WEBVTT
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Um.
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This is Wikipedia Weekly, the podcast for anyone who's ever said.
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Well, actually, Wikipedia has a really good article on that.
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Today we talk to user awadowitz, the Wiki authority on
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18th century english literature. Barn nun. She's got bronze.
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Good article review. Barn stars four. Good article. Barn stars four.
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Barn stars of diligence, literary stars, working women's stars,
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and my favorite, the fist of respect.
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Hello and welcome to the show. How are you going today? I'm doing
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well, thank you. Is that your name? That your username?
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Awadowit. It's a very interesting. Yeah,
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you can make up any sort of pronunciation you want, I think.
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Okay, so what
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is your most recently featured article? Because I think you have about 13.
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Is that correct? Yeah, you know, I don't even know
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the number. The most recently
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featured one. I don't know,
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actually, might be. It's certainly one
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of the ones on Mary Wilsoncraft. I think it's the vindication of the rights of
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men. The vindication might be the ones of men. A lot of people, I imagine
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we've heard of the vindication of the rights of women. Mary Wilson cast
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being one of the most famous first wave feminists.
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Well, she's not a first wave feminist. No,
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because there is no feminist movement until the end of
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the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
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Actually, if you read the feminism page,
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which is fairly good on Wikipedia, you can read the history
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of first wave feminism. I'm showing my.
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Oh, you can probably call
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Mary Wilsoncraft, in my opinion, a proto feminist.
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And actually, on the vindication of the
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rights of woman page, one of the foremost Wilson
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Kraft scholars, Barbara Taylor, talks about why or
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why not. You can call her an actual feminist,
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but she certainly wasn't part of the historical first
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wave movement, since there was no feminist
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movement at the time, and she would never have used that word herself.
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For 100 years after her death, she was reviled
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as a prostitute and a whore. Gee,
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it's really a fascinating story.
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One of the reasons I sort of got interested in her writings.
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After her death, her husband, William Godwin, the philosopher,
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was brokenhearted and decided to write a
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biography of her. And he was inspired by Rousseau's
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new ideas about how biographies and autobiographies should look.
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Rousseau had written a very influential autobiography called the Confessions,
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and if somebody could expand that page on Wikipedia, that would be
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wonderful. Sort of a stub right now. But it was incredibly
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influential. It was a bestseller, and he sort of wrote this 400
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page sort of outpouring of his soul that he was going
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to write exactly what he thought. And so Godwin took this to heart,
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and he said, well, I'm going to write exactly what Mary Wilsoncraft's
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life was like. And he said everything about her that he knew that
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she had had an affair. She had tried to
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have a threesome with Henry Fusili and his wife. She had
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had an illegitimate child.
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When are we talking here? Yes, at the end of the 18th century,
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in the 1780s and 1790s. This is completely unacceptable.
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Obviously, in many places now, it still is unacceptable. Then it
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was even more unacceptable. And when this was
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published, people were outraged. They were shocked.
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They were bald. Right. And whatever
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respect she might have gained as a writer was totally lost,
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because. She did have incredible respect in her day. She was the editor
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of really important magazine and literary journal,
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the Analytical Review. Until this
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biography was published. And once it was published,
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that really was completely lost for about a century.
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So she was only revived as an important and respected character
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in the late 19th century.
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Yeah, so once what
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you were talking about is the first away feminist movement comes along.
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People like Emma Goldman, Lucretia Mott, some of
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these figures, they try to resurrect Wilson Kraft, but it's very difficult
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because there's such this association with her
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of these terrible sort of immoral acts and
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values that it's difficult for them to
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even use her writings. They talk about being inspired by
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her life. Virginia Wolf referred to her experiments
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in living as something to be inspired by.
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But it really was
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difficult for these women to use her writings or even refer to
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her. And that's why it's even sketchy
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to say that Wilson Kraft is like an inspiration for the feminist
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movement, because it's so oblique. Any references
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to her to prove that is very difficult.
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Very difficult. Okay, well, what is your interest in Wilsoncraft
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and in 18th century literature, children's literature? Well,
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originally, I became interested in Wilson Craft's
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story called original Stories from real life,
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which is a book that she wrote for children. Not many
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people know that Wilsoncraft wrote children's books, but indeed she
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did. She also wrote a book called thoughts on the education of daughters,
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about how to raise a daughter all the way from
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infancy to marriage. And I became fascinated by
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the fact that Wilsoncraft was interested in education throughout her
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entire life. Almost all her books have something to do with education.
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So I started reading not only Wilsoncraft's
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book, but also women such as Anna Letitia
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Barbeau, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Martha Sherwood.
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And I really wanted to understand the
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answers to the question, which I haven't been able to find yet. But I'm
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still searching for of how it was that women who did not
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share any political similarity,
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because women such as Sarah Trimmer or Hannah Moore
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are generally viewed as extremely conservative,
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what might be called anti jacobin at the time, they were against the
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ideals of the French Revolution, whereas women such as Barbeau
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orcraft were very much in support of the French Revolution. Wilson Kraft even
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went to France in support of the French Revolution. But they all just writing
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children's books. She's getting involved in the politics of the day. That's right. Yeah,
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exactly. But they all supported education
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for women. And oftentimes writing for
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children was a way that they could get involved in the
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public sphere. They could format
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that. You could talk to women via children's books.
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Well, actually you could talk to the nation,
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because most of these women would write and say,
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well, I am going to describe the ideal citizen. And the
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way to educate the ideal citizen is this. And then
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it's described in their children's literature. The ideal citizen
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is the future for the nation. And that's
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really fascinating that they are
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stepping forth and saying, I feel that
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I have the right to participate in this discussion about
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what the future of our country is going to look like.
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And what's even more fascinating is that all
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of these women across this entire political spectrum have
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very much the same idea of what that future citizen should look like.
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I really want to talk about the fairy tale thing, actually, because it's quite fascinating.
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They're anti fairy tale. They believed
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in a rational worldview and were
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determined to oust fairy tales because
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they perpetuated superstition and irrationality.
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Obviously, that didn't work out. I mean, we live in
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a fairy tale ridden world for children. But it's fascinating to
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read their views on fairy tales because they
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really were concerned that children were going to believe in
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stories that were totally untrue, such as ghost stories.
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Why don't we go back to the beginning? Where are
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you speaking to us from today? The United States
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in the midwest. Okay. And you're a university
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academic, but you prefer to remain
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quite anonymous. Can you elaborate on that?
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Yes, I'm a graduate student, which means
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that my employment is in the
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humanities, which means that my employment is rather precarious.
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I don't have a job yet. And in the humanities,
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Wikipedia does not have quite the same acceptance.
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I don't think that it does in the sciences. Don't I know it.
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Tell me about it. Well, I'm currently
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an undergraduate. Yes, I'm taking my honors thesis
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in the school of history, on the academic lineage of Wikipedia,
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and how Wikipedia relates to historiographical arguments on
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authorship or the authority of knowledge, on censorship and
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things like that. And it's not only difficult to get them
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to accept that it might be an interesting topic to start with,
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but accept that you could even deal with Wikipedia in
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the context of academic debates in historiography.
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So before I even can write thesis properly,
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I have to convince the people in the faculty that it is a legitimate
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topic of concern that they should be aware of. You have to
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find the right person. Yes, that's what
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it's all about, finding the right person who's interested.
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So you're worried that if you publicize publicly your
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interest and experience on Wikipedia, that you won't get a job
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because you'd be laughed out of town. I'm very concerned,
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actually, I'm very concerned about that. I'm concerned that people will think
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that perhaps I've wasted time that I could have spent
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on my dissertation, time I could have spent
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publishing articles. That's really sad. Yeah. And it
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is because I really view the time that I
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have spent working on things for Wikipedia, which is
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related to what I'm studying as sort of
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public service, as part of being
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a public intellectual, because I'm often engaged in conversations
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with people on Wikipedia where I feel like I'm
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explaining what it means to be a scholar and I'm
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explaining even down to the level of,
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well, here's how you write a paragraph, or here's where you write a sentence.
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Right? Is that a wasted time? No, I don't think so, because that's what
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I do all the time. Yeah, that's what I do as that's
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my field, rhetoric and language.
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And I also feel that when, for example,
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you type into Google any of the things that I study in the 18th century,
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and they come up and they're empty in Wikipedia. I mean,
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the 18th century is just really sad on Wikipedia.
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Well, not needful, thanks to you. Well,
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13 articles or whatever, please.
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Since so many people in the world are looking
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at us first, why don't the people who have the knowledge,
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who already have taken the years to study,
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yeah, why don't they just donate it? I mean,
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I belong to a listserve of 18th century academics,
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and I was so distressed to see that one person said they had checked
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the Samuel Johnson article and that it was filled with errors.
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And I thought to myself, why didn't you fix them?
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It would have been easy for you who had studied for 20
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years. But no, I bet the people that you
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work with on a day to day basis have no idea that you
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are most probably the world's most
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foremost resource for information about that period
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or about english literature of that period. That more people read your
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work about Mary Wilson Craft than the officially
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recognized expert on Mary Wilson Craft. It's kind of scary.
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Sometimes I think about this, that what I have written
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about Mary Wilson Craft is now populated all over the web. I see it sometimes
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on other websites because they copy off of Wikipedia
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and it sometimes frightens me.
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It's kind of disturbing. You're secretly famous.
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Yeah, exactly. But it is a
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sort of fascinating thing. And every once in a while when I meet somebody who
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is a professor or another graduate student who I think might be
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receptive to the idea, I mentioned it and I say, you know,
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it would be a really good idea if you wrote an article because.
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But it's very hard to convince people that they should
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spend their time doing something that they're not going to get any credit for
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on their cv or when they're applying for tenure.
