Wikipedia:Meetup/justfortherecord/Events/OpenDesignCourse2020

Logo for the project Just For The Record – addressing how gender is represented in new media and writing/publishing tools like Wikipedia, and what influence this has on the way history is recorded.

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12.10.2020
Open Design Course 2020

A deconstruction of the concept of neutrality on online knowledge platforms. Depicting the landscape of power structures in the collective writing of history.

Event Information

Venue: The Broei, Gent
Date: 12.10.2020
Language English

Open questions

Here are interrogations we would like to share with you:

If Wikipedia can be considered as a tool to re·write history, how would you like it to be written?
How comfortable do you feel moving around or contributing to the public space that is Wikipedia?
What influences the way we write history and its main figures?
Can history writing, or writing in general ever be neutral?

Resources of theory and literature linked to the presentation

Decolonizing internet's language

Quote: When marginalized communities cannot create in their own languages on the internet, this reinforces and deepens inequalities that already exist offline. Most critically, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure are still not the producers nor the decision‐makers around its design, architecture, substance, and experience. The effort to change this – to re‐imagine the internet and re‐design digital knowledges – needs a multitude of us working together.

African feminism charter

Quote: ...to challenge patriarchy effectively also requires challenging other systems of oppression and exploitation, which frequently mutually support each other.

On situated feminism standpoint theory

Standpoint Epistemology in General. Standpoint theories claim to represent the world from an epistemically advantaged socially situated perspective. A complete standpoint theory must specify (i) the social location of the advantaged perspective, (ii) its scope: the subject matters over which it claims advantage, (iii) the aspect of the social location that generates epistemic advantage: for example, social role, or subjective identity; (iv) the ground of its advantage: what justifies its claim to superiority; (v) the type of epistemic superiority it claims: for example, greater accuracy, or greater ability to represent fundamental truths; (vi) the other perspectives relative to which it claims advantage, and (vii) modes of access to that perspective: is occupying the social location necessary or sufficient for getting access to the perspective? Many limited claims to epistemic advantage on behalf of particular perspectives are uncontroversial. Auto mechanics are in a better position than auto consumers to know what is wrong with their cars. Practical experience in fulfilling the mechanic’s role grounds mechanics’ epistemic advantage, which claims superior reliability.

Standpoint theories usually claim that the perspectives of subordinated social groups have an epistemic advantage regarding politically contested topics related to their subordination, relative to the perspectives of the groups that dominate them. Classically, standpoint theory claims that the standpoint of the subordinated is advantaged (1) in revealing fundamental social regularities; (2) in exposing social arrangements as contingent and susceptible to change through concerted action; and (3) in representing the social world in relation to universal human interests. By contrast, dominant group standpoints represent only surface social regularities in relation to dominant group interests, and misrepresent them as necessary, natural, or universally advantageous.

Access to the Feminist Standpoint. Every standpoint theory must explain how one gains access to it. Most standpoint theories represent the epistemically advantaged standpoint not as given, but as achieved through critical reflection on the power structures constituting group identities. If the group and its interests are defined objectively, the facts that constitute the group and its interests are publicly accessible. So anyone can theorize phenomena in relation to the interests of that group. However, if epistemic advantage lies in collective agent-knowledge, its site lies in the group defining itself as a collective agent. The privileged standpoint is not that of women, but of feminists (MacKinnon 1989). Men can participate in the feminist movement. But they cannot assume a dominant role in defining (hence knowing) its aims, given the feminist interest in overcoming male dominance.

Goals of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Feminist standpoint theory is a type of critical theory. Critical theories aim to empower the oppressed. To serve this aim, social theories must (a) represent the world in relation to the interests of the oppressed; (b) enable the oppressed to understand their problems; and (c) be usable by the oppressed to improve their condition. Claims of superiority for critical theories are thus fundamentally based on pragmatic virtues (Harding 1991, Hartsock 1996).

Intersectional Feminism

While there are many feminisms, intersectional feminism is define as how aspects of a person's social and political identities (e.g., race, gender, sex, class, sexuality, religion, disability) combine to create unique modes of discrimination and privilege.

Like in a simple venn diagram

Kimberlé Crenshaw, the person who defined intersectional feminism has also said: Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.

Some people look to intersectionality as a grand theory of everything, but that’s not my intention. If someone is trying to think about how to explain to the courts why they should not dismiss a case made by black women, just because the employer did hire blacks who were men and women who were white, well, that's what the tool was designed to do. If it works, great. If it doesn’t work, it’s not like you have to use this concept.

The other issue is that intersectionality can get used as a blanket term to mean, “Well, it’s complicated.” Sometimes, “It’s complicated” is an excuse not to do anything. We want to move beyond that idea.

Our Stories Our Knowledges

Quote, part 1:We live to understand ourselves and be seen fully by others. And yet, when our embodied experiences are not communicated through the “artifacts” of books, newspapers, TV shows, internet websites... we lose some of ourselves in the untelling and the unknowing. We call it the hidden crisis of “unknowing” — that we do not adequately know each other, our histories and knowledges, well enough in a rich, diverse, multilingual, multicultural world.

