By Joe Beaudoin Jr. | Posted on May 4, 2007 at 4:18 pm |
Posted in Category:
Discussions, Drifiting Thoughts
Just after I posted my previous blog entry, Sarah e-mailed me with a link to her pdf paper, which is available here. The paper does contain additional ideas that didn’t make it to her lecture/presentation at the panel.
Also, for those of you who want to see discussions on the wiki, a “Think Tank” proposal has been set up here, with discussions on said here.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Discussions, Drifiting Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Well, I suggest that an invitation be posted to some of the prominent female-dominated forums (e.g. LJ communities and the like) inviting them to participate in brainstorming, etc. Explain to them what is the current goals/focus of the wiki and which parts you’d like to see changed or not changed (speculation needs to be grounded in BSG canon–not just wishful thinking, etc.). If the brainstorming is male-dominated… it won’t be very surprising if the ideas coming out of the brainstorming are not particularly interesting to females.
There needs to be discussion on what’s considered “speculation” as well. In today’s post here on Joe Beaudoin’s thoughts on the MIT5 panel, he says that “the only tangible instance of any deviancy from heterosexuality would be in ‘Hero’” — I wonder whether an attentive viewer who is sensitive to this sort of theme might pick up on more than that. Picking up on that sort of thing isn’t my cup of tea in general, but it’s easy to ignore or be blind to innuendos that you’re not accustomed to looking for.
On the current version of Crossroad, Part II, there is a brief mention of how “Diana Seelix knocks on the duty locker door and Anders opens it. An uncomfortable silence between Seelix, Anders and Foster begins.”
This is rich with possible meanings for the upcoming episodes that are not explored. Perhaps a “typically female” viewer/contributer might want to bring up some points as to what possible impact the Seelix/Anders/Tori love triangle might have in the future since Seelix and Anders are both nuggest while Anders and Tori are both Cylons. Certainly I think this is at least worth mentioning in the articles “Questions” section especially since it’s no more speculative than some of the other items posted already— but it’s not.
I rather like these ideas. However, we need to first discuss the basic ground rules for speculation, particularly when it comes to the minutiae and subtexts.
Anything that doesn’t fit that framework then can jump over to BattlestarPegasus.com, whose aim is better suited for wishful thinking and “outside the box” thinking.
I wanted to respond to some of the discussion about this issue here & on the wiki itself, specifically reacting to something Serenity wrote on the wiki thread referenced above:
“Yeah. It’s sad that she has valid points, but a terribly flawed argumentation. Seems like she really doesn’t understand the goals of the site. While things can certainly be improved even within our mission parameters, some of the criticism is naturally excluded by the nature of the site.”
I don’t want to speak for Sarah, although I was at her MIT talk & spoke with her at length about her project. And I write this as a lurker at BSG Wiki, but an active editor at other fan wikis (and a media scholar, for whatever that’s worth). What I would take issue with is the implicit attitude expressed by Serenity above, that “some of the criticism is naturally excluded by the nature of the site.” This cuts to the heart of her critique of the wiki – the community defines this site in particularly narrow terms (encyclopedic), but there is nothing “natural” about that form or goal, and nothing in the design of wikis that makes them default to collecting & cataloguing factual information. Obviously the world’s most popular wiki does that, but it’s the –pedia that defines Wikipedia’s fact-finding mission, not the wiki- .
Imagine that I was a fan who wanted to participate in this site, but my contributions were more interpretive, speculative, or creative. The “nature” of the wiki would allow me to not only add whatever I wanted, but also to alter the policies that might prohibit certain additions from fitting the current mission. What would presumably prevent/revert such changes is not the nature of the wiki, but the nature of the community. I believe what she is pointing toward is that the community’s self-defined mission and standards limit the modes of participation available to fans – and that arguably those limits skew toward traditionally masculine practices and restrict traditionally feminine modes of fandom. If as a community you really want to include female participants, one strategy would be to broaden the mission & policies to invite other activities besides fact-gathering & cataloguing, moving away from NPOV and embracing subjective contributions.
As I mentioned in another thread, I’m active at Lostpedia, which does seem to have both more female participants (although it’s still quite male) and a more open attitude toward interpretation and fanon – check out some of the parody pages there, use of a “theory tab,” and its coverage of romantic entanglements (both realized & potential). I’m not claiming that inviting such content will automatically increase female participation, but simply that there is nothing “natural” about limiting a fan wiki to just the facts.