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But getting a job in the humanities
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is a very difficult proposition.
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About 200 to 400 people apply for every job,
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and they are just always looking for a reason to throw
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somebody out of that pool. It's truly sad that that
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should come to arbitrary
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draws a parallel in my mind between what you were saying about Mary Wilsoncraft and
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how her and her contemporaries were not allowed to participate in
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the public debate on citizenship because they were
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women, and so they came around it in a sort
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of a secret way by writing children's books. You seem to be having a similar
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approach, that you're not allowed to broach the topic of
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freeing out knowledge because you're
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not allowed to broach the topic of being an academic because you're a Wikipedia
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writer and those two things are mutually exclusive. So you come about it
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a secret way and produce your secretly famous,
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produce your work and then hide the fact. It's sort
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of bit of a parallel, wouldn't you say?
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I think I'm a little bit more open about being an academic than
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poor Mary Wilson Craft, whose life I
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feel was a great deal more tragic than my own.
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But I guess I
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feel that perhaps someday I will be able to post on my user
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page if I'm lucky enough to get an academic job.
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On masks. Right, exactly. I want to be
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able to do that. I want to be able to be transparent. I do.
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But the danger, I feel
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it because I've been on job search committees
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and I've seen what they say about candidates and
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I've read the Chronicle of Higher education's columns about job
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search committees, and it makes me wary.
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You were saying before we started this interview about
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in the aftermath of the SJ controversy, where a person
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was very publicly kicked out of Wikipedia because he had
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been exposed as an academic fraud. His work was
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quite good on Wikipedia, but he was pretending to be an academic when he indeed
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wasn't. And you were quite vocal in that discussion afterwards
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about whether or not Wikipedia should require
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people who are saying they have qualifications to prove
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it. Yes, I do not think that they should require people
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to have qualifications simply because people who are
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junior faculty members or graduate students like myself,
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particularly in the humanities,
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if you require that, they won't say they're academics.
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I mean, if I had known that there would be such a discussion about
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qualifications, I would never have said I was an academic.
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I would never have made any such claim, but would never have discussed it.
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But it is nice to be able to go to somebody's user page
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and have them say that, because then I know that I
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can discuss certain things with those people that
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I would not be able to discuss with other people. It's just a certain way
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of talking. If I can talk in a certain shorthand
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that's fast and easy and I don't have to explain myself.
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Like I can say JStore and somebody knows what I'm talking about,
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which is a database where you search for
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articles and not everybody knows what that is. Or has access to it.
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Right, exactly. And then I don't assume when I'm talking to
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somebody who might not be at a university
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institution that pays the enormous amount of money to have access to
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that, who does not identify that kind of thing on
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their user page. I would not make that kind of assumption. The statements that people
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make about themselves on their user pages,
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they help me gauge the kinds of rhetoric I want
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to use, the kinds of assumptions you can begin with. So if someone says
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that they're a high school student, I'm going to say
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and assume different kinds of research skills, for example,
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or research access than I am. If someone's going
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to say I live in Chicago, or if someone
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says that they've graduated from law school or that kind of
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thing, and you can start to assume a greater familiarity with
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search engines and databases
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and that sort of thing, I find that kind of information very helpful.
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I'm not talking about, I have a cat user boxes here.
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That's all very fascinating, but doesn't really help gauge
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when you're having a discussion about the quality of an article or anything.
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That's why in the aftermath of the
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SJ thing, I felt that those statements,
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they are very helpful. And whether or
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not you can actually verify them,
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I still think that they should be there. And even though I
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can't prove to anybody on Wikipedia that I am
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a graduate student. Well, you can, but just choose not to, right? I mean,
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I thought it would help people understand where I'm coming
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from to know that that's
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my orientation towards literature and
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scholarship. What is the best practical way for the Wikipedia
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to become less anti elitist and correspondingly,
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the academy to become less anti Wikipedia. Okay,
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what do you mean by Wikipedia being anti elitist?
19:24.638 --> 19:27.730
Well, you say on your user page you have
19:27.880 --> 19:31.566
a link to the essay why Wikipedia must jettison
19:31.598 --> 19:32.850
its anti elitism.
19:34.950 --> 19:37.998
Yeah, but just because I have a link doesn't mean that. Well, I assume you
19:38.024 --> 19:41.286
agree with. I agree with everything in it, but I mean,
19:41.308 --> 19:46.534
the term anti elitism in the United States can mean a lot of know.
19:46.572 --> 19:50.274
It can mean like anti latte, anti volvo driving.
19:50.322 --> 19:54.742
Right. All those things. I think that anti elitism
19:54.806 --> 19:58.042
on Wikipedia means something much more
19:58.096 --> 20:01.782
specific than all of that. It means anti intellectualism.
20:01.926 --> 20:06.510
In my life I've come into contact a lot of anti intellectualism.
20:06.930 --> 20:10.906
I grew up in a really rural area that was extremely
20:10.938 --> 20:14.530
anti intellectual. It was almost like anti knowledge.
20:15.750 --> 20:19.426
And I don't see that kind of anti intellectualism in
20:19.448 --> 20:22.386
Wikipedia anywhere. I mean,
20:22.408 --> 20:26.434
people who participate in Wikipedia to some extent can't
20:26.482 --> 20:29.846
be that kind of anti intellectual because they are participating in,
20:29.948 --> 20:33.154
by definition. Yeah. In an enterprise
20:33.202 --> 20:37.430
that wants to, by definition,
20:38.910 --> 20:42.346
disseminate reliable knowledge to the rest of
20:42.368 --> 20:46.282
the world. Where the problems come in are
20:46.416 --> 20:50.410
where people start to dispute what is reliable knowledge.
20:51.810 --> 20:55.790
I have a different idea about reliable knowledge than
20:55.860 --> 21:00.000
some other editors, and I think that that is something that
21:01.090 --> 21:04.738
Wikipedia in some real way has not come
21:04.744 --> 21:07.726
to grips with. What is reliable.
21:07.838 --> 21:11.314
Right. Encyclopedia Britannica is
21:11.352 --> 21:14.286
legitimate because it's the encyclopedia Britannica.
21:14.398 --> 21:18.326
Right. That's the circular reasoning that people tell themselves they
21:18.348 --> 21:21.906
really do. They purchase it because they say it's encyclopedia
21:21.938 --> 21:25.686
Britannica, therefore it's reliable. Right. Wikipedia really has
21:25.708 --> 21:29.834
to prove itself. It has to prove itself very
21:30.032 --> 21:33.786
well. Slowly and carefully, over a long period of
21:33.808 --> 21:37.034
time. Yeah, exactly. And I think that we
21:37.072 --> 21:40.538
have to hold ourselves to an incredibly high standard to be
21:40.544 --> 21:43.790
able to do that. And I think that the higher the standard
21:43.860 --> 21:48.190
we hold ourselves to, the more sort of impressed,
21:49.010 --> 21:52.142
first of all, the people in the academy will be. You were talking about how
21:52.196 --> 21:55.802
are we going to change people's minds in the academy.
21:55.946 --> 21:59.234
First of all, the more impressed people in the academy will be. And if people
21:59.272 --> 22:02.674
in the academy start saying, wow, Wikipedia really has done a good job on this,
22:02.712 --> 22:06.494
right, that can kind of percolate down, right? To some extent,
22:06.542 --> 22:10.086
because then you'll get, well, wasn't there an article like published in
22:10.108 --> 22:13.814
Nature or something about how I. Use that example quite often. It was a
22:13.852 --> 22:17.110
very comprehensive journal, nature journal study,
22:17.180 --> 22:20.474
where they have similar articles in Wikipedia and in Britannica were
22:20.512 --> 22:24.394
compared by peer reviewed effectively by academics in
22:24.432 --> 22:27.834
that particular area. And the result was, ironically, that they both were
22:27.872 --> 22:31.146
equally wrong. Right. They all had the same number of
22:31.168 --> 22:34.158
errors, like two to three errors per article, two or three major, and a.
22:34.164 --> 22:38.138
Couple of minor errors or omissions. And the result was that Wikipedia produced
22:38.234 --> 22:41.978
a page saying, a meter page saying, these are the mistakes
22:41.994 --> 22:45.074
that they've identified. Everyone, let's pitch in to fix them. In a month
22:45.112 --> 22:48.740
they were fixed, ticked off. Britannica, on the other hand, responded by.
22:51.430 --> 22:55.082
They would have to wait years to fix it. Not just that, they responded.
22:55.166 --> 22:58.886
Rather than saying, this is interesting and this is academic debate and
22:58.908 --> 23:02.534
whatnot, they responded by buying a full page advertisement in the London Times,
23:02.732 --> 23:06.162
decrying nature's methodology.
23:06.306 --> 23:09.910
Yeah. And that really shows the difference in the approach.
23:10.070 --> 23:13.990
I would be interested in an analysis of literature
23:14.070 --> 23:17.386
articles and history articles because I
23:17.408 --> 23:20.618
have a feeling that Wikipedia would not come out so well.
23:20.704 --> 23:24.646
They were all science articles, obviously. Yes. The science articles
23:24.678 --> 23:28.126
I have found in Wikipedia to be superb. The ones that I
23:28.148 --> 23:31.178
have read, I am not a science expert.
23:31.354 --> 23:35.678
However, I do live with one and that's handy.
23:35.854 --> 23:39.758
But the ones that I have read are amazing. They're comprehensive.
23:39.854 --> 23:44.100
I can read them as a non scientist myself, understand them.
23:45.270 --> 23:48.550
I am really astounded by the effort that has been put into them.
