Lady Business: Orpah vs. Oprah, word counts, and other problems with Wikipedia
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the thirty-seventh issue, published August 2, 2018.
Disingenuous Disambiguation
Oprah Winfrey is one of the most famous, wealthy, and influential people in the world. That’s a pretty uncontroversial statement, right? She’s on all sorts of lists! She’s the Queen of All Media! She’s first-name famous!
And do you know what the first line of her Wikipedia entry is?
“Not to be confused with Orpah.”
Orpah, in case you click on that helpful Wiki "disambiguation" link, is a minor Biblical figure from the Book of Ruth. She was apparently Winfrey’s original namesake, but she only rates 240 words on her own Wiki page, compared to Winfrey’s 8300. (Which is its own problem, but more on that in a minute.)
Yet the anonymous and variably-qualified Internet editors putting together Oprah Winfrey’s Wiki page decided that, yep, the first, most important thing for this entry would be to make sure that nobody happening upon the biography of one of the biggest living celebrities would get confused in the course of their Biblical exegesis.
Which brings us to one of the more persistent and insidious minor annoyances of the Internet: The subtle failings of Wikipedia, the imperfect first stop for almost anyone doing online research, and the systemic bias it reflects and creates.
There’s Wiki’s word-count issue. The weirdly blatant offensive language. And, of course, the widespread lack of entries for women, people of color, or anything deemed uninteresting or irrelevant by the men who make up 90 percent of Wikipedia’s estimated 100,000-plus editors.
This is a variation on the obituary problem: Who gets rated as worthy of biography, and how are their accomplishments presented? It’s a problem that some notable (and tireless!) women have worked to solve. Science researcher Jess Wade, for example, has written about 270 Wiki entries for fellow female scientists. The late Adrianne Wadewitz, a feminist scholar who died at age 37 after a hiking accident, spent the last 10 years of her life fixing Wiki language, writing entries, and training other women to do the same.
But the sheer amount of remaining systemic bias is exhausting. Take word counts, for example. Oprah, according to the Wiki masses, is worth more Internet ink than Orpah but not as much as another fictional character: Captain America, who gets roughly 8700 words devoted only to his comic-book incarnation. (His disambiguation page includes so many related pages it gives me a headache.
Or there’s James Damore, the fired Google engineer who set off the intensely stupid controversy last summer about whether women are biologically suited to doing math. The Wiki page related to that controversy gets almost 2000 words.
Meanwhile Susan Fowler--the former Uber engineer who blew the whistle on the company’s rampant harassment problem, and who helped force out CEO Travis Kalanick--gets a mere 600.
Which brings us to an even more subtle problem at Wikipedia: The blatant disparities in how it presents information about men versus women.
Take Kalanick, one of the top poster-children for tech-bro toxicity, whose leadership problems included so much more than ignoring reports of harassment at Uber. The start of his Wiki page presents him thusly:
Travis Cordell Kalanick (/ˈkælənɪk/) (born August 6, 1976) is an American billionaire businessman. He is the co-founder of Scour, a peer to peer file sharing application, Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer content delivery network, and Uber, a transportation network company.
Compare that to the Wiki page of another disgraced tech founder:
Elizabeth Anne Holmes (/hoʊmz/; born February 3, 1984) is the founder and former CEO of Theranos, a privately held company known for its false claims to have devised revolutionary blood tests that used very small amounts of blood.[3][4] She is under indictment by the United States Department of Justice for wire fraud.
“Yeah, but Maria, Holmes built her entire business on fraudulent and potentially criminal claims. Her entire legacy now rests on the damage her ambition caused other people. She might even go to jail!”
OK, fair point! Someone accused of that amount of wrong-doing should definitely have it front and center in his Wikipedia bio. That’s pretty obvious, right?
Um:
Harvey Weinstein (/ˈwaɪnstiːn/; born March 19, 1952) is an American former film producer. He and his brother Bob Weinstein co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films, including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), The Crying Game (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Heavenly Creatures (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), and Shakespeare in Love (1998).[1] Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love, and garnered seven Tony Awards for a variety of plays and musicals, including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County.[2] After leaving Miramax, Weinstein and his brother Bob founded The Weinstein Company, a mini-major film studio. He was co-chairman, alongside Bob, from 2005 to 2017.
So this isn’t to diminish the work of Wade, or Wadewitz, or any of the lesser-known Wikipedians working to make the site better. Nor is it to declare that we should stop using Wiki: it’s convenient, and pervasive, and occasionally wondrous, along with its inaccuracies and biases and bizarrely-unnecessary disambiguations for Biblical extras.
But it’s almost never objective. Which is the most insidious problem: For all of its claims of being a “general reference work,” Wikipedia is a tech platform full of uncurated user-generated content. Like Reddit, or Twitter, or Facebook, Wikipedia has a pervasive troll problem -- and it deserves equal pressure to fix it.
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