Hey Karen, Unfortunately Wikipedia is not really here to advance or serve a cause; the point is to document things in a scholarly way.
I weigh in on Ms. Sarkeesian's behalf about notability. Let's give her a > chance to advance the eternal cause of feminine value and voice. She has > extraordinary, and even visionary ideas, and deserves our temperance and > admiration. She is not just a blogger. She is not someone who will become > less meaningful and whose sole impact on society will be only the W-SAD. > She is one of ours, a gem who comes out swinging. > You yourself may hold this opinion; but for it to be a valid argument on Wikipedia you need to support it with a reliable source that says the same thing. > If a page about her went up prematurely, let us watch it evolve, and take > heart, celebrating her crowdsourcing success and ability to challenge > stereotypes of the type W-SAD manifests. This does not mean I am > suggesting she will be world famous in 100 years. The Feminist cause and > its merits find far too few role models. Girl gamers and gender specialists > are going to appreciate having this article and its referencing and links > to turn to. The story is cautionary, and ever-so current. If we have > something to be skeptical about, time will clarify why. > In particular Wikipedia has rules about "Crystal balling"; which say that it is better to wait for someone to do notable things than to write and article because* they probably will*. > > Please, let us give Ms. Sarkeesian's work encouragement to flourish, and > see what this dynamic woman does for the gender gap in space and time. I'm > of the conviction there is profound social importance in this provocative > artist's ideas. > I understand where you are coming from; but if this is the aim of the article, and others like it, the community will reject them forcefully. There are strong controls within the community against promotion, advocacy, etc. I hope this woman does flourish - but let's record her doing so, rather than play a part in it. I appreciate the appeal to emotion, but I don't think it is an appropriate, helpful, or good, argument. Maintaining objectivity is very critical to our work. To switch up to a more positive note; I think it's better to focus on what coverage of feminist topics we can do successfully. For example (and I intend to write more about this soon) yesterday I attended the World War I editathon at the British Library in London. It was a really fun event and there were three female academics there (and about 5/6 male academics). Anyway, I spent the day working with one of them, Rosemary, whose scholarly topic is medicine - but she got us interested in "surplus women". Which is a moral/social term used to describe the imbalance of women (i.e. more women than men) in many countries from around 1850 onwards. The topic is interesting to say the least; the imbalance was identified in the 1850 census and cause a social panic - with society worrying that there were around a million unmarried single women who would spend their lives in poverty and misery. This was obviously compounded by WWI when a huge number of men died or were badly injured. The economic and social impact of this issue resonates even today. In large part it helped drive forward the emancipation of women by presenting a social situation that required women to work to obtain economic stability (as opposed to marriage). We identified some interesting employment statistics for women; for example the increase in opportunities for female employment in the 1850s actually raised female unemployment. There was a rush away from domestic service which basically caused that industry (the largest female sector) to collapse. Female employment was around 40% in 1850, but by the 1900s it had slumped to 30%. As the war started many female industries - the textile trade for example - ended due to export restrictions. This cause female unemployment to spike further for several months before they were allowed to work in munitions factories etc. This is all tip of the iceberg stuff; as we investigated coverage of this entire topic on Wikipedia we discovered a severe lack of it! Women in the Workplace skims over the history. Surplus women existed (till yesterday) as an aside in another article. The Marriage bars are only barely covered. These are all important scholarly topics we can, and should, be working on. Coverage of women in history seems fairly important to me :) (you can see our initial work on "Surplus women" here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ErrantX/Sandbox/Surplus_women) Tom
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