Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Eesti/2020/programstory

Fighting gender gap in Estonian Wikiquote

For the background: a bit more than a year ago, we revived the project that had been mostly dormant, and turned it into a very active one. In 2020, we have nearly tripled the article count (from less than 1000 to 3000 in the beginning of 2021), and in recent months, our daily growth has been almost the highest across all Wikiquote language versions, occasionally superseded by English or Italian only. We have created new policies and manuals, a new category system, and are still working on style and reference issues. Unfortunately, no other Wikiquote project seems to have been very diligent and systematic in these issues, so we have mostly had to find our own solutions.

From early on, we met the problem that's known in digital humanities as hypercanonization: when people start digitizing analogue culture in a "natural" way, in different places and contexts, without meta-level strategies, cooperative planning etc, they tend to focus on the canon and create a wealth of digital versions of the already canonized works and authors, then keeping them in the highlights, so when peripheral material gets digitized at all, it will be all but hidden from the casual user. Western canon (although this goes for most other longstanding canons as well) focuses on white males, mostly Christian, from Europe and its white-dominated colonies (the whiter it is the better the chances for canonization). Well, this has been stating the obvious. Now, to the strategy and tactics.

We can't change the canon in Wikiquote, not right now; perhaps, we can nudge it in time. We can't ignore it when we choose our content, because that's what people are looking for, and that very often what they need: a quote from a certain author, a certain quote's source, related to their work or studies, it's a given we need to provide to be useful. We also rely a lot on the texts already available in a digital form. Thus, we can only influence the focus of our readers' attention by some structural devices and, possibly, campaigns, once we've created.

It took some months in WQ until we realised we don’t address the gender gap problem at all. But since August 2020 we started to change the situation which, of course, led to creating many pages of female authors, scholars, scientists, politicians and activists. (Also, we’ve tried to cover notable translators in Estonia, and to recognize their remarkable work of mediation between cultures and languages.)

So, besides of pushing directly the ratio of female/male in biographies (which, when left unsupervised, tends towards 1:3), we've been focusing on producing the Quote of the Day on our front page in a way that brings female authors in the highlight (when possible, we prefer Estonian females, as Estonian authors are also a minority which means there's double need for highlighting). Based on the principle that the author of the QotD should have some connection to the day, usually birthday, and depending on the available authors, texts, and time we have for preparations (we digitize a lot but rely on digitized texts, too, also providing our own translations when none is available or they're subpar), we've managed to hold The QotD monthly from about 2:1 female:male to almost no male authors. To achieve that, we're keeping a calendar with female and male authors' birthdays and some other dates, so we can keep the system up as much as we can without repeating too much and still covering new relevant female authors in the project. Btw, it's all a bit more difficult because, as opposed to the English project which has had small media scandals about its disagreements whether keeping gender-based lists of, say, novelists is a good or a bad thing, we have inherited the tradition of the Estonian Wikipedia which has never kept any gender-based categories or lists at all (there is no gender category in the whole language, so a strenuous import would look truly weird). It complicates things a bit, but also forces us to keep up with Wikidata, which is definitely a good thing. Unfortunately, we can't use pictures because the coverage of female authors in Wikiquote is subpar in all our projects, especially in Commons.

We consider QotD a good tool because: 1) it doesn't take too much energy from our small team, so we can still keep the project growing at an excellent rate, and maintain our quality standards; 2) it is all about the highlight, so it does the job but will not prevent any reader from getting their Great White Males when necessary - after all, everybody who needs them knows to look for them, but when they meet good female authors they've missed, they'll know to look for them, too. As a small bonus, we have been timing our little milestones in statistics so that the subject of our 1000th article was Greta Thunberg, 2000 Doris Lessing, 2500 Hilda Taba, 3000 is Virginia Woolf, 3500 is Olga Tokarczuk etc.

Also, we rearranged the permanent links on our front page so, that our link groups like "Authors", "Estonian authors", "Literature", and "Estonian literature" would each have at least half female authors or their works. It's actually somewhat surprising that last time checked, it seemed no one else uses the curated content of their front page for these purposes.

We'd like to implement other such highlighting tools when we can, so any ideas are welcome. We didn't take over the hashtags in edit summaries, though, because our team is very small, so we have already a rather fine overview of who does what, hence the tags wouldn't give much to this particular project, and besides, the project is not in English.

In general, it seems most of our Wikiquote projects are dormant, there is a lack of cooperation and even any systematic thought about common issues like categorization or copyright. Thus, all attempts at information exchange are welcome.