Year: 2005

Ladies, Wikipedia is ours

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 20, 2005

Rogers Cadenhead wrote on Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales edits of his own biography. During the discussion, Rogers mentioned his own Wikipedia entry. I checked, and sure enough: Rogers has an entry. That’s odd, I thought. Many of the male webloggers I know have an entry in Wikipedia, but most of the women I know, don’t. I brought this up with Rogers and he noticed the same.

Why are there significantly fewer women? I think one reason is that we women are taught not to put ourselves forward. Men are complimented for tooting their own horn; making known their wishes; noting their own accomplishments. Women, however, are expected to be sweet, demure, and most of all, stay ever so slightly in the shadow. Well, unless we’re eye candy, in which case not only should we be in the light, we should be wearing as little as possible so that our ‘assets’ can be fully explored.

Besides, who are we to say we deserve an entry? After all, it’s up to those around us who are required by laws of nature to perceive our goodness and give us the reassurance we need–without our asking (because if we have to ask, it’s not the same). After all, we can’t be expected to have enough confidence in our own abilities and accomplishments that we don’t need external validation. A needy woman is a sexy woman.

Something else to consider: how many women would not want articles up at Wikipedia anyway? It is a rough and tumble world, where people will say nasty things about us. We are, after all, delicate by nature, and easily offended and it’s just oh so distasteful to have to brawl with those nasty people who are so mean.

We have bought into such a bill of goods. We think that change for women must come at the ballot box or on the job but it has to begin within ourselves. We have to, first of all, acknowledge that we are worthy people: not as employees, not as wives, and, especially, not as mothers. We, the persons we are independent of our relationship with others, are worthy.

The concept behind women and visibility isn’t limited to a one hour session at a conference in Texas. It pervades our environment; it exists everywhere we look. We can choose to talk about it, or we can choose to do something about it. A place to start is recognizing that we deserve recognition.

Ladies, ask yourself this question: If you feel that you’re as much of a public figure as Rogers, Danny Ayers, Kevin Drum, Kevin Marks, Dave Sifry, Andrew Orlowski, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Ben Hammersley, Marc Canter, Seth Finkelstein, and numerous other gentlemen of our weblogging acquaintance, leave a comment or send me and email and I’ll start you a Wikipedia page. You’ll need to give me some basic biographical information to start.

(I also hope that one of you will do me the courtesy and create a page for me, since it’s not the done thing to create one for ourselves. And if inaccurate information is added, or a non-nuetral POV is expressed, I will edit the entry. Oh, and it’s ShellEy Powers. I’m attached to that second ‘e’.)

If you do decide you’ve earned a right to a Wikipedia entry, you’ll have to accept the fact that people can and will add ’stuff’ into your page. However, contrary to myth, if someone puts something inaccurate about yourself in your bio page, you can correct it. This doesn’t mean, though, that you’ll be allowed to dump the butter boat over yourself and make yourself into the next Princess Diane.

The Wikipedia editors are pretty ruthless: you’ll have to defend your page. They’re going to question whether you deserve the page; it will be up to you, then, to say, damn right, I do.

Ken Camp and Scott Reynman were both kind enough to add an entry for me (at almost the same time). It was immediately added to the articles to delete queue for discussion. People will add Keep/Delete votes with associated reasons, and in the end, it will be deleted or saved. This is how Wikipedia works. Now, we’ll see if it gets defended and remains, or ends up on the cutting room floor.

update

You can see the old discussion about deleting Rogers Cadenhead article.

update

A follow up post that discusses the ends and outs of deleting a wikipedia entry, including comments from Wikipedia authors.

Diversity

Women and visibility panel canceled

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 19, 2005

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The Sunday, March 12 panel on Women and Visibility at SxSW has been canceled.

update

Point of clarification: I was given responsibility for this panel, unexpectedly, late Monday afternoon. Because of the number of panel members who had dropped out, I made a call to cancel. The SxSW organizers did not make this decision.

However, some interest has been expressed about still having this, but with new panel members. If you’re interested in being a part of this, or being panel leader, contact the SxSW organizers.

Stuff

Never need

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 19, 2005

Recently, I was the target of recruiters for a well known company. I wasn’t particularly interested in working for the company, especially since it meant I would have to move back to the Silicon Valley area (something I didn’t want to do).

The recruiters were nice, and I was flattered. However, I was also aware that there was a hiring blitz of women happening within many of the tech companies so I wasn’t too flattered.

