Kate Middleton’s Wedding Gown, Wikipedia and the Lebanese Parliament

Important or trivial?

How good is Wikipedia? As a big Wikipedia fan, that was never a question to me. I always believed in the superiority of the online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone at any time.

So imagine my intrigue when I read this article in Slate yesterday. From it I learned that the dominance of male editors in Wikipedia is creating an alarming gender bias in what is supposed to be a mirror of our collective human achievements. The overwhelmingly male Wikipedians have made sure that it included articles about Linux distributions that almost nobody has heard of. But when the wedding gown of Kate Middleton got an article, there was a huge Wikipedia fight to remove it because it was deemed “not important”.

I was annoyed by the royal wedding (and the attention it got) as much as your average guy, but to deem Kate’s wedding gown, a cultural and artistic object that was an influence to millions of designers, an icon that caused millions of ladies all over the world (and some guys) to gush incessantly about it for many weeks, to deem that “not important” and undeserving of a Wikipedia page — the equivalent of erasing it from history — is a clear indication that Wikipedia needs more female contributors (please spare me the infantile debate about the distinction between girly girls and geek-ladies who care as little as I do about the wedding gown)

Yes, there’s a Lebanese connection

Slate’s article reminded me of a case I once made for why we need more women in the Lebanese parliament. I had previously written a post that seriously annoyed my female readers (just read the comments!), and I found it necessary back then to defend myself by writing (and sorry for quoting myself):

There are matters in Life that only a woman will genuinely understand and where men are truly a lost cause. You can create all the awareness campaigns in the world, but men will never understand on a visceral level the humiliation of a catcall. This is why you ladies need more women in parliament and government to make laws. It’s the only way you’re going to get sexual harassment laws, official rape awareness and overall fairness in the Lebanese legal system.”

Many men will never understand the humiliation of sexual harassment in the same way that many men will never understand what’s the big deal with Kate Middleton’s wedding gown.

The thing is, I sincerely used to believe that Wikipedia was perfect the way it is, in the same way that many people sincerely believe that the Lebanese parliament is perfect (sex ratio wise) the way it is. If the next parliament contains as little women as it does today, we will miss out on things many of us don’t even know we were missing, and we will be worse off for it.

Fortunately, the Wikpedia story has a happy ending: The article about the gown survived.