Q. and I have done some talking about Wikipedia and the lack of good feminist history. Is there an existing Wikimob... or swarm... to add important women (and history of feminism, too) to Wikipedia?
I have been thinking about compiling whatever knowledge I can, and organizing it, and making it social... Socialtext is coming out with a revision or a new thing that looks really good for this project and I might want to go with that instead of trying to fight on Wikipedia. I saw the fight that happened over danah boyd's entry on there, and I don't have the energy to fight that fight for every historical figure and Uruguayan poet from 1880 and member of the first international women's congress and editors of the first Egyptian women's newspaper. As an example of the bullshit level on there.... check out the "talk" page on "Women's Rights". Love the one who wants to merge "women's rights" with "women's movement". Thanks! Because, you know, they're the same thing and there's only one women's movement"!
Oh yeah, I really want to go write an article on there now...
A few years ago when I went back to Everything2 (which I'd been on in what... 1999? 2000?) I had to fight like mad over adding a short biographical entry which was reverted right out to the morgue, or limbo, or whatever it was called... with the same sort of argument on significance. So I stopped that project.
As I consider this, I am realizing what a chilling effect those reversions and refusals and trashings have. On so many people who are much less determined than I am.
I could take the data from my thesis research and from the Wittig project and whatever feminist encyclopedia sort of books I have lying around the house, and have a very nice beginning.
It needs to be a wiki and needs easy tagging.
My ideal tool would be wiki-ish, but would be like a social network. I want each person in the encyclopedia to have a friendster-y page, with links to other people, but the ability to define their relationships.... timeline.... a biographical tool that is a social network!
I do not have the techie skills to build this tool... Think how popular this would be. It would be huge. It would not be all about academics , though I would like them to come. It would also be every kid on the planet entering info on their own personal heroes. myspace has bands. My vision uses this fan model, where the motivation for people to be on the site is to declare their fandom -- because it is part of their identity. But, in the process, becasue of the beautiful structure of this product.... History, biography, and the relationships between people over the courses of their lives would be filled in, collectively. How awesome it could be to tag up all of history! Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with hyperlinks and that's also very beautiful, but this coudl be something different and very compelling.
Who will build it... who would fund it... with me on the team?
I don't even care if someone else does it. Take it and run. As long as you don't build it all wrong and ugly and clumsy.
Tagging history! That is a very cool idea. Although I guess the core of what you have in mind isn't the tagging, it's social networking with historical figures and events as the reference points for finding common interests.
One issue which I could imagine would come up right away: people might be less interested in history history than in personal history. "Podunk High Graduation "04" and "Becky and Joe's Wedding" and "the first time I (jdoe666) got lucky" might loom larger than the Emancipation Proclamation or Virginia Woolf. You'd have to decide how far you wanted to go to force people to comply with some definition of "history" and how you'd determine that definition.
One conceivable way to structure it would be as an add-on to Wikipedia. I haven't looked into what Wikipedia offers in the way of an API or at least a reliable way to scrape date information out of entries. If you could automate the linkage of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation to 1/1/1863 then that could do the trick. Although the use of Wikipedia as the historical authority has problems, as you point out.
I believe I've heard of some interesting timeline projects recently. All I can find in my del.icio.us bookmarks is this Timeline of Timelines. A search for "wiki timeline" turns up EasyTimeline, "a wiki way to compose timelines". Possibly you could glue together some open source/web 2.0-ish tools to approximate what you want, although the result might turn out to be be ugly and clumsy.
As for your struggle with Wikipedia -- if you've got a community with a burning motivation to build its own resource for feminist history, then go for it, but I think your time would be better spent trying to remain visible to Wikipedia's vast audience. Think of how many fresh(wo)men writing term papers would find your ideas in Wikipedia versus how many would find them in a standalone site.
I've never engaged in the political and editorial struggles of Wikipedia and I'm sure they're quite a timesink, but you with your network's vast brainpower can probably outgame the maculinist vandals if you get organized. I would think that part of the key would be to appeal to Wikipedia's stated ideology of neutrality. True neutrality may be an impossibility, and at times the cult of neutrality can result in a false parity between flat-earthers and round-earthers, but surely the way to fight back against anti-feminist bias in Wikipedia is to hammer it on the criteron of neutrality.
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle | August 29, 2006 at 06:40 AM
Additional idea: how about a metaWikipedia, with which a community could filter and annotate Wikipedia? It would be place to make visible your objections to Wikipedia content and record the work you've put into it that got trashed. Hmm.
