Wikipedia is used often and with pleasure. The free online encyclopedia has been around for 20 years. But there is a lack of authors – and especially women. Around 300 of them will exchange ideas in Erfurt until Sunday.
“The tights are one-piece legwear that completely covers the body skin-tight from the waist down” – this is the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry “Tights”.
Sounds simple. But this year the article has led to an exemplary discussion within the voluntary writing community of the online encyclopedia, it has been changed umpteen times and hotly debated in forums.
The relevance of tights
“Because something as simple as pantyhose is of course something that people look at very differently,” explains Fuchs B. The 35-year-old works in Berlin’s cultural sector and is one of the few women who writes for Wikipedia. Here, as is common in the community, she would like to remain anonymous and only be mentioned by her Wikipedia name. She herself works a lot on textiles and that’s how she discovered the article that caused a sensation with its illustrations of lascivious lolling women.
How do you write about certain topics? And how do you depict them? Who decides that? The reference work on the Internet is written by volunteers. But Wikipedia lacks authors – and above all women authors like Fuchs B is one. Here it is mainly men who write about topics – or other men.
Hardly any female authors on Wikipedia
According to a Wikimedia survey from 2018, the proportion of women in all projects was just nine percent. Of the roughly 833,300 biographies on German-language Wikipedia, just 17 percent are about women. The lack of diversity among the authors is one of the most common criticisms of Wikipedia.
In addition, a team of researchers found back in 2015 that romantic relationships and family-related topics are dealt with much more often in Wikipedia articles about women than in those about men. This suggests that there are gender differences in the way the Wikipedia community portrays notable personalities.
“As an association, we cannot influence the content of Wikipedia, it is even forbidden,” said Wikimedia spokeswoman Julia Gebert. But they are continuously working to support the community and to increase the number of editors at Wikipedia. “We are increasingly doing this with campaigns such as editathons, which increase diversity in the community and thus also in Wikipedia and its sister projects.” Editathons are events at which authors from online platforms jointly create or edit articles.
Especially the expansion of the community and the lack of diversity are the topic from Friday to Sunday in several events of the annual “WikiCon”, the meeting of German-speaking authors of Wikipedia, said the Erfurt Wikipedian and organizer Steffen Prößdorf. Around 300 interested parties want to find out about current content and problems in Erfurt this year – such as the lack of female authors and the associated one-sided view of topics – and discuss them.
“In the more than 15 years that I’ve been there, the topic has really blossomed,” says Fuchs B. To promote the exchange, she too travels from Berlin to Erfurt and is here, together with Wikipedia author Kaethe17 , give a lecture. Based on the development of the pantyhose article, it should encourage people to dare to edit articles – and “advertise to find more women for Wikipedia,” says the long-term active.
The view and the community would have to open up further so that the range of such topics can also be found in the articles, says Fuchs B. The result is that the pantyhose is now introduced with a drawing of a pantyhose-wearing lower body and illustrated in a more “balanced” way such a collaborative development of a topic – and the participation of women who came across the former documentation of the topic.
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