Wikipedia’s Sexism

<i>But there was more. Much more. As soon as the Op-Ed article appeared, unhappy Wikipedia editors pounced on my Wikipedia page and started making alterations to it, erasing as much as they possibly could without (I assume) technically breaking the rules. They removed the links to outside sources, like interviews of me and reviews of my novels. Not surprisingly, they also removed the link to the Op-Ed article. At the same time, they put up a banner at the top of my page saying the page needed “additional citations for verifications.” Too bad they’d just taken out the useful sources.</i><p>Childish behavior like this is much more damaging to Wikipedia's reputation than any critical article in the media. And as long as the editors of Wikipedia act this way, Wikipedia will never get a single cent from me, no matter how many banner ads they slap over the top of the page pleading for donations.

A feature Wikipedia could use is category intersection. Then you could view a list of pages that are in the "women", "novelists", and "Americans" categories, and no editor would have to curate that list. It's pretty easy to factually verify whether a page is about a woman, or a novelist. Taking human judgment out of the picture would eliminate many kinds of bias.

Looking through the talk pages, I found this interesting note:<p><i>This is an important subcategory, but Wikipedia's categorization guidelines clearly state that subcategories defined by ethnicity or gender are non-diffusing. As such, American women novelists should be listed here as well as in the American novelist category</i><p>Which implies that if the wikipedia editors were following the basic rules, adding the sex-specific categories wouldn't do anything to solve the "this list of novelists is too long" problem.

I agree with Filipacchi that it certainly seems wrong to remove American women novelists from American novelists.<p>I admit I am curious how she feels about contests, prizes, scholarships targeting American women novelists. <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=scholarships+women+writers+american" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=scholarships+women+writers+a...</a>

A tangent, but all the "list of" pages on wikipedia seem to be missed potential for some neat data-manipulation tool. I wonder how hard it would be to scrape that sort of information easily. Too many times have I tried to figure out the right wording for wolfram alpha to get some neat chart, secretly wishing for a more low-level tool

I'm confused by "American (Men|Women) Novelists". If both exist, then what's the point of American Novelists?