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle | August 29, 2006 at 06:46 AM
OK. This is brilliant. If you could tag history kids would want to learn it. I hope someone picks this up. Really like how your head works.
Posted by: NursePam | August 29, 2006 at 07:26 AM
Have you looked at Planet?
It's a feed aggregator written in Python. You give a set of RSS/Atom feeds to monitor, and it stitches them together in one long stream of HTML. The cool thing is that you only need a server that runs Python. Planet can run as a batch process publishing to static files!
Since Wikipedia publishes the deltas of entries as RSS feeds, you could run a planet that tracks and publishes thoses to one page that a group could monitor. Sam Ruby uses it as part of his Planet to keep watch for people changing the entry for the Atom Syndication Protocol.
That doesn't deal with the social problem of deleters and other haters on Wikipedia, but as Prentiss says, Wikipedia is where the eyeballs are.
Posted by: whump | August 29, 2006 at 11:51 PM
Please do both - start a wiki for this stuff *and* feed the best-referenced to Wikipedia, putting the specialist wiki under GFDL to be compatible. There's all manner of specialist wikis with this sort of relation to Wikipedia.
We have a page, [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias]], to try to alleviate the effects of Wikipedia's editor population largely self-selecting from middle-class white male computer geeks in the US and UK. And I've had a few discussions with a feminist friend about what to do about the problems with Wikipedia. The only reasonably workable-sounding solution is to get such contributors involved.
The big problem with Wikipedia is that working with people you consider complete idiots is not optional. And they think you're an idiot too. In this, it's a microcosm of the rest of the Internet and the rest of the world.
Posted by: David Gerard | December 05, 2006 at 05:51 PM
Ha! That's funny David! I agree with you and will take a look at the Systemic Bias page.
At this point I'm developing a separate wiki with the idea that I'll put entries on the main Wikipedia once they're filled out a bit. I'm having a lot of fun with it and am looking at installing Semantic Mediawiki to give me a bit of flexible searching.
Posted by: badgerbag | December 05, 2006 at 08:07 PM
I looked at the "WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias" page, and, while there's brief mention of "the average wikipedian" being male, there's squat on the causes of this bias particular bias.
Posted by: Ide Cyan | December 05, 2006 at 08:28 PM
The technical world as a whole is not clear on the causes of the bias and is very annoyed with it. I'm a Unix computer system administrator for a living, and almost every workplace I've been in has been in desperate need of female geeks to counteract the boys'-club-ish tendencies of all-male workplaces. (The one exception was Ericsson, which was about 30% female at the technical end.)
From my (interested dilettante non-academic) readings on social technology, most technical fields over the last hundred years show this, not just computers and not just recently. That is, the males at the end of the pipeline would very much like more women there, but are clueless on what is turning them away along the way. And why 30% seems to be about the best a given workplace can do. (Only anecdotal evidence for that number, but I've seen the 30% counting heads at Ericsson, and it was also mentioned in a Joel On Software column.)
So far, what we're doing is going out and trying to recruit, while saying "and erm please pardon the idiots and trolls." Ah well.
The profile of Internet users in general slowly gets closer to the demographics of the social classes who could afford a connection, so to some extent I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that as Wikipedia continues to be stupidly popular, it'll go the same way a bit. We have to make ourselves friendlier to good newbies without getting flooded.
There's also been a disgracefully clueless kerfuffle on the mailing lists of late with a proposal to form a "wikichix" list. The list has been formed, but the discussion is the appalling part. Sigh.
Posted by: David Gerard | December 06, 2006 at 07:24 AM
Oh, and see this post: http://smg.typepad.com/smg/2006/09/wiki_wiki.html
Posted by: David Gerard | December 06, 2006 at 07:29 AM
I'm a Unix computer system administrator for a living, and almost every workplace I've been in has been in desperate need of female geeks to counteract the boys'-club-ish tendencies of all-male workplaces.
Oh, where to begin... Have those boys been doing a lot of housework lately?
Posted by: Ide Cyan | December 07, 2006 at 03:53 AM
I have done my best to create a scholarly and inclusive history of feminism for Wikipedia but it has come under fire from those with narrower views. Do feel free to add your comments there.
Posted by: MGoodyear | December 25, 2006 at 01:01 PM
That's great, MGoodyear, and I'm sure it's a good start.
Posted by: badgermama | December 25, 2006 at 05:01 PM