote some publishable things, but I feel like the right thing to do is to actually start now.

And, since I'm overwhelmed with learning the coding parts of Wiki (I know it's not hard to figure out, but it does take time (I tried before) and I'd rather focus on the research/writing right now), I think I'm going to resurrect my research wiki and start working on pages for the Woman's Commonwealth and other women/women's groups there, until I get something worth publishing on the Wiki site, then I'll figure out how to do it.

No comments:

Post a Comment