23:48.620 --> 23:52.582
I live with someone who is an undergraduate physics major
23:52.716 --> 23:56.354
and he was looking for articles to write because he loves physics
23:56.402 --> 23:59.526
and he would love to write an article. And there was nothing left. There was
23:59.548 --> 24:03.226
nothing left. On the other hand, I can
24:03.248 --> 24:07.110
always find something to write about on the 18th century. There is always a stub
24:07.190 --> 24:11.138
rating to be expanded. There's always a page. All these red links
24:11.174 --> 24:14.734
that I could make. I could make red links all day
24:14.772 --> 24:18.746
long. It's incredible. I mean, for example, one of the best selling
24:18.778 --> 24:22.590
novels of the 18th century, Rousseau's Julie,
24:23.090 --> 24:26.930
the New Eloise, which helped
24:27.270 --> 24:30.670
generate an entire new genre, this sentimental novel.
24:30.750 --> 24:34.014
I mean, people went to visit Rousseau, they cried over this novel,
24:34.062 --> 24:38.754
they read it all night. Mean, you know, it's that
24:38.792 --> 24:42.078
kind of bestseller has a couple of paragraphs.
24:42.254 --> 24:46.274
It's doubly difficult to write about or doubly missing on Wikipedia
24:46.322 --> 24:49.130
because one, it's old, and two, it's not in English.
24:49.550 --> 24:53.158
Right. Although there's a translation of the novel
24:53.254 --> 24:57.946
and there's plenty of scholarship on it in English. It's just all
24:57.968 --> 25:01.886
of these major works in the 18th century are missing. And I
25:01.908 --> 25:05.550
haven't done a major survey of the 19th century or the 17th century
25:05.970 --> 25:09.754
or other countries, but I can only imagine that it's
25:09.802 --> 25:13.882
equally as bad in places like Africa or Asia.
25:14.026 --> 25:17.058
This is just one thing that I happen to know a lot about, so I
25:17.064 --> 25:20.866
know what's. But there's many areas like
25:20.888 --> 25:24.946
that, no doubt. So I sort of feel like even though that
25:25.128 --> 25:28.958
survey that they did about science articles was to Wikipedia's
25:28.974 --> 25:32.710
great benefit, I feel that there should be some sort of survey done about
25:32.860 --> 25:36.246
history and literature in these other fields to see, well, what is it
25:36.268 --> 25:38.860
that's missing and what do we need to improve on?
25:47.630 --> 25:50.746
Can I turn your attention to the role
25:50.778 --> 25:54.254
of women on Wikipedia and their
25:54.292 --> 25:57.758
proportion, how much they participate, and whether you feel
25:57.924 --> 26:01.406
women are not represented fully in articles and
26:01.428 --> 26:04.958
in editorship? Well, I'd like to turn to editorship first because I think that's
26:04.974 --> 26:07.860
a really interesting question. I'm not sure we know.
26:09.990 --> 26:12.930
First of all, you counted,
26:13.590 --> 26:17.060
interestingly, all the barn stars I was given,
26:18.170 --> 26:21.538
did you read them, what they said? I didn't
26:21.554 --> 26:25.622
read what, the notes that came with them. No. Yeah. Half of them said he.
26:25.756 --> 26:28.966
Really? Yeah. Because many people did
26:28.988 --> 26:32.826
not know my gender for a long time, because I didn't say on
26:32.848 --> 26:36.234
my user page what my gender was. It was very interesting to me.
26:36.352 --> 26:40.006
And people started leaving notes on my user page. I wasn't
26:40.038 --> 26:44.160
sure if you were a he or a she. And it was very interesting.
26:44.530 --> 26:48.302
So finally I did put a box at the top of my talk page
26:48.356 --> 26:52.254
that says that I'm a she because people were getting
26:52.292 --> 26:55.678
kind of concerned that they didn't know. It's interesting that
26:55.684 --> 26:59.266
people would find that important. Yes. It was fascinating to me,
26:59.288 --> 27:02.146
first of all, that they did find it important. It was also fascinating to me
27:02.168 --> 27:05.442
that for a long time people assumed I was a he.
27:05.576 --> 27:09.190
I started asking people why they assumed that. Was it because of
27:09.260 --> 27:12.498
my aggressive style of writing.
27:12.674 --> 27:15.942
I wondered if it was that, because I had assumed that anyone
27:15.996 --> 27:18.582
going to my user page would assume I was a woman,
27:18.726 --> 27:22.294
because people who write about women's
27:22.342 --> 27:26.086
issues in literature are most often a woman.
27:26.278 --> 27:29.542
So I had just assumed people would think, well, of course she's a woman.
27:29.606 --> 27:32.970
She's writing about children and she's writing about women.
27:33.040 --> 27:36.494
How could she not be a woman? That's what I did. And I had
27:36.532 --> 27:39.706
assumed that you were female on the basis that you were writing about women's
27:39.738 --> 27:43.186
stuff. And that's equally bad.
27:43.368 --> 27:46.706
It is. But the probability that
27:46.728 --> 27:49.140
you would have been right was so high.
27:49.990 --> 27:53.154
Know, perhaps make the stereotype not so
27:53.192 --> 27:56.306
bad. But I did find it fascinating that I was a
27:56.328 --> 27:59.414
he for a very long time. I see one here. The Barn star of high
27:59.452 --> 28:02.326
culture, given to you in July this year.
28:02.428 --> 28:06.434
This Barn star is awarded to our demet for his FA and GA
28:06.482 --> 28:10.390
work on classical era topics such as Mary Bulson Graft and Joseph Priestley.
28:12.750 --> 28:16.074
And I love it. Actually, there was a whole discussion on my talk
28:16.112 --> 28:19.754
page a while ago about what gender. I was on your talk
28:19.792 --> 28:23.726
page and you didn't answer. Well, actually, I think I
28:23.748 --> 28:28.202
said something about embracing all genders, because that was fabulous.
28:28.346 --> 28:30.800
I didn't really want to be either one.
28:34.530 --> 28:38.258
Yeah, I actually thought that was fun. So, with the
28:38.264 --> 28:41.842
editorship, I'm not really sure we know how many men and women
28:41.896 --> 28:45.410
are there. People declare their genders with user boxes,
28:45.850 --> 28:49.800
but they could be declaring anything with that. And of course, I've seen
28:50.250 --> 28:53.526
male and female user boxes on the
28:53.548 --> 28:56.898
same page. I don't
28:56.914 --> 29:00.518
know what's going on with that. To some extent, you assume
29:00.614 --> 29:04.330
it's more male simply because it's more technology
29:04.480 --> 29:08.250
oriented, but I think that's probably a dangerous assumption.
29:08.750 --> 29:12.554
How much data do we really have on this? The reason
29:12.592 --> 29:16.222
I asked recently was because there was a mailing list set up a while ago,
29:16.276 --> 29:19.530
and I'm not sure if it still exists, called wiki chicks,
29:19.610 --> 29:22.978
which was a mailing list exclusively for female editors of
29:22.984 --> 29:26.050
Wikipedia. I've never heard that.
29:26.200 --> 29:29.406
Got a lot of people a bit angry on the basis
29:29.438 --> 29:32.606
that it was exclusivist, but in a affirmative action
29:32.638 --> 29:35.886
kind of way. Now, at Wikimania,
29:35.918 --> 29:39.246
Taiwan, at the opening speech by Florence
29:39.278 --> 29:43.186
de Vivoard, or the chairperson of the foundation,
29:43.298 --> 29:46.150
there was a special table set aside for wiki chicks.
29:47.930 --> 29:51.770
Their efforts are laudable in the sense of promoting and providing a community
29:51.840 --> 29:55.734
for female editors on the community. But what is your initial
29:55.782 --> 29:59.020
reaction to that idea? I guess my initial reaction is,
29:59.890 --> 30:02.750
do they feel isolated?
30:03.650 --> 30:06.990
Because usually such communities help
30:07.060 --> 30:09.806
people who feel isolated. So, for example,
30:09.988 --> 30:14.122
there are often physics for women groups,
30:14.186 --> 30:18.386
right? In physics departments. Because there are so few women in
30:18.408 --> 30:22.158
those departments, they feel very isolated. It's a very different kind of culture,
30:22.254 --> 30:25.242
and so it's often good to have those kinds of groups.
30:25.326 --> 30:29.410
Right. I can imagine such a group for men in an english department
30:29.490 --> 30:32.760
because they're often dominated by women. Right.
30:33.370 --> 30:37.566
So I guess my question would be, are women feeling
30:37.618 --> 30:41.226
isolated on Wikipedia that they would need such a
30:41.248 --> 30:46.586
group? Do you? No, but I
30:46.608 --> 30:50.214
never advertised really what my gender was. So you have now,
30:50.272 --> 30:54.206
really? Yeah, until very recently, because I
30:54.228 --> 30:58.720
never really viewed that as particularly important to
30:59.810 --> 31:04.070
what I was doing. Actually, I kind of disliked
31:04.090 --> 31:07.330
the idea that only women can write about women's issues
31:07.400 --> 31:09.700
or that kind of thing,
31:12.710 --> 31:16.242
even though that is very common. And that argument
31:16.306 --> 31:19.814
has been made particularly for things like in
31:19.852 --> 31:23.240
english departments anyway, for african american literature, for example,
31:23.690 --> 31:27.366
that, I don't know, perhaps. Is this
31:27.388 --> 31:31.146
group made up of people who've been on Wikipedia for many years? I've only been
31:31.168 --> 31:32.620
on Wikipedia for a.
31:33.550 --> 31:37.626
Even. It's not a very long about your
31:37.728 --> 31:41.766
work. Not only are you writing a dissertation and professional
31:41.798 --> 31:45.360
academic and you're doing all this amazing stuff, you've only been here for a year.
