1. The Wikimedia Foundation is a bloated bureaucracy that alienates both editors and friends of the encyclopedia and related projects by immeasurably over-aggressive fundraising and then spends the money unwisely (IMO) and (IMO) is doing its best to strangle the ideals of Wikipedia. A significant proportion of editors wish most of the WMF would go.away. Anytime it and its employees claim to speak for editors, beware.
2. The WMF has decided there is a Gender Gap on Wikipedia. Based partly on swallowing hoary myths about who does stuff online and partly on a startlingly badly designed questionnaire whose method of presentation guaranteed a sample skewed towards less serious editors (it popped up once and could never be retrieved, thereby guaranteeing everyone who was at that point trying to do some actual work on the site would dismiss their one chance to respond) and that asked people to self-identify by sex. Oh and partly on the fact the nominal head, Sue Gardner, is a well-meaning idiot who thinks "There has been an objection to one editor's talkpage being used for voting on cheesecaky pics of female athletes" = "Women are being driven away by pornographic images in userspace!!!!!1", who thinks a straw poll of her nice, well-meaning female friends constitutes ironclad data on women's reactions, and to whom it has never occurred that you cannot accurately estimate the proportion of females in any online forum by counting usernames you consider map to a particular gender.
3. Wikipedia is a honeypot not only to geeks and eccentric scholars but to the kind of power-mad people who regard the internet as a huge new place to throw their weight about - including at least one person who is making a career out of being The Women's Advocate and stands to lose a lot if the myth of "Women have a different Wikipedia experience! Women need Wikipedia to change! Women are unhappy on Wikipedia!" is ever exploded.
4. The WMF is pushing face-to-face things like country chapters with actual governing boards and conventions and, yes, edit-a-thons for all it's worth. For its own more or less nefarious purposes (and just maybe one is that they will inevitably attract more men than women, thereby feeding their sense of OMGs Gender Gap Urgency). These things are a colossal distraction from actual editing - I read enough of that article to form the impression that, umm, no editing actually got done - and antithetical to the principle of anonymous editing. Which is important to Wikipedia and to genuinely encouraging editing by diverse and knowledgeable people. But of course, it doesn't do to forget ... Jimbo Wales is agin anonymity! He'd like me to have to use my Real Name and fax in proof of my PhD and prove via the Goethe Institute that I'm certified to translate German (which I'm not, but I'm one of the best German translators they have.) I will stop now before I have to make a second comment on him alone.
5. Oh and .... yes, there is a real problem with the Notability pillar and related to that, with Verifiability. When they cracked down on Notability half a dozen years ago, they lost swathes of articles on internet-based things that haven't yet been written about in the New York Times. The entire area of paganism illustrates the dissonance between "things someone might need to look up" and "things scholars have written about" - plus the problem when scholars mostly write idiocy on a particular topic. (I also write about topics where recent scholars tend to write idiocy, so I fall afoul of the naive view that the latest scholarship is ipso facto the best.) So I have quite a bit of sympathy with the view that people and groups can legitimately differ as to what/who is notable, and Wikipedia should, I think, take a serious look at that (especially since they pay occasional lipservice to an ideal of countering entrenched bias). But "Wimyn should be judged by a different standard" is not what I mean.
I just put in a rant about gender essentialist "feminism" and the crazy push to get more stereotypically feminine people editing Wikipedia. Once I'd calmed down by writing the rant and walking my dogs, I realized that I wasn't actually responding to the article. It doesn't promote the goal of more "women" (i.e. stereotypically feminine and/or female-named persons) on Wikipedia, though it does take it for granted. And I wouldn't even call it gender essentialist, though its presumptions and language are best understood in terms of gender stereotyping, the use of "masculinist" is probably best translated as "culturally hegemonic" or similar.
