-----Original Message-----
From: Sumana Harihareswara
Wikimedia community member Liz Henry blogs here:
http://bookmaniac.org/journalists-dont-understand-wikipedia-sometimes/
and does a little bit of digging into edit histories.
"Just from these three samples, it does not seem that there is any
particular movement among a group of Wikipedia editors to remove women
from the “novelists” category and put them in a special women category
instead. I would say that the general leaning, rather, is to stop people
who would like to label women writers as women writers *in addition* to
labeling them as writers, claiming there is no need for Category:
American women writers at all and that it is evidence of bias to
identify them by gender. ... The sexist thing we
should be up in arms about isn’t labelling women as women! It’s the
efforts to delete entire categories (like Haitian women writers, for
example) because someone has decided that that meta-information is
unnecessary “ghettoization”..."
--
As a pending comment I have at her blog observes, I find it a little strange
that no one, certainly not the media but (more puzzlingly) the community has
bothered to look into the history of this category. Apparently, it was
created by User:Gareth E Kegg last fall as part of what seems to have been a
general housekeeping effort to reduce the size of many "novelists by
nationality" categories.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20121117122439&limit=250&tagfilter=&contribs=user&target=Gareth+E+Kegg&namespace=14)
If it isn't just novelists, and it isn't just Americans, then there is an
awfully large mess to clean up (which is why some people at the CfD have
called for a procedural close to put all these categories up in a reopened
discussion). And until I just left a comment at his talk page, no one had
bothered to even let him know about this (which I would think would be the
first thing you'd want to do).
Daniel Case
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