31:46.370 --> 31:50.094
If the women have been on Wikipedia for like three or four years,
31:50.132 --> 31:54.530
I'm sure they have a much better idea of perhaps the isolating
31:56.470 --> 31:59.780
effect of being a woman on Wikipedia or something.
32:00.150 --> 32:03.780
I wonder if it would be interesting to have it
32:04.150 --> 32:07.654
be a group dedicated to women's issues
32:07.772 --> 32:11.430
on Wikipedia rather than women on Wikipedia.
32:11.930 --> 32:15.254
So people who are interested in making sure that women don't feel
32:15.292 --> 32:19.014
excluded or isolated on Wikipedia, because men can be interested in those
32:19.052 --> 32:22.482
issues. Men can be a champion
32:22.546 --> 32:25.898
for mean, I know that, for example,
32:26.064 --> 32:29.878
a lot of feminists have said, no, they can't, that that's
32:29.894 --> 32:33.198
not a good thing, actually, that women should be the people
32:33.284 --> 32:36.606
championing women's own causes. But I don't
32:36.628 --> 32:40.270
think that there should be such a division. There should be
32:40.340 --> 32:44.174
people arguing for women, right? Not just women arguing for
32:44.212 --> 32:47.794
women and men arguing for men. I think that's where in
32:47.832 --> 32:51.300
academia, for example, we've had so many problems with
32:51.830 --> 32:55.490
women scientists, for example, arguing that they should have family leave time,
32:55.560 --> 32:59.286
et cetera, and men never arguing for that. Men who
32:59.308 --> 33:03.078
have families should have family leave time too. And if it were people
33:03.164 --> 33:06.886
arguing for family leave time, I think that there would be
33:06.988 --> 33:10.906
a lot less discrimination against female scientists and it
33:10.928 --> 33:14.618
would be a sort of more equal atmosphere, if you know
33:14.624 --> 33:18.026
what I mean. Well, I think we should probably leave
33:18.048 --> 33:22.266
it there at that quite large digression from where we started up
33:22.288 --> 33:25.678
at barn Stars and Mary Wilson Craft. Although it has a
33:25.684 --> 33:29.902
lot of contemporary relationship, I hope that
33:29.956 --> 33:33.694
one day soon you'll be able to cast off your
33:33.732 --> 33:36.640
mask and proclaim to your faculty into the world.
33:39.010 --> 33:42.926
I am the world scholar on Mary Wilson Craft and everyone around the world has
33:42.948 --> 33:44.960
been reading my work much more than you.
33:47.050 --> 33:50.994
And I truly hope that happens. It saddens me greatly
33:51.042 --> 33:54.838
to hear that you are not only hiding your
33:54.924 --> 33:58.278
knowledge and experience because you think it might be embarrassing,
33:58.374 --> 34:02.582
but it's actually going to damage your career being an authority
34:02.646 --> 34:05.498
on a website. Yeah,
34:05.584 --> 34:09.238
I know. It worries me for the future of the Internet,
34:09.334 --> 34:13.158
actually. I think it'll change. I think it'll change the
34:13.184 --> 34:16.666
conclusion to my thesis, I hope, if I can justify the sentence,
34:16.698 --> 34:20.842
will be along the lines that just as it has become necessary for academics
34:20.906 --> 34:24.218
to publish in journals, in peer reviewed journals, and that's
34:24.234 --> 34:27.586
a required part of the job, it'll become, over the next decade or
34:27.608 --> 34:31.154
so, required part of the job for academics to not
34:31.192 --> 34:34.954
necessarily write, but at least monitor and participate in the articles on Wikipedia
34:35.022 --> 34:38.706
in which they are an expert. Oh, the next decade,
34:38.738 --> 34:42.706
I think that's optimistic. But perhaps the next quarter
34:42.738 --> 34:46.600
century, if. We'Re still around that long.
34:47.210 --> 34:51.018
Oh, I think it will be. I think it will be. It's inserting itself
34:51.104 --> 34:55.546
into the ether, I think as
34:55.568 --> 34:58.954
long as it can sustain funds. Right. It's all about
34:58.992 --> 35:02.620
the money. Yeah, well, that's a whole episode in itself.
35:02.990 --> 35:06.366
Yeah, exactly. So thank you so much for spending your time
35:06.388 --> 35:09.006
with us today. I know it's been difficult trying to catch on to you.
35:09.028 --> 35:12.682
You've got a very busy life. Thank you. Well, and we're 13
35:12.746 --> 35:16.254
hours apart. Yeah. Thank you very much.
35:16.292 --> 35:17.420
You're welcome. Thank you very much.
00:00.090 --> 00:00.640
Um.
00:04.050 --> 00:07.806
This is Wikipedia Weekly, the podcast for anyone who's ever said.
00:07.908 --> 00:11.294
Well, actually, Wikipedia has a really good article on that.
00:11.492 --> 00:15.246
Today we talk to user awadowitz, the Wiki authority on
00:15.268 --> 00:18.746
18th century english literature. Barn nun. She's got bronze.
00:18.778 --> 00:22.782
Good article review. Barn stars four. Good article. Barn stars four.
00:22.836 --> 00:26.258
Barn stars of diligence, literary stars, working women's stars,
00:26.274 --> 00:28.630
and my favorite, the fist of respect.
00:35.610 --> 00:39.062
Hello and welcome to the show. How are you going today? I'm doing
00:39.116 --> 00:42.530
well, thank you. Is that your name? That your username?
00:42.610 --> 00:45.340
Awadowit. It's a very interesting. Yeah,
00:46.110 --> 00:48.858
you can make up any sort of pronunciation you want, I think.
00:48.944 --> 00:51.966
Okay, so what
00:51.988 --> 00:55.690
is your most recently featured article? Because I think you have about 13.
00:55.770 --> 01:00.142
Is that correct? Yeah, you know, I don't even know
01:00.196 --> 01:03.774
the number. The most recently
01:03.822 --> 01:06.914
featured one. I don't know,
01:07.032 --> 01:10.386
actually, might be. It's certainly one
01:10.408 --> 01:13.858
of the ones on Mary Wilsoncraft. I think it's the vindication of the rights of
01:13.864 --> 01:17.406
men. The vindication might be the ones of men. A lot of people, I imagine
01:17.438 --> 01:20.834
we've heard of the vindication of the rights of women. Mary Wilson cast
01:20.882 --> 01:24.210
being one of the most famous first wave feminists.
01:24.290 --> 01:26.600
Well, she's not a first wave feminist. No,
01:27.950 --> 01:31.306
because there is no feminist movement until the end of
01:31.328 --> 01:35.770
the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
01:36.110 --> 01:39.178
Actually, if you read the feminism page,
01:39.264 --> 01:42.462
which is fairly good on Wikipedia, you can read the history
01:42.516 --> 01:45.054
of first wave feminism. I'm showing my.
01:45.252 --> 01:49.600
Oh, you can probably call
01:49.970 --> 01:53.710
Mary Wilsoncraft, in my opinion, a proto feminist.
01:53.870 --> 01:57.218
And actually, on the vindication of the
01:57.224 --> 02:01.038
rights of woman page, one of the foremost Wilson
02:01.054 --> 02:04.194
Kraft scholars, Barbara Taylor, talks about why or
02:04.232 --> 02:07.106
why not. You can call her an actual feminist,
02:07.298 --> 02:11.046
but she certainly wasn't part of the historical first
02:11.148 --> 02:14.386
wave movement, since there was no feminist
02:14.418 --> 02:17.830
movement at the time, and she would never have used that word herself.
02:18.190 --> 02:22.550
For 100 years after her death, she was reviled
02:22.630 --> 02:25.398
as a prostitute and a whore. Gee,
02:25.574 --> 02:27.740
it's really a fascinating story.
02:29.150 --> 02:32.350
One of the reasons I sort of got interested in her writings.
02:33.090 --> 02:37.706
After her death, her husband, William Godwin, the philosopher,
02:37.898 --> 02:40.958
was brokenhearted and decided to write a
02:40.964 --> 02:44.814
biography of her. And he was inspired by Rousseau's
02:44.862 --> 02:48.354
new ideas about how biographies and autobiographies should look.
02:48.392 --> 02:53.010
Rousseau had written a very influential autobiography called the Confessions,
02:53.510 --> 02:56.850
and if somebody could expand that page on Wikipedia, that would be
02:56.920 --> 03:00.690
wonderful. Sort of a stub right now. But it was incredibly
03:00.770 --> 03:05.030
influential. It was a bestseller, and he sort of wrote this 400
03:05.100 --> 03:08.646
page sort of outpouring of his soul that he was going
03:08.668 --> 03:12.666
to write exactly what he thought. And so Godwin took this to heart,
03:12.768 --> 03:16.166
and he said, well, I'm going to write exactly what Mary Wilsoncraft's
03:16.198 --> 03:20.006
life was like. And he said everything about her that he knew that
03:20.048 --> 03:24.062
she had had an affair. She had tried to
03:24.196 --> 03:28.014
have a threesome with Henry Fusili and his wife. She had
03:28.052 --> 03:29.920
had an illegitimate child.
03:31.170 --> 03:34.830
When are we talking here? Yes, at the end of the 18th century,
03:35.250 --> 03:39.230
in the 1780s and 1790s. This is completely unacceptable.
03:39.390 --> 03:43.298
Obviously, in many places now, it still is unacceptable. Then it
03:43.304 --> 03:47.142
was even more unacceptable. And when this was
03:47.276 --> 03:50.466
published, people were outraged. They were shocked.
