Battlestar Wiki talk:Think Tank/Female Involvement

Combining goals?

Goals to solve:

Female involvement
"Important Themes" of the show -- possibly a new "series" of articles?

Why not combine them? Why not scout female contributors to write a themes series? One these women have written stuff, they may just stick around. On an unrelated note, what ever happened to Laineylain and Misco? They seemed to have stopped contributing at some point (all happened before my time here), but judging by people's comments they were very helpful over here. But back to the scouting idea. Maybe we should get our name out there a little more (of course underlining we're not a forum), as like Shane said on the blog, most communities (whether male or female) are unaware of our existence. On a side note, I'd also like this policy to encourage any present females to "come out", and I'll be adding a "sex" field to {{User Data}}. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 03:21, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

Sex and femalecat fields have been added to {{User Data}}. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 03:48, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

Laineylain and Misco were both pretty major podcast contributors for a while there. I'm not sure what happened... no major blowups that I'm aware of. They may have just gotten tired of transcribing. --Steelviper 07:40, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

Paradoxically, centering out women to contribute because they are women is a little weird, but I understand and support this. For one, I'd like to see a female administrator, and I'll be forced to change the term "Mop Boy" to something else. I'll think more about this; there are many women of popular note in the blogosphere (Sarah Kuhn from iPodObserver, Nat from BSGCast, for starters) that should be here more based on their enthusiasm, but aren't. Are there misperceptions about the wiki? The article appears to indicate that. --Spencerian 08:50, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

It is a little weird, I agree, but we have close to zero female contribution, whereas the overall online BSG community is filled with female fans. So clearly, something's wrong. And yes, appointing a "Mop Girl" would certainly be a milestone. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 08:54, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

Erm, how about gender and gendercat for the field names? -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 21:17, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

Hey! :-) You know, guys, I feel a little left out... I mean, ok, I work for the German BSGWiki, but... hey! ;-) My guess, why there are so few female contributors on the BSGWiki: they are already involved with other BSG-related projects (fanfiction, actor websites, translating news articles for caprica-city.de...); time's in short supply for everyone. And seeing how great the en:bsgwiki fares, I'd never seen much reason to contribute here. The German BSGWiki is another topic though... Greetings, --CC-Mel 00:41, 2 May 2007 (CDT)

Hey, good to know you're still with us! You're right that the other languages need more menpower (or womenpower, if you will). Joe, I made gender and nogendercat the preferred names for those fields, although sex and nosexcat still work. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 04:02, 2 May 2007 (CDT)

After reading the article

I agree, Spencerian, Catrope ... definite misperceptions, and something is wrong, but I'm not sure how to fix it. I was posting the below at the same time you both were posting and got an edit conflict, the following are my thoughts on reading the article:

From reading the article linked in the blog entry, I think the author doesn't really understand the goal of BSG Wiki: to be an encyclopedia. We aren't really about the speculation (much) or reinterpretation, but rather the documentation of that which is presented on-screen. Take this quote:

This also means that some important themes in the wiki remain left out so far - including, for example, any coverage of potential homosexual relationships within the BSG world. Creative interpretation of the BSG text in this environment still has some way to go... - http://snurb.info/node/662

"Potential homosexual relationships"? From a encyclopedic standpoint, we don't deal in potentialities, we deal in facts. It also really isn't our goal to do "creative interpretation" of the BSG text; in fact, doesn't that basically break BW:NOT? I'm generally an inclusionist, and we have tags to address these kinds of articles (fandom, plausible speculation, etc), we note real-world parallels in the Notes and Analysis sections of articles ...I wouldn't mind seeing an "Important Themes" series of articles ...

We're a community, but we have different goals than other BSG communities. Those goals may not appeal as much to many potential female (and male, for that matter) contributors as, say, the ability to write fan-fiction, discuss potential relationships, or the ability to write whatever they like under their own name with a guarantee that it won't be altered/improved/deleted. I am all for bringing in new contributors, male or female, but I'm against compromising our stated goals to do so (not that anyone is saying that's the plan). I'm more for "getting our name out there". JubalHarshaw 08:56, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

I concur. However, that being said... where are the women (anyway)? Even granting our strict encyclopedic mission, there are still (I imagine) a tremendous amount of female encyclopedic contributors at Wikipedia. Why none here? Is it simply probability/statistics? (They do have a much larger sample size to work with than we do.) I'm not sure. I have, in the past, made suggestions to try to start topics that might be of more interest to a "female demographic", but they were (justifiably) determined to compromise the BW:NOT encyclopedic mission. I don't have any answers, though. --Steelviper 09:31, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

Like I said on the blog, I agree that we should get our name out there. That should be possible without compromising BW:IS or BW:NOT. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 09:52, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

I posted a personal response on the article's blog (it should be available after its blog admin clears it) that clarifies what we are (I didn't speak on behalf of the wiki, but just clarified our mission) and put my 2 cents in about BSG, female contributors, and the one homosexual note in the entire RDM show: the Caprica-Six/Three/Baltar threesome from "Hero" (which should be funny to them as Lucy Lawless, whose Xena character has many homosexual fans and a strong overall fanbase). --Spencerian 15:24, 1 May 2007 (CDT)

I've been reading the responses on the blog. (I didn't realize that a vanity search would turn into a full fledged discussion on improving gender diversity of our contributors. Not that this is a bad thing, but life leads you to the most interesting places.) Basically, I haven't gotten the feedback that I've hoped yet from the female sector of the fandom, but I did like some of the ideas I saw, notably:

The series on "Important Themes" in the series. (Actually, I did attempt to start something like this, but it never took off.)
Delving more into character's motivations. We cover the history of the characters, which help us to understand the source of their motivations, including what drives them, but we can do better. As Serenity pointed out on the blog, our analysis on Romo Lampkin's motivations from "The Son also Rises" on forward is a good template to work from.
Having read Sarah Toton's paper, my initial impression is that the technology barrier isn't the major hurdle. I'll quote the paper here, because it's something that struck me upon first reading it:
"[W]omen fans tend to insert themselves and personals experiences into the storyline, identifying with characters and finding relationships between the fictive universe and their own lives, men parse through a text like a puzzle, giving great weight to authorial intent and working through details within the text in order to gain some sort of ownership."

I've queried Sarah on getting permission to reprint the paper and the accompanying power point presentation, so people can view the full text and make their own determinations. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 21:48, 1 May 2007 (CDT)