Traditionally, college and university courses have culminated in essays and exams. At Amherst College, our women’s history class (Spring 2007, Spring 2008) has chosen instead to create and revise Wikipedia articles, working in novel ways to both study history and critique it. When women’s history is taught in American schools, it tends to be in the form of biographies or short segments that nod to major social movements but do not go into depth. Our class read research articles, monographs, historical analyses, autobiographies, primary texts, and works of fiction, supplementing our readings with film documentaries, covering in detail material from the 1860s to the present. Using this information and individual research, we have added gender-specific information into articles that previously lacked a gender perspective. Our project attempts to effect a change beyond the classroom. Our edits of Wikipedia are not exams to be read once and graded, but attempts to bring together male and female experiences into a complex historical narrative.
Wikipedia has rapidly become the default resource for people in the United States as well as abroad seeking basic information on a variety of topics. Hundreds of thousands of users visit, read, and edit Wikipedia on a daily basis. For historical topics, Wikipedia is especially important. Most internet searches on historical subjects return Wikipedia articles as the first links. The familiarity of the site makes it a trustworthy source for many students and non-specialists, giving the online encyclopedia both a cause and effect quality in perpetuating traditional prejudice. Popular misconceptions of history and politics are reproduced in Wikipedia, and Wikipedia itself serves to perpetuate these misconceptions. Through our class’s research and revisions, we hope to begin break the cycle of bias as it affects women’s history.
There are no qualifications for the 75,000 active editors of Wikipedia other than Internet access. Sixty percent of the editors are male and eighty-two percent of editors are over the age of thirty-five. With such age and gender gaps, it is unsurprising that Wikipedia reflects gender bias. It is primarily women who have taken on the task of writing women’s history. Our project, a work done primarily—though not entirely—by female historians, seeks to fill in holes in the historical narrative that have been left unintentionally by male editors.
Correcting this deficit is important for two reasons. First, when there is no information that explicitly includes women, there is a tendency to forget about them. Yet the events of history had an equal, although often different, impact on women and men. The history of an event is incomplete if both stories are not told. Second, the perception of women and men in various times influenced how events unfolded. Gendered thinking has historically informed both ideology and policy. Without reckoning with these facts, our understanding of the past is incomplete.
Women’s history itself is a very broad subject and women of different backgrounds have different experiences; our Wikipedia projects aims to be inclusive of all women. We have been careful not to generalize the female experience and to incorporate the histories of women of all races, geographies, political beliefs, and socioeconomic classes. We believe that articles on the feminist movement should recognize the contributions of racial minorities and tensions within the movement. Articles should include the experiences of women from different geographical regions, from different national origins, and of different political beliefs. Our initial work, for example, has included an article on the migratory experiences of Puerto Rican women to the continental United States.
At the same time, we aim are wary of privileging race, class, or other forms discrimination at the expense of women. While some Wikipedia articles recognize only racial or ethnic discrimination, we attempt to include gender discrimination as well. We also attempt to correct notions of class difference and oppression as an exclusively male problem. Articles on the labor movement, for instance, seek to redress ideas of an all-male working class by including women’s experiences and participation in this movement. Our project will create an enriched historical account by being sensitive to differences within American women’s experiences and increasing the visibility of women in Wikipedia and our public consciousness. We have tried, where possible, to insert narratives of women into the historical record that generally privileges men. In some cases, this has meant deepening the material on women already there, and in others, introducing women’s material where there was none before. In a few other cases, we have created separate narratives dealing exclusively with women’s experiences because women and their activities have sometimes been separate from men. But often, creating a separate women’s history incorrectly suggests that women's lives and men’s are separate, when in reality women usually belong in a historical narrative alongside men.
Hence most of our projects, like the revised articles on the Shakers and Ann Lee (their most important and influential leader) have integrated and/or reinforced existing material on women. Both articles lacked adequate information from a female perspective – even an article on a religion that enthusiastically upheld gender equality and one that was invigorated and spread throughout America by a woman. The revision of both of these articles painted a more complete picture of the religious experience of Shakers.
One class historian added the history of a crucial event: the 1867 Kansas Campaign for black and female suffrage, to an article on women’s suffrage, using largely letters and other primary source documents. Thus, the quest to represent women on Wikipedia went beyond giving women equality in male-dominated articles; it was also about giving depth to a discussion of the political evolution of ideas about race and gender. In broadening the history of The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, one of the most prestigious art training institutions in the country, a member of the class was able to illustrate the challenges women faced to becoming seriously recognized as artists in world of fine art. The Academy only opened its doors to women for the first time 1844, and they faced other obstacles in the next decades.
One student, upon researching the life of Jane Addams, concluded that including the heated nationalism that all but destroyed Addams’ reputation during and after World War I was essential to completing the sketch of this pioneer of the settlement house movement and Progressivism. Without understanding the significance of peace work to Addams, as well as the massive, usually male hostility it provoked, one cannot understand the era and her role in it.