03:50.498 --> 03:55.254
They were bald. Right. And whatever
03:55.372 --> 03:58.630
respect she might have gained as a writer was totally lost,
03:58.710 --> 04:02.486
because. She did have incredible respect in her day. She was the editor
04:02.518 --> 04:05.610
of really important magazine and literary journal,
04:06.270 --> 04:09.722
the Analytical Review. Until this
04:09.856 --> 04:12.906
biography was published. And once it was published,
04:12.938 --> 04:16.106
that really was completely lost for about a century.
04:16.218 --> 04:19.962
So she was only revived as an important and respected character
04:20.106 --> 04:22.270
in the late 19th century.
04:23.110 --> 04:28.338
Yeah, so once what
04:28.344 --> 04:31.220
you were talking about is the first away feminist movement comes along.
04:32.150 --> 04:35.958
People like Emma Goldman, Lucretia Mott, some of
04:35.964 --> 04:39.640
these figures, they try to resurrect Wilson Kraft, but it's very difficult
04:40.250 --> 04:43.990
because there's such this association with her
04:44.140 --> 04:47.834
of these terrible sort of immoral acts and
04:47.872 --> 04:51.146
values that it's difficult for them to
04:51.168 --> 04:54.666
even use her writings. They talk about being inspired by
04:54.688 --> 04:58.246
her life. Virginia Wolf referred to her experiments
04:58.278 --> 05:01.198
in living as something to be inspired by.
05:01.284 --> 05:05.054
But it really was
05:05.092 --> 05:08.574
difficult for these women to use her writings or even refer to
05:08.612 --> 05:12.426
her. And that's why it's even sketchy
05:12.458 --> 05:16.654
to say that Wilson Kraft is like an inspiration for the feminist
05:16.702 --> 05:19.950
movement, because it's so oblique. Any references
05:20.030 --> 05:23.826
to her to prove that is very difficult.
05:24.008 --> 05:27.554
Very difficult. Okay, well, what is your interest in Wilsoncraft
05:27.602 --> 05:30.854
and in 18th century literature, children's literature? Well,
05:30.892 --> 05:34.870
originally, I became interested in Wilson Craft's
05:35.210 --> 05:38.518
story called original Stories from real life,
05:38.604 --> 05:42.394
which is a book that she wrote for children. Not many
05:42.432 --> 05:46.106
people know that Wilsoncraft wrote children's books, but indeed she
05:46.128 --> 05:49.590
did. She also wrote a book called thoughts on the education of daughters,
05:49.670 --> 05:53.166
about how to raise a daughter all the way from
05:53.268 --> 05:56.846
infancy to marriage. And I became fascinated by
05:56.868 --> 06:00.526
the fact that Wilsoncraft was interested in education throughout her
06:00.548 --> 06:03.614
entire life. Almost all her books have something to do with education.
06:03.812 --> 06:07.574
So I started reading not only Wilsoncraft's
06:07.722 --> 06:11.118
book, but also women such as Anna Letitia
06:11.134 --> 06:14.526
Barbeau, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Martha Sherwood.
06:14.638 --> 06:18.086
And I really wanted to understand the
06:18.108 --> 06:21.778
answers to the question, which I haven't been able to find yet. But I'm
06:21.794 --> 06:25.622
still searching for of how it was that women who did not
06:25.676 --> 06:28.866
share any political similarity,
06:28.978 --> 06:32.582
because women such as Sarah Trimmer or Hannah Moore
06:32.726 --> 06:36.038
are generally viewed as extremely conservative,
06:36.134 --> 06:40.380
what might be called anti jacobin at the time, they were against the
06:40.750 --> 06:45.014
ideals of the French Revolution, whereas women such as Barbeau
06:45.062 --> 06:48.654
orcraft were very much in support of the French Revolution. Wilson Kraft even
06:48.692 --> 06:52.154
went to France in support of the French Revolution. But they all just writing
06:52.202 --> 06:55.282
children's books. She's getting involved in the politics of the day. That's right. Yeah,
06:55.336 --> 06:59.074
exactly. But they all supported education
06:59.272 --> 07:02.754
for women. And oftentimes writing for
07:02.792 --> 07:06.066
children was a way that they could get involved in the
07:06.088 --> 07:09.906
public sphere. They could format
07:09.938 --> 07:13.266
that. You could talk to women via children's books.
07:13.458 --> 07:15.590
Well, actually you could talk to the nation,
07:16.810 --> 07:20.602
because most of these women would write and say,
07:20.656 --> 07:24.634
well, I am going to describe the ideal citizen. And the
07:24.672 --> 07:28.522
way to educate the ideal citizen is this. And then
07:28.576 --> 07:32.442
it's described in their children's literature. The ideal citizen
07:32.506 --> 07:35.786
is the future for the nation. And that's
07:35.818 --> 07:39.470
really fascinating that they are
07:39.540 --> 07:42.606
stepping forth and saying, I feel that
07:42.628 --> 07:46.082
I have the right to participate in this discussion about
07:46.136 --> 07:49.220
what the future of our country is going to look like.
07:49.590 --> 07:52.946
And what's even more fascinating is that all
07:52.968 --> 07:56.194
of these women across this entire political spectrum have
07:56.232 --> 07:59.382
very much the same idea of what that future citizen should look like.
07:59.516 --> 08:02.914
I really want to talk about the fairy tale thing, actually, because it's quite fascinating.
08:02.962 --> 08:06.866
They're anti fairy tale. They believed
08:06.898 --> 08:10.922
in a rational worldview and were
08:10.976 --> 08:14.906
determined to oust fairy tales because
08:15.008 --> 08:18.650
they perpetuated superstition and irrationality.
08:20.270 --> 08:23.486
Obviously, that didn't work out. I mean, we live in
08:23.508 --> 08:26.654
a fairy tale ridden world for children. But it's fascinating to
08:26.692 --> 08:30.430
read their views on fairy tales because they
08:30.580 --> 08:34.114
really were concerned that children were going to believe in
08:34.152 --> 08:37.730
stories that were totally untrue, such as ghost stories.
08:38.790 --> 08:42.098
Why don't we go back to the beginning? Where are
08:42.104 --> 08:45.670
you speaking to us from today? The United States
08:45.820 --> 08:50.226
in the midwest. Okay. And you're a university
08:50.338 --> 08:54.306
academic, but you prefer to remain
08:54.418 --> 08:57.560
quite anonymous. Can you elaborate on that?
08:58.670 --> 09:02.250
Yes, I'm a graduate student, which means
09:02.320 --> 09:05.466
that my employment is in the
09:05.488 --> 09:08.650
humanities, which means that my employment is rather precarious.
09:09.710 --> 09:13.194
I don't have a job yet. And in the humanities,
09:13.322 --> 09:17.114
Wikipedia does not have quite the same acceptance.
09:17.242 --> 09:20.480
I don't think that it does in the sciences. Don't I know it.
09:21.250 --> 09:25.038
Tell me about it. Well, I'm currently
09:25.124 --> 09:28.286
an undergraduate. Yes, I'm taking my honors thesis
09:28.398 --> 09:32.174
in the school of history, on the academic lineage of Wikipedia,
09:32.222 --> 09:35.842
and how Wikipedia relates to historiographical arguments on
09:35.896 --> 09:39.814
authorship or the authority of knowledge, on censorship and
09:39.852 --> 09:43.334
things like that. And it's not only difficult to get them
09:43.372 --> 09:47.254
to accept that it might be an interesting topic to start with,
09:47.372 --> 09:51.306
but accept that you could even deal with Wikipedia in
09:51.328 --> 09:54.998
the context of academic debates in historiography.
09:55.174 --> 09:58.726
So before I even can write thesis properly,
09:58.758 --> 10:02.426
I have to convince the people in the faculty that it is a legitimate
10:02.458 --> 10:05.886
topic of concern that they should be aware of. You have to
10:05.908 --> 10:09.278
find the right person. Yes, that's what
10:09.284 --> 10:12.320
it's all about, finding the right person who's interested.
10:13.570 --> 10:16.914
So you're worried that if you publicize publicly your
10:17.032 --> 10:20.354
interest and experience on Wikipedia, that you won't get a job
10:20.392 --> 10:23.918
because you'd be laughed out of town. I'm very concerned,
10:24.094 --> 10:28.200
actually, I'm very concerned about that. I'm concerned that people will think
10:28.650 --> 10:32.514
that perhaps I've wasted time that I could have spent
10:32.642 --> 10:35.666
on my dissertation, time I could have spent
10:35.698 --> 10:39.334
publishing articles. That's really sad. Yeah. And it
10:39.372 --> 10:43.226
is because I really view the time that I
10:43.248 --> 10:47.034
have spent working on things for Wikipedia, which is
10:47.072 --> 10:50.926
related to what I'm studying as sort of
10:51.108 --> 10:54.686
public service, as part of being
10:54.708 --> 10:58.250
a public intellectual, because I'm often engaged in conversations
10:58.330 --> 11:01.770
with people on Wikipedia where I feel like I'm
11:01.850 --> 11:06.026
explaining what it means to be a scholar and I'm
11:06.058 --> 11:09.154
explaining even down to the level of,
11:09.192 --> 11:11.902
well, here's how you write a paragraph, or here's where you write a sentence.
11:11.966 --> 11:16.086
Right? Is that a wasted time? No, I don't think so, because that's what
11:16.108 --> 11:20.066
I do all the time. Yeah, that's what I do as that's
11:20.098 --> 11:23.910
my field, rhetoric and language.
11:24.330 --> 11:27.494
And I also feel that when, for example,
11:27.612 --> 11:31.046
you type into Google any of the things that I study in the 18th century,
11:31.078 --> 11:34.346
and they come up and they're empty in Wikipedia. I mean,
11:34.368 --> 11:37.610
the 18th century is just really sad on Wikipedia.
