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ABSTRACT
Wikipedia promotes itself as a community that anyone can join as long as they know the rules. In this paper, we reflect on our attempt to join this community and to edit Wikientries on ageing so that they include an intersectional perspective, especially with regard to gender. Our excursion into Wikipedia reveals how certain entries act as sites of contestation between different communities of practice, such as feminist scholars and Wikipedia experts. We document and discuss three interconnected discursive guidelines over which contestation takes place: notability, verifiability, and tone. These guidelines govern the way that Wikipedia operates in relationship to dominant discourses on age and gender. They are at the heart of its inequitable treatment of content matter.
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
2. Ros Jennings and Abigail Gardner, “Rock On”: Women, Ageing and Popular Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Kirsty Fairclough, “Nothing Less Than Perfect: Female Celebrity, Ageing and Hyper-scrutiny in the Gossip Industry,” Celebrity Studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 90–103; Julia Twigg, Fashion and Age: Dress, the Body and Later Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Linn J. Sandberg and B.L. Marshall, “Queering Aging Futures,” Societies 7, no. 3 (2017): 1–11; Margaret M. Gullette, Aged by Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Deborah Jermyn, “Glorious, Glamorous and that Old Standby, Amorous: The Late Blossoming of Diane Keaton’s Romantic Comedy Career,” Celebrity Studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 37–51.
3. Alexandra Juhasz and Anne Balsamo, “An Idea whose Time is Here: Femtechnet—A Distributed Online Collaborative Course (DOCC),” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 1 (2012), http://adanewmedia.org/2012/11/issue1-juhasz.
4. Maggie McAulay and Rebecca Visser, “Editing Diversity In: Reading Diversity Discourses on Wikipedia,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 9 (2016), http://adanewmedia.org/2016/05/issue09-macaulay-and-visser/.
5. Laura Black et al., “‘Wikipedia is Not a Democracy’: Deliberation and Policy-Making in an Online Community” (paper presented at the International Communication Association conference, Montreal, Canada, May 21, 2008), http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~danco/research/papers/democracy-black-ica2008.pdf.
6. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1981).
7. Dariusz Jemielniak, Common Knowledge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
8. Bryce Peake, “WP:THREATENING2MEN: Misogynist Infopolitics and the Hegemony of the Asshole Consensus on English Wikipedia,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 7 (2015), http://adanewmedia.org/2015/04/issue7-peake/.
9. Davydd J. Greendwood and Morten Levin, “Reconstructing the Relationships Between Universities and Society Through Action Research,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Linciln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 94.
10. Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Untying the Text, ed. Robert J.C. Young (London: Routledge, 1981), 48–78.
11. Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (Harlow: Longman, 2010).
12. Yasmin Jiwani, Discourses of Denial (Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press, 2006); Teun A. van Dijk, Discourse and Power: Contributions to Critical Discourse Studies (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
13. Susan L. Star, “This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept,” Science, Technology & Human Values 35, no. 5 (2010): 602.
14. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan L. Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
15. Bowker and Star, “Sorting Things Out,” 294.
16. Star, “This is Not a Boundary Object.”
17. Ibid., 614.
18. Peake, “WP:THREATENING2MEN.”
19. Greg Hearn et al., Action Research and New Media (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009).
20. Bowker and Star, “Sorting Things Out,” 294.
21. Ibid., 295.
22. WikiHow, Write a Wikipedia Article, http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Wikipedia-Article (accessed January 4, 2016); Wikipedia: WP: Your first article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Yourfirstarticle (accessed January 4, 2016).
23. Wikipedia. WP: Five Pillars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fivepillars (accessed January 4, 2016).
24. WikiHow, Write a Wikipedia; Wikipedia: WP: Your first article.
25. Deleted entries leave traces so that if they are re-entered, they are likely to be identified as an article that was previously deleted.
26. Shing-Chung Jonathan Yam, “Negotiating Boundaries of Knowledge: Discourse Analysis of Wikipedia’s Articles for Deletion (AfD) Discussion,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (2016): 305–23.
27. Wikipedia. WP: Notability, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability (accessed January 4, 2016).
28. Wikipedia. WP: Articles for Deletion/Centre for Women, Ageing and Media (2nd nomination), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articlesfordeletion/CentreforWomen,AgeingandMedia(2ndnomination) (accessed June 5, 2015).
29. Wikipedia. WP: Articles for deletion.
30. Ibid.
31. Wikipedia. Draft: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Trans* (LGBT*) Ageing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Lesbian,Gay,Bisexual%26Trans*(LGBT*)Ageing (accessed April 22, 2016).
32. Sue Gardner, “Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (In Their Own Words),” February 19, 2011, http://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia-in-their-own-words/ (accessed May 10, 2015). Gardner quotes Barbara Fister, from Inside Higher Ed, Women and Wikipedia, and a discussion at Metafilter entitled Wikipedia, Snips & Snails, Sugar & Spice? (Where “YA” Means Young Adult).
33. Stephanie Pappas, “Wikipedia’s Gender Problem Gets a Closer Look,” Live Science, December 3, http://www.livescience.com/48985-wikipedia-editing-gender-gap.html (accessed May 10, 2015); Peake, “WP:THREATENING2MEN.”
34. Star, “This is Not a Boundary Object.”
35. Bowker and Star, “Sorting Things Out.”
36. Peake, “WP:THREATENING2MEN.”
37. Ibid.
38. Star, “This is Not a Boundary Object.”
39. Ibid.
40. Benjamin Collier and Julia Bear, “Conflict, Confidence, or Criticism: An Empirical Examination of the Gender Gap in Wikipedia” (paper presented at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference, Seattle, Washington, USA, February 11–15, 2012: 390).
41. Aaron Halfaker et al., “The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s Reaction to Popularity Is Causing its Decline,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 5 (2013).
42. R. Stuart Geiger and Heather Ford, “Participation in Wikipedia’s Article Deletion Processes” (paper presented at the WikiSym conference, Mountain View, CA, USA, May 3, 2011: 201–2).
43. Judd Antin and others, “Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing” (paper presented at the WikiSym conference, Mountain View, CA, USA, October 3–5, 2011: 14).
44. McAulay and Visser, “Editing Diversity In.”
45. Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration, 172.
46. Jemielniak, Common Knowledge.
47. Chantal Benoit-Barné and Francois Cooren, “The Accomplishment of Authority Through Presentification: How Authority Is Distributed Among and Negotiated by Organizational Members,” Management Communication Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2009): 5–31.
48. Nicolas Bencherki, “La stabilisation des faits sur les wikis : le cas de l’encyclopédie en ligne Wikipédia” (Master’s Thesis, Université de Montréal, Canada, 2007).
49. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975).
50. Brendan Luyt, “The Inclusivity of Wikipedia and the Drawing of Expert Boundaries: An Examination of Talk Pages and Reference Lists,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63, no. 9 (2012): 1873.
51. Luyt, “The Inclusivity of Wikipedia and the Drawing of Expert Boundaries,” 1877.
52. Olivier Voirol, “Les luttes pour la visibilité,” Réseaux 129–30 (2005): 89–121.
53. Bowker and Star, “Sorting Things Out.”
54. McAulay and Visser, “Editing Diversity In.”
55. Peake, “WP:THREATENING2MEN.”
56. Ibid.
57. McAulay and Visser, “Editing Diversity In.”