Wikipedia Assignment

The Wikipedia assignment turned out to be one that was very eye-opening to me. Though I didn't make a huge contribution in my editing, the editing process and learning that the majority of Wikipedia editors are male made me think about Wikipedia in a completely new light. Before this assignment I would mindlessly read through Wikipedia articles and dub them credible sources. I'm not saying that they aren't credible, but the fact that many articles are written from male perspectives, it is hard to believe that there are no biases in their writing. I know that Wikipedia promises to be an objective space, and that is why it's such a great place for females to feel a sense of anonymity and power, but I can't help but think that the male voice is still very dominating, and that we are perhaps numbed to it because of how naturalized it has become (I think it would be interesting to explore this idea of the male voice more).

Thinking about the male voice and its dominance reminded me of an article I read in COMM 10 about the male gaze. I believe the article was written by a Black woman who spoke of the male gaze in cinema. She spoke of the idea that cinema comes from a male point of view and that the females are portrayed as either damsels in distress or an evil character that the male must overpower. However, she also mentioned that women of color have absolutely no one to identify with in cinema besides the occasional woman of color who plays either a made or a sidekick to the main white female character. As I wrote about previously, the idea of inequality in feminism is of particular interest to me. That is why the Guerrilla Girls are so interesting to me--because they focus on both racism and feminism.

I chose to edit the Guerrilla Girls Wiki page because, frankly speaking, the project was daunting and adding a bit of left-out information to the page seemed easy enough. I simply added some information as to how the Guerrilla Girls came about and a little bit of the meaning behind their masks in the "History" section.

I was surprised the authors of the page hadn't mentioned why they wore masks or how their name came about. All my information came directly from the Guerrilla Girls website. In terms of my take-away from the assignment, it was quite exciting to edit a Wikipedia page and know that I  was a creator and reproducer of information. Sure someone else may have eventually come along to edit the page and add what I added, but before then people who were using Wikipedia as their only source of information on the GGs wouldn't have known about the facts I added, so in that sense I felt kind of powerful. It was also nice that when registering to edit the page there was no section where we had to specify whether we were male or female, proving that Wikipedia is really trying to be a gender neutral space of information sharing.