11:38.030 --> 11:40.800
Well, not needful, thanks to you. Well,
11:41.330 --> 11:43.440
13 articles or whatever, please.
11:45.410 --> 11:48.702
Since so many people in the world are looking
11:48.756 --> 11:52.362
at us first, why don't the people who have the knowledge,
11:52.506 --> 11:55.170
who already have taken the years to study,
11:55.320 --> 11:59.218
yeah, why don't they just donate it? I mean,
11:59.304 --> 12:03.454
I belong to a listserve of 18th century academics,
12:03.502 --> 12:07.170
and I was so distressed to see that one person said they had checked
12:07.250 --> 12:11.670
the Samuel Johnson article and that it was filled with errors.
12:12.090 --> 12:15.480
And I thought to myself, why didn't you fix them?
12:16.890 --> 12:20.794
It would have been easy for you who had studied for 20
12:20.832 --> 12:24.426
years. But no, I bet the people that you
12:24.448 --> 12:27.994
work with on a day to day basis have no idea that you
12:28.032 --> 12:31.258
are most probably the world's most
12:31.344 --> 12:35.350
foremost resource for information about that period
12:35.430 --> 12:38.734
or about english literature of that period. That more people read your
12:38.772 --> 12:42.522
work about Mary Wilson Craft than the officially
12:42.586 --> 12:46.030
recognized expert on Mary Wilson Craft. It's kind of scary.
12:46.110 --> 12:49.806
Sometimes I think about this, that what I have written
12:49.838 --> 12:53.650
about Mary Wilson Craft is now populated all over the web. I see it sometimes
12:53.720 --> 12:58.098
on other websites because they copy off of Wikipedia
12:58.274 --> 13:00.520
and it sometimes frightens me.
13:01.850 --> 13:04.950
It's kind of disturbing. You're secretly famous.
13:05.530 --> 13:08.998
Yeah, exactly. But it is a
13:09.004 --> 13:12.554
sort of fascinating thing. And every once in a while when I meet somebody who
13:12.592 --> 13:16.346
is a professor or another graduate student who I think might be
13:16.368 --> 13:19.562
receptive to the idea, I mentioned it and I say, you know,
13:19.616 --> 13:23.520
it would be a really good idea if you wrote an article because.
13:24.210 --> 13:27.966
But it's very hard to convince people that they should
13:28.148 --> 13:31.278
spend their time doing something that they're not going to get any credit for
13:31.364 --> 13:35.170
on their cv or when they're applying for tenure.
13:35.510 --> 13:39.918
But getting a job in the humanities
13:40.094 --> 13:43.086
is a very difficult proposition.
13:43.198 --> 13:46.840
About 200 to 400 people apply for every job,
13:47.290 --> 13:50.994
and they are just always looking for a reason to throw
13:51.042 --> 13:55.158
somebody out of that pool. It's truly sad that that
13:55.244 --> 13:59.750
should come to arbitrary
14:00.090 --> 14:03.546
draws a parallel in my mind between what you were saying about Mary Wilsoncraft and
14:03.568 --> 14:07.338
how her and her contemporaries were not allowed to participate in
14:07.344 --> 14:10.714
the public debate on citizenship because they were
14:10.752 --> 14:14.078
women, and so they came around it in a sort
14:14.084 --> 14:17.678
of a secret way by writing children's books. You seem to be having a similar
14:17.764 --> 14:21.342
approach, that you're not allowed to broach the topic of
14:21.396 --> 14:25.118
freeing out knowledge because you're
14:25.124 --> 14:28.638
not allowed to broach the topic of being an academic because you're a Wikipedia
14:28.654 --> 14:31.986
writer and those two things are mutually exclusive. So you come about it
14:32.008 --> 14:35.578
a secret way and produce your secretly famous,
14:35.614 --> 14:39.286
produce your work and then hide the fact. It's sort
14:39.308 --> 14:42.360
of bit of a parallel, wouldn't you say?
14:44.810 --> 14:48.170
I think I'm a little bit more open about being an academic than
14:48.240 --> 14:51.706
poor Mary Wilson Craft, whose life I
14:51.728 --> 14:54.220
feel was a great deal more tragic than my own.
14:55.150 --> 14:59.114
But I guess I
14:59.152 --> 15:02.794
feel that perhaps someday I will be able to post on my user
15:02.842 --> 15:06.960
page if I'm lucky enough to get an academic job.
15:09.410 --> 15:12.898
On masks. Right, exactly. I want to be
15:12.904 --> 15:16.340
able to do that. I want to be able to be transparent. I do.
15:17.350 --> 15:20.594
But the danger, I feel
15:20.632 --> 15:24.094
it because I've been on job search committees
15:24.222 --> 15:31.270
and I've seen what they say about candidates and
15:31.340 --> 15:35.990
I've read the Chronicle of Higher education's columns about job
15:36.060 --> 15:39.530
search committees, and it makes me wary.
15:48.430 --> 15:52.174
You were saying before we started this interview about
15:52.372 --> 15:56.350
in the aftermath of the SJ controversy, where a person
15:56.420 --> 15:59.806
was very publicly kicked out of Wikipedia because he had
15:59.828 --> 16:03.054
been exposed as an academic fraud. His work was
16:03.092 --> 16:06.654
quite good on Wikipedia, but he was pretending to be an academic when he indeed
16:06.702 --> 16:10.430
wasn't. And you were quite vocal in that discussion afterwards
16:10.510 --> 16:14.430
about whether or not Wikipedia should require
16:14.510 --> 16:18.306
people who are saying they have qualifications to prove
16:18.338 --> 16:22.054
it. Yes, I do not think that they should require people
16:22.092 --> 16:25.462
to have qualifications simply because people who are
16:25.516 --> 16:28.554
junior faculty members or graduate students like myself,
16:28.672 --> 16:30.490
particularly in the humanities,
16:32.190 --> 16:36.166
if you require that, they won't say they're academics.
16:36.358 --> 16:40.346
I mean, if I had known that there would be such a discussion about
16:40.448 --> 16:43.974
qualifications, I would never have said I was an academic.
16:44.102 --> 16:47.150
I would never have made any such claim, but would never have discussed it.
16:47.300 --> 16:50.974
But it is nice to be able to go to somebody's user page
16:51.092 --> 16:54.458
and have them say that, because then I know that I
16:54.484 --> 16:58.626
can discuss certain things with those people that
16:58.648 --> 17:02.114
I would not be able to discuss with other people. It's just a certain way
17:02.152 --> 17:06.110
of talking. If I can talk in a certain shorthand
17:06.190 --> 17:09.270
that's fast and easy and I don't have to explain myself.
17:09.340 --> 17:12.760
Like I can say JStore and somebody knows what I'm talking about,
17:13.610 --> 17:16.774
which is a database where you search for
17:16.812 --> 17:20.170
articles and not everybody knows what that is. Or has access to it.
17:20.320 --> 17:23.594
Right, exactly. And then I don't assume when I'm talking to
17:23.632 --> 17:27.014
somebody who might not be at a university
17:27.062 --> 17:30.634
institution that pays the enormous amount of money to have access to
17:30.672 --> 17:33.918
that, who does not identify that kind of thing on
17:33.924 --> 17:37.694
their user page. I would not make that kind of assumption. The statements that people
17:37.732 --> 17:40.430
make about themselves on their user pages,
17:41.010 --> 17:44.114
they help me gauge the kinds of rhetoric I want
17:44.152 --> 17:47.634
to use, the kinds of assumptions you can begin with. So if someone says
17:47.672 --> 17:52.546
that they're a high school student, I'm going to say
17:52.648 --> 17:56.562
and assume different kinds of research skills, for example,
17:56.616 --> 17:59.766
or research access than I am. If someone's going
17:59.788 --> 18:03.142
to say I live in Chicago, or if someone
18:03.196 --> 18:06.326
says that they've graduated from law school or that kind of
18:06.348 --> 18:10.218
thing, and you can start to assume a greater familiarity with
18:10.384 --> 18:13.590
search engines and databases
18:13.670 --> 18:17.690
and that sort of thing, I find that kind of information very helpful.
18:18.430 --> 18:22.320
I'm not talking about, I have a cat user boxes here.
18:23.890 --> 18:28.666
That's all very fascinating, but doesn't really help gauge
18:28.698 --> 18:32.480
when you're having a discussion about the quality of an article or anything.
18:33.430 --> 18:36.466
That's why in the aftermath of the
18:36.488 --> 18:39.598
SJ thing, I felt that those statements,
18:39.694 --> 18:42.866
they are very helpful. And whether or
18:42.888 --> 18:46.034
not you can actually verify them,
18:46.232 --> 18:50.406
I still think that they should be there. And even though I
18:50.428 --> 18:54.214
can't prove to anybody on Wikipedia that I am
18:54.412 --> 18:57.802
a graduate student. Well, you can, but just choose not to, right? I mean,
18:57.856 --> 19:01.162
I thought it would help people understand where I'm coming
19:01.216 --> 19:04.950
from to know that that's
19:05.110 --> 19:08.586
my orientation towards literature and
19:08.608 --> 19:12.602
scholarship. What is the best practical way for the Wikipedia
19:12.666 --> 19:16.346
to become less anti elitist and correspondingly,
19:16.458 --> 19:20.080
the academy to become less anti Wikipedia. Okay,
19:20.850 --> 19:24.446
what do you mean by Wikipedia being anti elitist?
19:24.638 --> 19:27.730
Well, you say on your user page you have
19:27.880 --> 19:31.566
a link to the essay why Wikipedia must jettison
19:31.598 --> 19:32.850
its anti elitism.
