On Friday, 6 July 2012 at 07:11, [email protected] wrote: > On Mon, 2 Jul 2012 09:47:58 +0100, Tom Morris wrote > > I'm not sure I agree that LGBT is another gender gap. > > > > my impression is that there certainly are gender gaps in LGBTIQA* communities > - if ever non-heterosexual > people are happy to be lumped together just because of not identifying > non-heterosexual, that is ... -
There may be gender gaps in LGBT communities, but that's not the issue at Wikimedia. This list is about what we can do on Wikimedia regarding LGBT issues: outreach, support and editor assistance. As I have pointed out on gender gap, there isn't an "LGBT gap". It's not that we need more LGBT-identifying people to make up the numbers or to avoid some kind of heterosexist systemic bias. There's a gender gap within the LGBT wiki community, sure: in the #wikimedia-lgbt IRC channel, it tends to be dominated by a few men. On some areas of the wikis, non-male LGBT voices don't get heard for any number of reasons. There are currently issues related to BLP, related to editor behaviour and civility: the way that Wikipedia handles transgender people's identities, transitions and so on that offends and annoys many transgender people. Personally, I think this is mostly down to ignorance. Take Lana Wachowski, formerly Larry Wachowski, one of the creators of The Matrix. The average person who is likely to want to write about The Matrix on Wikipedia probably doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about issues faced by transgender people or how to sensitively and maturely handle LGBT-related issues. To them, whether they are described on-wiki as Larry or as Lana doesn't matter too much compared to when the next movie comes out. English Wikipedia's handling of BLP policy can often be very hasty and writes off any claim about sexual orientation as "irrelevant", and a crowd of "BLP warriors" often seem to think that anyone who attempts to say that a person is LGBT is 'defaming' them. English Wikipedia is sometimes behind the curve in switching over to using a transgender person's preferred name and pronouns. And finally some LGBT editors have reported problems of harassment and homophobia. Those are the issues specific to LGBT as I see them. The flip side is that a lot of people on-wiki who aren't LGBT see us as essentially "single-issue voters". That we are here to bang on about whether some celebrity is gay or not and probably infringe BLP while doing so. There have been LGBT-focussed editors in the past who have been disruptive and difficult to work with. There is some community mistrust here to overcome. My personal interest is to work productively on outreach and editing, and handling issues maturely and calmly rather than this list becoming a social justice talking shop. Having a long and intricate argument about whether, say, asexuals are members of the LGBT community or whether to use the term "LGBT" (or an extended version thereof) or "queer" (although I have my opinions) and whether they get to join the club is far less way to spend one's time than actually improving and expanding what we cover on the wiki. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
