Tag: Varvara Dukhovskaia

Let’s chat about Wikipedia as a source of general information. For many people, Wikipedia is a first stop to check on information about who’s who, genre overviews, lists of books, and more. In theory, as a place to find the “sum of all human knowledge” (Wikipedia: About), it should be a good place to get an overview of what’s out there to know. Yet, using Wikipedia’s coverage leads to a skewed understanding of what’s available. Instead of being a reliable source for all human knowledge, Wikipedia’s policies means it reproduces institutionalized biases related to gender, community groups, and other categories of identity and knowledge. Furthermore, those policies mean that the platform’s biases are very difficult to address despite Wikipedia’s calls for public contributions and claims to desire to be an unbiased source of information.

What do I mean by that?

Bluntly, I mean that Wikipedia’s coverage privileges white, male, English-speaking people in positions of power (Wikipedia: Gender Bias; Racial Bias). I personally think that having editors, having some checks, are incredibly important. There needs to be some level of standard, but there are problems with how the standards for things like notability are enforced.

But why?

The issue is partly one of Wikipedia’s focus on “Notability” (Wikipedia: Notability). Wikipedia’s guidelines claim that not everything needs an article. To be included within Wikipedia, contributing authors are expected to provide information that is “worthy” of notice. Yet, worth is a value judgement. So, who’s judging that worth and on what criteria?

The answer is that Wikipedia has an excellent team of employees and volunteer editors who are predominantly white men. Most humans are predominantly interested in things that, in some way or another, represent themselves (Hall ed., Representation, UC Library Search). Those white men with their particular interests then evaluate worth based on criteria of things like how many people have written about someone. Given historic inequalities and continued social bias, men in positions of power are more likely to be written about than other groups. Those “worthy of notice” end up being men.

Take, for example, the problem of a diplomat’s wife Varvara Dukhovskaia. For a person like this princess, we have a woman whose job is partly predicated on her husband’s, but she was part of his team (if you allow) and an essential part of the job. Particularly in a past when women were denied access to most official positions, women performed labor analogous to a man’s without the official acknowledgement. A diplomat’s wife, for example, was expected to host events, make connections, and spread good will for the state they represented … which was precisely what many diplomats were hired to do. The woman, however, was not socially or legally considered a diplomat in and of themselves – they were often the “wife,” “daughter,” or “mother.”

In this case, Varvara Dukhovskaia was an influential presence, known as a “first lady of Siberia.” She spearheaded efforts to establish schools, was part of problems with discussions of Russian government and nationalism, and wrote about her efforts. Dukhovskaia’s autobiography (on Project Gutenberg) has been translated into English but the majority of scholarship about her is in other languages (English language scholarship includes Katya Hokanson’s A Woman’s Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia on JSTOR).

So, we have a highly influential woman in a position of power about whom multiple scholars have written. Yet, while Wikipedia has an article about her husband (Wikipedia), Wikipedia’s editors refused to publish an entry about her because writing a travel narrative is not notable.

This example is hardly the only one of its kind. There are multiple examples one could refer to about how Wikipedia’s editors refused an article because the person, the idea, the movement, the book, wasn’t important enough … but the problem was circular. The idea wasn’t “important” because of institutional bias, which meant it didn’t spread, which in turn meant Wikipedia didn’t value it.

For students and scholars in the humanities, that means Wikipedia isn’t necessarily a great place to find information about the people, the books, the media, the ideas, the groups, that they study. And, not only does the current content skew toward institutionalized forms of discrimination, but that imbalance is difficult to address because Wikipedia actively turns down material that could address some of those problems.

So what to do?

What can we currently do to address some of these considerations? One of the ways to increase notability is to scour scholarship for references to the different people/ideas that are important to include. Another way is to begin writing about the people, ideas, and things that are missing in related articles. For example, including a paragraph in the husband’s Wikipedia article about the person raises their “Notability” and leads toward Wikipedia’s viewing the person, the book, the event as worthy of having individual entries.

To get some experience with how to do this, join us for UC’s I Love Data Week’s Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon on Feb. 10! You can find out more about it on our guide.