Unfortunately, I don't have the energy or patience to deconstruct the language used - just to note it's a language common among various self-identified anti-hegemonic literati, many of whom call themselves "feminist", "womanist", etc. (Others using similar language focus on race rather than sex/gender; I'm unclear what they call themselves. And others are just plain fluffy bunny "liberals" - in the modern American sense of "liberal".) It was the common argot among most folks at the school where I studied theology - and far too taken-for-granted for anyone to ever produce a master translation key. It also seems to be the common argot among such groups as pagans in Berkeley, where it's generally used in a risibly clueless fashion. The assumption among folks for whom this language is (effectively) hegemonic is that it represents The Truth, obvious to any right-thinking person - and hence the only thing that needs to be explained is the facts/ethics behind it. Obviously I disagree.
At any rate, "masculinist" means something like "giving higher value to stereotypically masculine values/behaviours". It's possible to use this language without presuming that those behaviours/values have anything to do with the natural inclinations and state of males. Possible, but uncommon; gender essentialism is so much simpler ;0)
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1. The Wikimedia Foundation is a bloated bureaucracy that alienates both editors and friends of the encyclopedia and related projects by immeasurably over-aggressive fundraising and then spends the money unwisely (IMO) and (IMO) is doing its best to strangle the ideals of Wikipedia. A significant proportion of editors wish most of the WMF would go.away. Anytime it and its employees claim to speak for editors, beware.
2. The WMF has decided there is a Gender Gap on Wikipedia. Based partly on swallowing hoary myths about who does stuff online and partly on a startlingly badly designed questionnaire whose method of presentation guaranteed a sample skewed towards less serious editors (it popped up once and could never be retrieved, thereby guaranteeing everyone who was at that point trying to do some actual work on the site would dismiss their one chance to respond) and that asked people to self-identify by sex. Oh and partly on the fact the nominal head, Sue Gardner, is a well-meaning idiot who thinks "There has been an objection to one editor's talkpage being used for voting on cheesecaky pics of female athletes" = "Women are being driven away by pornographic images in userspace!!!!!1", who thinks a straw poll of her nice, well-meaning female friends constitutes ironclad data on women's reactions, and to whom it has never occurred that you cannot accurately estimate the proportion of females in any online forum by counting usernames you consider map to a particular gender.
3. Wikipedia is a honeypot not only to geeks and eccentric scholars but to the kind of power-mad people who regard the internet as a huge new place to throw their weight about - including at least one person who is making a career out of being The Women's Advocate and stands to lose a lot if the myth of "Women have a different Wikipedia experience! Women need Wikipedia to change! Women are unhappy on Wikipedia!" is ever exploded.
4. The WMF is pushing face-to-face things like country chapters with actual governing boards and conventions and, yes, edit-a-thons for all it's worth. For its own more or less nefarious purposes (and just maybe one is that they will inevitably attract more men than women, thereby feeding their sense of OMGs Gender Gap Urgency). These things are a colossal distraction from actual editing - I read enough of that article to form the impression that, umm, no editing actually got done - and antithetical to the principle of anonymous editing. Which is important to Wikipedia and to genuinely encouraging editing by diverse and knowledgeable people. But of course, it doesn't do to forget ... Jimbo Wales is agin anonymity! He'd like me to have to use my Real Name and fax in proof of my PhD and prove via the Goethe Institute that I'm certified to translate German (which I'm not, but I'm one of the best German translators they have.) I will stop now before I have to make a second comment on him alone.
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Unfortunately, I don't have the energy or patience to deconstruct the language used - just to note it's a language common among various self-identified anti-hegemonic literati, many of whom call themselves "feminist", "womanist", etc. (Others using similar language focus on race rather than sex/gender; I'm unclear what they call themselves. And others are just plain fluffy bunny "liberals" - in the modern American sense of "liberal".) It was the common argot among most folks at the school where I studied theology - and far too taken-for-granted for anyone to ever produce a master translation key. It also seems to be the common argot among such groups as pagans in Berkeley, where it's generally used in a risibly clueless fashion. The assumption among folks for whom this language is (effectively) hegemonic is that it represents The Truth, obvious to any right-thinking person - and hence the only thing that needs to be explained is the facts/ethics behind it. Obviously I disagree.
At any rate, "masculinist" means something like "giving higher value to stereotypically masculine values/behaviours". It's possible to use this language without presuming that those behaviours/values have anything to do with the natural inclinations and state of males. Possible, but uncommon; gender essentialism is so much simpler ;0)