19:34.950 --> 19:37.998
Yeah, but just because I have a link doesn't mean that. Well, I assume you
19:38.024 --> 19:41.286
agree with. I agree with everything in it, but I mean,
19:41.308 --> 19:46.534
the term anti elitism in the United States can mean a lot of know.
19:46.572 --> 19:50.274
It can mean like anti latte, anti volvo driving.
19:50.322 --> 19:54.742
Right. All those things. I think that anti elitism
19:54.806 --> 19:58.042
on Wikipedia means something much more
19:58.096 --> 20:01.782
specific than all of that. It means anti intellectualism.
20:01.926 --> 20:06.510
In my life I've come into contact a lot of anti intellectualism.
20:06.930 --> 20:10.906
I grew up in a really rural area that was extremely
20:10.938 --> 20:14.530
anti intellectual. It was almost like anti knowledge.
20:15.750 --> 20:19.426
And I don't see that kind of anti intellectualism in
20:19.448 --> 20:22.386
Wikipedia anywhere. I mean,
20:22.408 --> 20:26.434
people who participate in Wikipedia to some extent can't
20:26.482 --> 20:29.846
be that kind of anti intellectual because they are participating in,
20:29.948 --> 20:33.154
by definition. Yeah. In an enterprise
20:33.202 --> 20:37.430
that wants to, by definition,
20:38.910 --> 20:42.346
disseminate reliable knowledge to the rest of
20:42.368 --> 20:46.282
the world. Where the problems come in are
20:46.416 --> 20:50.410
where people start to dispute what is reliable knowledge.
20:51.810 --> 20:55.790
I have a different idea about reliable knowledge than
20:55.860 --> 21:00.000
some other editors, and I think that that is something that
21:01.090 --> 21:04.738
Wikipedia in some real way has not come
21:04.744 --> 21:07.726
to grips with. What is reliable.
21:07.838 --> 21:11.314
Right. Encyclopedia Britannica is
21:11.352 --> 21:14.286
legitimate because it's the encyclopedia Britannica.
21:14.398 --> 21:18.326
Right. That's the circular reasoning that people tell themselves they
21:18.348 --> 21:21.906
really do. They purchase it because they say it's encyclopedia
21:21.938 --> 21:25.686
Britannica, therefore it's reliable. Right. Wikipedia really has
21:25.708 --> 21:29.834
to prove itself. It has to prove itself very
21:30.032 --> 21:33.786
well. Slowly and carefully, over a long period of
21:33.808 --> 21:37.034
time. Yeah, exactly. And I think that we
21:37.072 --> 21:40.538
have to hold ourselves to an incredibly high standard to be
21:40.544 --> 21:43.790
able to do that. And I think that the higher the standard
21:43.860 --> 21:48.190
we hold ourselves to, the more sort of impressed,
21:49.010 --> 21:52.142
first of all, the people in the academy will be. You were talking about how
21:52.196 --> 21:55.802
are we going to change people's minds in the academy.
21:55.946 --> 21:59.234
First of all, the more impressed people in the academy will be. And if people
21:59.272 --> 22:02.674
in the academy start saying, wow, Wikipedia really has done a good job on this,
22:02.712 --> 22:06.494
right, that can kind of percolate down, right? To some extent,
22:06.542 --> 22:10.086
because then you'll get, well, wasn't there an article like published in
22:10.108 --> 22:13.814
Nature or something about how I. Use that example quite often. It was a
22:13.852 --> 22:17.110
very comprehensive journal, nature journal study,
22:17.180 --> 22:20.474
where they have similar articles in Wikipedia and in Britannica were
22:20.512 --> 22:24.394
compared by peer reviewed effectively by academics in
22:24.432 --> 22:27.834
that particular area. And the result was, ironically, that they both were
22:27.872 --> 22:31.146
equally wrong. Right. They all had the same number of
22:31.168 --> 22:34.158
errors, like two to three errors per article, two or three major, and a.
22:34.164 --> 22:38.138
Couple of minor errors or omissions. And the result was that Wikipedia produced
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a page saying, a meter page saying, these are the mistakes
22:41.994 --> 22:45.074
that they've identified. Everyone, let's pitch in to fix them. In a month
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they were fixed, ticked off. Britannica, on the other hand, responded by.
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They would have to wait years to fix it. Not just that, they responded.
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Rather than saying, this is interesting and this is academic debate and
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whatnot, they responded by buying a full page advertisement in the London Times,
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decrying nature's methodology.
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Yeah. And that really shows the difference in the approach.
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I would be interested in an analysis of literature
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articles and history articles because I
23:17.408 --> 23:20.618
have a feeling that Wikipedia would not come out so well.
23:20.704 --> 23:24.646
They were all science articles, obviously. Yes. The science articles
23:24.678 --> 23:28.126
I have found in Wikipedia to be superb. The ones that I
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have read, I am not a science expert.
23:31.354 --> 23:35.678
However, I do live with one and that's handy.
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But the ones that I have read are amazing. They're comprehensive.
23:39.854 --> 23:44.100
I can read them as a non scientist myself, understand them.
23:45.270 --> 23:48.550
I am really astounded by the effort that has been put into them.
23:48.620 --> 23:52.582
I live with someone who is an undergraduate physics major
23:52.716 --> 23:56.354
and he was looking for articles to write because he loves physics
23:56.402 --> 23:59.526
and he would love to write an article. And there was nothing left. There was
23:59.548 --> 24:03.226
nothing left. On the other hand, I can
24:03.248 --> 24:07.110
always find something to write about on the 18th century. There is always a stub
24:07.190 --> 24:11.138
rating to be expanded. There's always a page. All these red links
24:11.174 --> 24:14.734
that I could make. I could make red links all day
24:14.772 --> 24:18.746
long. It's incredible. I mean, for example, one of the best selling
24:18.778 --> 24:22.590
novels of the 18th century, Rousseau's Julie,
24:23.090 --> 24:26.930
the New Eloise, which helped
24:27.270 --> 24:30.670
generate an entire new genre, this sentimental novel.
24:30.750 --> 24:34.014
I mean, people went to visit Rousseau, they cried over this novel,
24:34.062 --> 24:38.754
they read it all night. Mean, you know, it's that
24:38.792 --> 24:42.078
kind of bestseller has a couple of paragraphs.
24:42.254 --> 24:46.274
It's doubly difficult to write about or doubly missing on Wikipedia
24:46.322 --> 24:49.130
because one, it's old, and two, it's not in English.
24:49.550 --> 24:53.158
Right. Although there's a translation of the novel
24:53.254 --> 24:57.946
and there's plenty of scholarship on it in English. It's just all
24:57.968 --> 25:01.886
of these major works in the 18th century are missing. And I
25:01.908 --> 25:05.550
haven't done a major survey of the 19th century or the 17th century
25:05.970 --> 25:09.754
or other countries, but I can only imagine that it's
25:09.802 --> 25:13.882
equally as bad in places like Africa or Asia.
25:14.026 --> 25:17.058
This is just one thing that I happen to know a lot about, so I
25:17.064 --> 25:20.866
know what's. But there's many areas like
25:20.888 --> 25:24.946
that, no doubt. So I sort of feel like even though that
25:25.128 --> 25:28.958
survey that they did about science articles was to Wikipedia's
25:28.974 --> 25:32.710
great benefit, I feel that there should be some sort of survey done about
25:32.860 --> 25:36.246
history and literature in these other fields to see, well, what is it
25:36.268 --> 25:38.860
that's missing and what do we need to improve on?
25:47.630 --> 25:50.746
Can I turn your attention to the role
25:50.778 --> 25:54.254
of women on Wikipedia and their
25:54.292 --> 25:57.758
proportion, how much they participate, and whether you feel
25:57.924 --> 26:01.406
women are not represented fully in articles and
26:01.428 --> 26:04.958
in editorship? Well, I'd like to turn to editorship first because I think that's
26:04.974 --> 26:07.860
a really interesting question. I'm not sure we know.
26:09.990 --> 26:12.930
First of all, you counted,
26:13.590 --> 26:17.060
interestingly, all the barn stars I was given,
26:18.170 --> 26:21.538
did you read them, what they said? I didn't
26:21.554 --> 26:25.622
read what, the notes that came with them. No. Yeah. Half of them said he.
26:25.756 --> 26:28.966
Really? Yeah. Because many people did
26:28.988 --> 26:32.826
not know my gender for a long time, because I didn't say on
26:32.848 --> 26:36.234
my user page what my gender was. It was very interesting to me.
26:36.352 --> 26:40.006
And people started leaving notes on my user page. I wasn't
26:40.038 --> 26:44.160
sure if you were a he or a she. And it was very interesting.
26:44.530 --> 26:48.302
So finally I did put a box at the top of my talk page
26:48.356 --> 26:52.254
that says that I'm a she because people were getting
26:52.292 --> 26:55.678
kind of concerned that they didn't know. It's interesting that
26:55.684 --> 26:59.266
people would find that important. Yes. It was fascinating to me,
26:59.288 --> 27:02.146
first of all, that they did find it important. It was also fascinating to me
27:02.168 --> 27:05.442
that for a long time people assumed I was a he.
27:05.576 --> 27:09.190
I started asking people why they assumed that. Was it because of
27:09.260 --> 27:12.498
my aggressive style of writing.
27:12.674 --> 27:15.942
I wondered if it was that, because I had assumed that anyone
27:15.996 --> 27:18.582
going to my user page would assume I was a woman,
27:18.726 --> 27:22.294
because people who write about women's
27:22.342 --> 27:26.086
issues in literature are most often a woman.
27:26.278 --> 27:29.542
So I had just assumed people would think, well, of course she's a woman.
27:29.606 --> 27:32.970
She's writing about children and she's writing about women.