A few points I’d like to tackle here, just from me personally. I’m not going to tackle them all, because I’m pressed for time, but here goes…
Just because the suffix -pedia is not attached to “Battlestar Wiki” doesn’t specifically mean that we don’t work like an encyclopedia. Names aren’t everything, no more than titles.
You are indeed correct that wikis can include fanon and the like — they can be about anything. It’s only a platform. Same with blogs, which can be used as either a news reporting tool or as an online diary.
However, Battlestar Wiki’s mission from the onset is to collect information and as a resource to help fans who may have gotten lost in the story along the way. (For instance, the one-year jump confused people, and so people were naturally befuddled when that happened. We’ve helped explain that to many fans. There was also the Final Five thing which many fans, again, referred to us to help them walk through.)
To say we don’t cover speculation is false, because we have done this in the past. The Cylon speculation page is proof of this. Additionally, some would probably rightfully argue that this backfired because of the whole “Final Five” thing.
Could we cover more ground in that area? Perhaps.
But what are the limits. There will always be limits. Always. There’s no going around it.
Jason, you’re absolutely correct in that we define those limits. But since the inception of the wiki, we have broadened and tightened those limits as the community has felt necessary.
It is up to the community, but at the same time we can’t be everything to everyone… That’s impossible, nor should we try that. We’d ultimately stretch ourselves too thin.
Which is why I threw out there Battlestar Pegasus… because it does allow for this sort of thing. BSP and BSWiki can compliment each other, but with different missions.
Also, there is an inherent flaw in Toton’s argument… It pits that male-versus-female dichotomy that, in itself, is extremely limiting as well.
Toton ignores the fact that not all females are creative, nor that not all males are not creative either. The paper, whether by design or not, tends to pit these two against each other using, yes, stereotypes. Both men and women, boys and girls create art, literature, and interpretations of the world. There are scientists and researchers (fact-finders) who are both male and female. Librarians are, for the most part, female — and they deal with information.
But we don’t post fan fic, fan art, or the like. That doesn’t make us “anti-creative”. We just don’t cover that. Not our mission.
What’s being ignored here is the act of organizing and maintaining information is a form of creativity, something that Toton herself touched upon
This is best exemplified by the responses from some of our female viewers out there, from here:
“Because while I find writing and reading fanfic to be a lot of fun, contributing to a wiki is boring to me and would require me to take the time to learn how to do it properly, which I’m not willing to do because it’s just not that interesting to me.” - Beatrice Otter
“Lots of people love to say that, but females dominate in the audience for games like The Sims, yet you used to and still have some people who will then go, “Oh but The Sims isn’t a reeeeeaaalll computer game” –um, well, if you begin by defining “computer games” to include only game types that typically appeal to males (e.g. FPS-style games), then of course you’re always going to find that “females don’t play computer games.”” - autumnmist
“I do primarily use this site for info. As it’s my major source of info, I can’t exactly contribute anything valuable at the moment” - trigona
What I should probably note here as well is that we have two different groups of people who use the site: contributors and viewers.
Joe - I agree with everything you say, except I think I read Sarah’s paper a bit more charitably. (I think she’s typifying masculine & feminine practices & attitudes, not essentializing all men & women.) I guess ultimately the point is that the focus on encyclopedia-izing tends toward masculine practices, which seems to also attract a primarily male editor-base (not necessarily readers, as you mentioned).
I am curious to see what would happen if the community broadened the mission to include (carefully labeled) non-canonical material. Would it lead to another set of users joining the community? Would it dilute the factual material of the wiki, or might it augment it? The great thing about wikis is that this can be done experimentally without changing what’s already here, by adding another “wing” to the wiki. (Again, my parallel is Lostpedia, where the “theory” tab appears on every page, and there are many parody/fanon pages throughout.)
Good luck working through this problem…
[...] here’s some discussion about gender and the expectations of what a wiki should be on the Battlestar Galactica Wiki Blog. In this thread, commenters suggest that women would particpate more in the BSG wiki if it did not [...]
Note (added by Joe):
Apparently the blog entry was removed, since the link is dead upon my inspection of it.As of 2 June, the link is up. Interesting read.