Novelist Amanda Filipacchi, in a Times Op-Ed (Wikipedia’s Sexism) noticed that women kept disappearing from Wikipedia’s listing for American Novelists and were instead being moved into the American Women Novelists Category.
The intention appeared to be to create a list of “American Novelists” made up almost entirely of men. The category listed 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred were mainly men. An explanation at the top of the page said that the list of “American Novelists” was too long, and novelists had to be put in subcategories whenever possible.
This might have been well-intentioned on some person’s part, but unfortunately they didn’t take kindly to correction.
As soon as the Op-Ed article appeared, unhappy Wikipedia editors pounced on my Wikipedia page and started making alterations to it, erasing as much as they possibly could without (I assume) technically breaking the rules. They removed the links to outside sources, like interviews of me and reviews of my novels. Not surprisingly, they also removed the link to the Op-Ed article. At the same time, they put up a banner at the top of my page saying the page needed “additional citations for verifications.” Too bad they’d just taken out the useful sources.
I wondered whether the same move was afoot with poets, and there is indeed a category American Women Poets but it now bears this disclaimer, and so very well may be endangered:
