This icon has never been more bitterly appropriate
(If you're reading on LJ: the Dreamwidth icon says "I am not your user-generated content.")
Introductory note: the person who prompted this story, Aaron Schwabach, is to the best of my knowledge a nice guy-not a Nice Guy, but a person who is proceeding in good faith and, as will become important below, gives prominent and substantial credit to his predecessors in the field of his writing, which is the legal analysis of fan fiction. He is a nice guy; he is also a beneficiary of male privilege.
Schwabach wrote an article, The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright, that appeared in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review in 2009. After the article appeared on SSRN, he noticed that the Wikipedia coverage of legal issues surrounding fan fiction had been turned into its own article, with material he thought significantly derived from his article. Being a good Wikipedian, Schwabach didn’t resent the apparent copying, especially since he well understood that copyright doesn’t cover facts or ideas; he merely added a citation to his article. (Other present citations are to Sonia Katyal, Charles Petit (a nonfan and nonacademic), and Rebecca Tushnet.)
The story seems to be that Wikipedians accepted the page as appropriately significant so that it was not deleted and edited it to follow his lead. (At least one page editor is quite fannish, and in examining her/his history I noticed that Whedonesque had been flagged for deletion as nonsignificant, though apparently this was beaten back.)
Excluding (1) pieces written from the copyright owner’s perspective or about Internet issues generally and (2) pieces about scanlation, fansubbing, and manga, here are the names of the people on Fanlore’s Legal Analysis page who wrote about fan fiction and fanvids in law reviews before Schwabach did (and most of whom, I emphasize again, he himself cited): Rosemary, Rebecca, Deborah, Meredith, Cecilia, Simone, Krissi, Leanne, Sonia, Mollie, Christina, Anupam & Madhavi, Ernest, Jacqueline, Casey, Christina, Edward, Nathaniel, Sarah, Steven, Megan & David, and Shira.
Notice anything?
As a baseline point of reference, 20.3% of law review articles at top journals have a sole female author, while adding articles with at least one female author brings the percentage to 25.2%. By contrast, of the 23 (including Schwabach) law review articles focusing on fan fiction through 2009, 8.7% are by male-female partnerships, 21.7% are by men, and 69.6% are by women.
So, a subfield of knowledge largely created and explored by women became interesting to Wikipedia when a man talked about it, and citation-wise looks on Wikipedia--increasingly the first place to which people turn for information online--like a field in which male sources of authority are at least equal to female sources.
Tell me again that Wikipedia doesn’t have a woman problem?
And, you know, I reserve most of my limited editing energy for Fanlore, though I did correct the faulty reference to Fanlore in that one Wikipedia entry. I suppose I could, like Schwabach, edit the Wikipedia entry, though that might be considered to run afoul of the self-promotion policies, which, of course, have generally admirable purposes and effects. Given various forms of policing feminist-friendly entries on Wikipedia, though, I'm not inclined to switch my focus.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Introductory note: the person who prompted this story, Aaron Schwabach, is to the best of my knowledge a nice guy-not a Nice Guy, but a person who is proceeding in good faith and, as will become important below, gives prominent and substantial credit to his predecessors in the field of his writing, which is the legal analysis of fan fiction. He is a nice guy; he is also a beneficiary of male privilege.
Schwabach wrote an article, The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright, that appeared in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review in 2009. After the article appeared on SSRN, he noticed that the Wikipedia coverage of legal issues surrounding fan fiction had been turned into its own article, with material he thought significantly derived from his article. Being a good Wikipedian, Schwabach didn’t resent the apparent copying, especially since he well understood that copyright doesn’t cover facts or ideas; he merely added a citation to his article. (Other present citations are to Sonia Katyal, Charles Petit (a nonfan and nonacademic), and Rebecca Tushnet.)
The story seems to be that Wikipedians accepted the page as appropriately significant so that it was not deleted and edited it to follow his lead. (At least one page editor is quite fannish, and in examining her/his history I noticed that Whedonesque had been flagged for deletion as nonsignificant, though apparently this was beaten back.)
Excluding (1) pieces written from the copyright owner’s perspective or about Internet issues generally and (2) pieces about scanlation, fansubbing, and manga, here are the names of the people on Fanlore’s Legal Analysis page who wrote about fan fiction and fanvids in law reviews before Schwabach did (and most of whom, I emphasize again, he himself cited): Rosemary, Rebecca, Deborah, Meredith, Cecilia, Simone, Krissi, Leanne, Sonia, Mollie, Christina, Anupam & Madhavi, Ernest, Jacqueline, Casey, Christina, Edward, Nathaniel, Sarah, Steven, Megan & David, and Shira.
Notice anything?
As a baseline point of reference, 20.3% of law review articles at top journals have a sole female author, while adding articles with at least one female author brings the percentage to 25.2%. By contrast, of the 23 (including Schwabach) law review articles focusing on fan fiction through 2009, 8.7% are by male-female partnerships, 21.7% are by men, and 69.6% are by women.
So, a subfield of knowledge largely created and explored by women became interesting to Wikipedia when a man talked about it, and citation-wise looks on Wikipedia--increasingly the first place to which people turn for information online--like a field in which male sources of authority are at least equal to female sources.
Tell me again that Wikipedia doesn’t have a woman problem?
And, you know, I reserve most of my limited editing energy for Fanlore, though I did correct the faulty reference to Fanlore in that one Wikipedia entry. I suppose I could, like Schwabach, edit the Wikipedia entry, though that might be considered to run afoul of the self-promotion policies, which, of course, have generally admirable purposes and effects. Given various forms of policing feminist-friendly entries on Wikipedia, though, I'm not inclined to switch my focus.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.