Google estimated in 2010 that there are about 130 million books in at least 480 languages. In a world of 7 billion people speaking nearly 7000 languages and dialects, we estimate that only about 7% of those languages are captured in published material; ^{a smaller fraction of the world’s knowledge is converted into digital} knowledge; and a still smaller fraction of that is available on the internet. Most of our world’s knowledges are oral and embodied, and we know so little about each other right now.

The internet itself offers us possibilities to share these histories and knowledges in rich, multi-media ways — to amplify different voices, and make visible different bodies. Yet the internet of today is deeply skewed towards a monocultural view of the world, primarily that of white straight men from the global North — Europe and North America. 75% of the online population today — using and experiencing the internet — is from the global South, from Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, Latin America and the Caribbean. Nearly 45% of those online are women. And on Wikipedia — a good proxy for online public knowledge — 20% of the world (primarily white male editors from North America and Europe) edits 80% of Wikipedia currently, and 1 in 10 of the editors is self-identified female.

Quote, part 3: The internet we have today is not multilingual enough to reflect the full depth and breadth of humanity.75% of the world’s online population is currently from the Global South, and 45% of all women in the world are online. At the same time, we know that content online remains heavily skewed towards rich, Western countries, and most online knowledge today is accessible only through colonial languages. We estimate that only about 500 of the world’s 7000+ languages are represented online, with English and Chinese dominating. Google estimates that 129 million books have been published in about 480 languages. At best, then, only 7% of the world’s 7000 languages are captured in published material. An even smaller fraction of these languages is represented in digital content. When marginalized communities cannot create in their own languages on the internet, this reinforces and deepens inequalities that already exist offline. Most critically, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure are still not the producers nor the decision‐makers around its design, architecture, substance, and experience. The effort to change this – to re‐imagine the internet and re‐design digital knowledges – needs a multitude of us working together. So the idea for Decolonizing the Internet was born: an annual gathering, for unusual and unlikely allies to connect and scheme together towards a decolonized internet. For this 2019 Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages gathering in London, UK, we brought together a diverse group of thoughoul, powerful folks who recognise that language is a proxy for knowledge, and who want to reclaim our many languages beyond English on the internet.Our aim was to build alliances, and move from thinking together towards doing together ‐to take on various actions to decolonize the internet’s languages, and encourage others to join us on this journey. Building a more multilingual internet is certainly a technical process, but even more crititially, it is a social and political effort.

On Wikipedia's definition of neutrality

Editing on Wikipedia

Enregistrez-vous ici ! / Sign Up Here!

Avez-vous déjà un compte Wikipedia? / Do you already have a Wikipedia account?
NON / NO : Créer un compte Create an account	OUI / YES : Inscrivez-vous en cliquant sur le bouton bleu Sign-up by clicking the button below To sign up for this event: Log in or create an account.

What can you do?

During the event, we invite you to contribute to Wikipedia and to the discussions around the gender gap on Wikipedia. You can edit an existing article to improve it, create a new one about a subject that doesn’t exist, but we also highly value the sharing of editing experiences, and ideas about what could make Wikipedia a more welcoming and colorful place!

First steps on wikipedia

Create an account
Add your user name to the participant list of this event at the bottom of this page or by clicking the "sign up" button above
Write some informations on your own wiki page by clicking on your user name at the top of the page. This will turn your link blue so that you wont look like a newbie.
Write some informations on your Sandbox, also at the top of the page
Improve an existing article
Create a new article

Ideas to start editing

Articles that need your help!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Paula_Maia

Here are lists identifying articles that could benefit from edits and expansion:

The Art+Feminism list of articles to be improved
Women Artists, by the Women in Red
Black Lives Matters
A list by the project Women in Red
Women Artists from all over the world, a list by the Project Women Artists
Women scientists, a list by the Project Women Scientists
Women writers, a list by the Project Women Writers

Translations

These lists mostly link to English Wikipedia, don’t forget your own language’s Wikipedia!
You can follow these steps

Look for problematic language

Man as false generic: Ban the use of the words man, men and mankind to refer to a person or persons of unspecified sex or to persons of both sexes.

The page Writing about women offers great insights. Look for the following problems in existing pages and try to fix them:

Male is not the default: Avoid labelling a woman as a female (ex: author, politician etc.), unless her gender is explicitly relevant to the article. An opposite example is saying male nurse.
Use surnames: Look for articles using surnames for men, while calling women by their first name. See example
Infoboxes are an important source of metadata (see DBpedia) and a source of discrimination against women. For example, the word spouse is more likely to appear in a woman's infobox than in a man's.
This is a good and terrifying exercise, try to find a page (that is not) defining women by their relationships in the first paragraph.
One study found that women on Wikipedia are more linked to men than men are linked to women.
Use gender-neutral nouns when describing professions and positions
Try changing the order in which groups are introduced – man and woman, male and female, Mr. and Mrs., husband and wife, brother and sister
The use of the generic he (masculine pronouns such as he, him, his) is increasingly avoided in sentences that might refer to men and women.
Avoid problematic phrasing when talking about married people. See examples
Do not refer to adult women as girls or ladies!
Avoid images that objectify women!

Pictures

To add pictures on an article you have to upload first on Wikimedia commons → [pictures]