27:33.040 --> 27:36.494
How could she not be a woman? That's what I did. And I had
27:36.532 --> 27:39.706
assumed that you were female on the basis that you were writing about women's
27:39.738 --> 27:43.186
stuff. And that's equally bad.
27:43.368 --> 27:46.706
It is. But the probability that
27:46.728 --> 27:49.140
you would have been right was so high.
27:49.990 --> 27:53.154
Know, perhaps make the stereotype not so
27:53.192 --> 27:56.306
bad. But I did find it fascinating that I was a
27:56.328 --> 27:59.414
he for a very long time. I see one here. The Barn star of high
27:59.452 --> 28:02.326
culture, given to you in July this year.
28:02.428 --> 28:06.434
This Barn star is awarded to our demet for his FA and GA
28:06.482 --> 28:10.390
work on classical era topics such as Mary Bulson Graft and Joseph Priestley.
28:12.750 --> 28:16.074
And I love it. Actually, there was a whole discussion on my talk
28:16.112 --> 28:19.754
page a while ago about what gender. I was on your talk
28:19.792 --> 28:23.726
page and you didn't answer. Well, actually, I think I
28:23.748 --> 28:28.202
said something about embracing all genders, because that was fabulous.
28:28.346 --> 28:30.800
I didn't really want to be either one.
28:34.530 --> 28:38.258
Yeah, I actually thought that was fun. So, with the
28:38.264 --> 28:41.842
editorship, I'm not really sure we know how many men and women
28:41.896 --> 28:45.410
are there. People declare their genders with user boxes,
28:45.850 --> 28:49.800
but they could be declaring anything with that. And of course, I've seen
28:50.250 --> 28:53.526
male and female user boxes on the
28:53.548 --> 28:56.898
same page. I don't
28:56.914 --> 29:00.518
know what's going on with that. To some extent, you assume
29:00.614 --> 29:04.330
it's more male simply because it's more technology
29:04.480 --> 29:08.250
oriented, but I think that's probably a dangerous assumption.
29:08.750 --> 29:12.554
How much data do we really have on this? The reason
29:12.592 --> 29:16.222
I asked recently was because there was a mailing list set up a while ago,
29:16.276 --> 29:19.530
and I'm not sure if it still exists, called wiki chicks,
29:19.610 --> 29:22.978
which was a mailing list exclusively for female editors of
29:22.984 --> 29:26.050
Wikipedia. I've never heard that.
29:26.200 --> 29:29.406
Got a lot of people a bit angry on the basis
29:29.438 --> 29:32.606
that it was exclusivist, but in a affirmative action
29:32.638 --> 29:35.886
kind of way. Now, at Wikimania,
29:35.918 --> 29:39.246
Taiwan, at the opening speech by Florence
29:39.278 --> 29:43.186
de Vivoard, or the chairperson of the foundation,
29:43.298 --> 29:46.150
there was a special table set aside for wiki chicks.
29:47.930 --> 29:51.770
Their efforts are laudable in the sense of promoting and providing a community
29:51.840 --> 29:55.734
for female editors on the community. But what is your initial
29:55.782 --> 29:59.020
reaction to that idea? I guess my initial reaction is,
29:59.890 --> 30:02.750
do they feel isolated?
30:03.650 --> 30:06.990
Because usually such communities help
30:07.060 --> 30:09.806
people who feel isolated. So, for example,
30:09.988 --> 30:14.122
there are often physics for women groups,
30:14.186 --> 30:18.386
right? In physics departments. Because there are so few women in
30:18.408 --> 30:22.158
those departments, they feel very isolated. It's a very different kind of culture,
30:22.254 --> 30:25.242
and so it's often good to have those kinds of groups.
30:25.326 --> 30:29.410
Right. I can imagine such a group for men in an english department
30:29.490 --> 30:32.760
because they're often dominated by women. Right.
30:33.370 --> 30:37.566
So I guess my question would be, are women feeling
30:37.618 --> 30:41.226
isolated on Wikipedia that they would need such a
30:41.248 --> 30:46.586
group? Do you? No, but I
30:46.608 --> 30:50.214
never advertised really what my gender was. So you have now,
30:50.272 --> 30:54.206
really? Yeah, until very recently, because I
30:54.228 --> 30:58.720
never really viewed that as particularly important to
30:59.810 --> 31:04.070
what I was doing. Actually, I kind of disliked
31:04.090 --> 31:07.330
the idea that only women can write about women's issues
31:07.400 --> 31:09.700
or that kind of thing,
31:12.710 --> 31:16.242
even though that is very common. And that argument
31:16.306 --> 31:19.814
has been made particularly for things like in
31:19.852 --> 31:23.240
english departments anyway, for african american literature, for example,
31:23.690 --> 31:27.366
that, I don't know, perhaps. Is this
31:27.388 --> 31:31.146
group made up of people who've been on Wikipedia for many years? I've only been
31:31.168 --> 31:32.620
on Wikipedia for a.
31:33.550 --> 31:37.626
Even. It's not a very long about your
31:37.728 --> 31:41.766
work. Not only are you writing a dissertation and professional
31:41.798 --> 31:45.360
academic and you're doing all this amazing stuff, you've only been here for a year.
31:46.370 --> 31:50.094
If the women have been on Wikipedia for like three or four years,
31:50.132 --> 31:54.530
I'm sure they have a much better idea of perhaps the isolating
31:56.470 --> 31:59.780
effect of being a woman on Wikipedia or something.
32:00.150 --> 32:03.780
I wonder if it would be interesting to have it
32:04.150 --> 32:07.654
be a group dedicated to women's issues
32:07.772 --> 32:11.430
on Wikipedia rather than women on Wikipedia.
32:11.930 --> 32:15.254
So people who are interested in making sure that women don't feel
32:15.292 --> 32:19.014
excluded or isolated on Wikipedia, because men can be interested in those
32:19.052 --> 32:22.482
issues. Men can be a champion
32:22.546 --> 32:25.898
for mean, I know that, for example,
32:26.064 --> 32:29.878
a lot of feminists have said, no, they can't, that that's
32:29.894 --> 32:33.198
not a good thing, actually, that women should be the people
32:33.284 --> 32:36.606
championing women's own causes. But I don't
32:36.628 --> 32:40.270
think that there should be such a division. There should be
32:40.340 --> 32:44.174
people arguing for women, right? Not just women arguing for
32:44.212 --> 32:47.794
women and men arguing for men. I think that's where in
32:47.832 --> 32:51.300
academia, for example, we've had so many problems with
32:51.830 --> 32:55.490
women scientists, for example, arguing that they should have family leave time,
32:55.560 --> 32:59.286
et cetera, and men never arguing for that. Men who
32:59.308 --> 33:03.078
have families should have family leave time too. And if it were people
33:03.164 --> 33:06.886
arguing for family leave time, I think that there would be
33:06.988 --> 33:10.906
a lot less discrimination against female scientists and it
33:10.928 --> 33:14.618
would be a sort of more equal atmosphere, if you know
33:14.624 --> 33:18.026
what I mean. Well, I think we should probably leave
33:18.048 --> 33:22.266
it there at that quite large digression from where we started up
33:22.288 --> 33:25.678
at barn Stars and Mary Wilson Craft. Although it has a
33:25.684 --> 33:29.902
lot of contemporary relationship, I hope that
33:29.956 --> 33:33.694
one day soon you'll be able to cast off your
33:33.732 --> 33:36.640
mask and proclaim to your faculty into the world.
33:39.010 --> 33:42.926
I am the world scholar on Mary Wilson Craft and everyone around the world has
33:42.948 --> 33:44.960
been reading my work much more than you.
33:47.050 --> 33:50.994
And I truly hope that happens. It saddens me greatly
33:51.042 --> 33:54.838
to hear that you are not only hiding your
33:54.924 --> 33:58.278
knowledge and experience because you think it might be embarrassing,
33:58.374 --> 34:02.582
but it's actually going to damage your career being an authority
34:02.646 --> 34:05.498
on a website. Yeah,
34:05.584 --> 34:09.238
I know. It worries me for the future of the Internet,
34:09.334 --> 34:13.158
actually. I think it'll change. I think it'll change the
34:13.184 --> 34:16.666
conclusion to my thesis, I hope, if I can justify the sentence,
34:16.698 --> 34:20.842
will be along the lines that just as it has become necessary for academics
34:20.906 --> 34:24.218
to publish in journals, in peer reviewed journals, and that's
34:24.234 --> 34:27.586
a required part of the job, it'll become, over the next decade or
34:27.608 --> 34:31.154
so, required part of the job for academics to not
34:31.192 --> 34:34.954
necessarily write, but at least monitor and participate in the articles on Wikipedia
34:35.022 --> 34:38.706
in which they are an expert. Oh, the next decade,
34:38.738 --> 34:42.706
I think that's optimistic. But perhaps the next quarter
34:42.738 --> 34:46.600
century, if. We'Re still around that long.
34:47.210 --> 34:51.018
Oh, I think it will be. I think it will be. It's inserting itself
34:51.104 --> 34:55.546
into the ether, I think as
34:55.568 --> 34:58.954
long as it can sustain funds. Right. It's all about
34:58.992 --> 35:02.620
the money. Yeah, well, that's a whole episode in itself.
35:02.990 --> 35:06.366
Yeah, exactly. So thank you so much for spending your time
35:06.388 --> 35:09.006
with us today. I know it's been difficult trying to catch on to you.
35:09.028 --> 35:12.682
You've got a very busy life. Thank you. Well, and we're 13
35:12.746 --> 35:16.254
hours apart. Yeah. Thank you very much.
35:16.292 --> 35:17.420
You're welcome. Thank you very much.