Because Wikipedia is a uniquely open, collaborative forum, any material posted is immediately subject to revision and challenge. We have found that the responses to our Wikipedia interventions illustrate the difficulty of excising opinion, perceived or actual, from Wikipedia.
In the article “Wampanoag” – which a member of our class edited in April 2007 – we have found a series of minor but important edits that subtly altered the tone of the article so that it portrayed the Wampanoag in a more favorable light and portrayed Europeans more negatively. For example, a section describing conflict between the Wampanoag and a neighboring group, the Narragansett, was changed to bolster the military prowess of the Wampanoag. Instead of the Narragansett retreating from the battle, the Wampanoag were said to have driven them back. Similarly, a section describing relations between early European merchants and the Wampanoag now presents the merchants as opportunistic slavers without admitting that, although such violence did occur, amicable interactions were the norm. In a third instance of editing to enhance the reader’s view of the Native Americans, the section on Thanksgiving – which some activist Native Americans view as offensive and have re-named the “National Day of Mourning – was altered to emphasize the violent aspect of the Pilgrim’s relationship with the Wampanoag. The editor clearly promotes a negative view of the Thanksgiving tradition and denies that the first dinner took place, although a letter from Edward Winslow, founder of the Plymouth Colony, describes such a harvest festival with Massasoit, the Wampanaog leader, and ninety of his men (see Edward Winslow, letter of 11 December 1621, quoted in The Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, In New England, in 1620 by George B. Cheever, 1848, pages 95-96). Certain users seem to be editing Wikipedia with the purpose, whether acknowledged or not, of promoting a picture of a more hostile relation between Wampanoag and English settlers than documents support, and of propagating a revisionist view of the history and culture of the Wampanoag tribe as peaceful and powerful.
The issue at stake here is less the objectivity of a single, obscure article and more the broader theme of the propriety of personal agendas in educational environments. Is Wikipedia – which purports to be an encyclopedia – the proper forum in which to publicize personal views about controversial topics? Furthermore, is it right that those opinions should be published as purportedly factual and reported without documentation? How do we even determine which viewpoint is “correct”? These questions are at the core of the debate surrounding Wikipedia, its purpose, and its legitimacy as an intellectual source.
Editing fairly obscure articles can be difficult enough, but editing feature articles poses other problems. Articles become features after a long process of review, and once they are deemed to have achieved feature quality, editors believe they are balanced. The amount of text about a specific topic in featured articles should also reflect the topic’s importance in the real world. However, an examination of various featured articles reveals a severe absence of women. Women constitute about half the population and significantly influence history and society, thus, a significant portion of Wikipedia should be about women. We have found this to be untrue; in fact, many articles exclude women by specifically saying “men” or using a male-centered tone that implies men were the significant actors in the story.
When one member of the class attempted to edit the California Gold Rush article to include women, the additions were deleted within 24 hours. Editors argued that the main reason for deletion was that the proper editing channels for a featured article were not followed, and some of the material was eventually posted. However, the additional material had to be inserted into a small section about women and then linked to a separate article. The section was accompanied by minor interventions to neutralize the article’s tone. This compromise over position means that general interest readers will not encounter women’s material without going to a link. Furthermore, the amount of text in the article still does not represent the importance of women’s contributions. Also, it is disconcerting that no one ever questioned the article’s gender imbalance while it slowly obtained feature status. We found that many articles receive feature status without any critique based on women’s invisibility or underrepresentation. Intervening in featured articles is important since many look to them as the most reliable Wikipedia sources, and by leaving out women they perpetuate the absence of women in our historical understanding and memory.
In conclusion, the scope, accessibility, and breadth of topics covered by Wikipedia articles have made Wikipedia the most popular public encyclopedia to date. Since all that is needed is an Internet connection to view, read, and edit its articles, Wikipedia is a reflection of the society we live in. Inevitably this reflection exposes how little is known by the general public about the ways in which women shaped, influenced, and made history (because of the lack of information and/or the gendered bias of “facts”). Women’s history is a large and varied academic field, but this information and analysis has not significantly trickled down into the popular consensus, and it continues to be regarded as marginal to “real history.” There are several ways to insert women’s history into Wikipedia, and we have experimented with them. These initiatives constitute progress for women and will have a positive effect on their visibility in history. We remain aware that while revising women’s history in general is of tremendous importance, women’s history must be generalized in a way that also regards class, race, sexuality, geography, political beliefs, or socioeconomic status, otherwise the result would contradict our original purpose of accurately representing the history of an oppressed group.
For Wikipedia to obtain credibility and balance, it cannot exclude women on a wide scale. The democratic promise of Wikipedia requires intervention in order to help it achieve gender balance, as well as to prevent women and gender from becoming invisible in American popular culture. Though this project may seem tiny now, originating in one class at a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, it has the potential to spread and develop across colleges and universities in the United States as well as abroad. If other institutions of higher education in America initiated programs like this, Wikipedia would quickly begin to reflect more accurately the presence of women and the roles they have played throughout history.