in brief: wikipedia writes women from literary canon

Amanda Filipacchi from The New York Times reported on Wednesday that editors on Wikipedia were systematically removing female authors from the category of ‘American Novelists’, and placing them instead in their own subcategory of ‘American Women Novelists’. One by one, in alphabetical order, women were being written out of the American literary canon.

At the time that her article was published, there was no subcategory of American Men Novelists. Today, one exists, but it contains less than 10 authors, while the Women Novelist category has 380 pages. This means that the majority of male authors were left on a list that women were conspicuously absent from. The process had predominantly effected the As and Bs subcategories of the original list, but was becoming more widespread.

The explanation given by Wikipedia is that the American Novelists list was too long, and needed to be broken into subcategories. However, as Filipacchi noted, ‘People who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of “American Novelists” for inspiration, might not even notice that the first page of it includes far more men than women.’

Approximately 85% of Wikipedia contributors are men, and less than 9% of the editors are women.

The creation of a subsection for women novelists that removes women from the main article is a subtle indicator of the persistent belief that women’s writing is not equal to men’s. It demotes the value of women’s work, making the job of being a female writer even harder.

Luckily, Wikipedia is a public space, and since Filipacchi’s piece, there has been movement to counteract this process. Filipacchi reports that word is spreading through social media, and women’s names are reappearing on the main page, where recently it was only men.

While the Australian Novelists category on Wikipedia does contain a subsection for women, the main list has a significant number of female authors.

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