(Not sure of the reason for the sudden interest in hiring women. It could be the class action lawsuits successfully won by women being discriminated against in other industries. Or perhaps the companies are finally starting to realize that, hey! They have women customers, too. Anyway, I digress. Back to the recruiters. )

They tried a couple of different approaches to get me interested in the company, the most recent of which had some mild appeal (not working for the company, but what they offered). At that point, the recruiters had me speak with a person from their technology department. I did, and chattered on enthusiastically about the topics he brought up until he had to make another call.

I never did hear back from the recruiters. To be honest, I don’t think any of us, myself or the recruiters, expected anything to come from this conversation. So why did it occur? Simple: they had to bring the relationship to the point where they were the ones who did the rejection. At no point could they tolerate that they didn’t have the final say in the decision: will I, won’t I work for them.

As long as I kept saying no, I had value; once I said yes, my value deteriorated. It wasn’t me that was of interest; it was the fact that I said ‘no’ that made me stand out.

This is a nasty by-product of our increasingly marketing-oriented mentality: we want that which is unobtainable; we don’t value that which is within reach. So this holiday season, there are three things of great worth: iPods, XBoxes, and people who are hard to get. Or already gone.

I am learning, though. After a while, even Pavlov’s dogs learned to react to the bell.

Weblogging

Ain’t no cobwebs here

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 19, 2005

Bob Wyman has made a point of clarifying that Structured Blogging is a thing you do not a format. This is a good point to make, because there has been some strong association between the first release SB-generated metadata format, and the concept of Structured Blogging, itself.

The SB plugins can be (and are being) modified to generate microformats and RDF in addition to the embedded x-subnode format currently supported. I myself am not overly fond of the current implementation of metadata embedding, primarily because I don’t think embedding makes sense with today’s web applications.

Increasingly, generated web content is replacing static pages, especially when it comes to online businesses and personal web sites. There are some applications that generate static web pages, but these are becoming more the exception than the rule. Most web and CMS tools generate dynamic content, as do the majority of commerce-based sites such as Amazon, eBay, and the many stores based on OSCommerce.

Even sites that create static pages, such as those based on Userland’s Radio, MT, or TypePad, do so from dyanamic data and change frequently. The ’static’ in these instances is more of a delivery mechanism than a philosophy of web content. However, as we’re finding, creating or generating static web pages that are fresh and timely, takes resources. As such, pages that are created in a more on-demand fashion are becoming, more and more, the norm. For those times when on-demand paging becomes, itself, a resource hog (such as with syndication feed access), many of the on-demand tools now provide functionality to generate a static snapshot of a page, if it makes more sense to do so.

Regardless of approach, though, the concept behind all these pages is the same: web content that is dynamic.

Because of this increasingly dynamic web, it doesn’t make sense to embed different levels of data, or even uses of data, within the same page. After all, we don’t expect to ’scrape’ a page to provide our syndication feeds; so why would we expect to embed our metadata directly in a page, when it can be easily and simply provided in much the same manner as the syndication feed data.

Take a look at this site. My tool, Wordform (a variation of WordPress), generates the page content based on demand. The page contains posts, comments, and sidebar items that enable site navigation. If I port the SB plugins over to Wordform, when I do my Saturday matinee movie reviews, I could use these the plugins to add a more structured view of the data in addition to the already provided unstructured text.

Now, I can generate the more structured data as microformats, and it might make sense to do so because some tools may only work with microformatted data. I could also use the embedded metadata approach behind SB. However, my preferred approach would be to generate RDF/XML metadata for the movie review, and then just add this to the other metadata associated with the page. To make this data accessible, I only need to add a META link in my header, pointing to an URL the same as the post URL, except with an ‘/rdf/’ attached to the end.

In fact, since it is the same data that generates all three, I could have a META link to the current SB-flavored XML, accessible by attaching an ‘/xml/’ to the end of the URL; provide the same data formatted as RDF/XML, accessible by attaching ‘/rdf/’; and then add the microformatting into the page elements. That way, no matter what the tools want, the data would be available.

This is no different than what we do with syndication feeds. Many people provide more than one type of syndication feed, and depending on the tool, can be accessed from tools just by attaching a ‘/feed/’ to the end of the weblog URL (or post, to subscribe to a post’s comments). Since feeds themselves are nothing more than another view of the page data, it makes little sense to use a different delivery mechanism for metadata then what one uses for feeds.

Best of all, with this approach, the data is formatted specifically for the use; rather than trying to warp and twist one format to meet the needs of all uses. Embedding all manner of data into the web page delivered to a consumer interested in only a portion of it, comes from an outmoded way of thinking. It’s based on the idea that web pages are, themselves, costly to maintain and that the more files one has, the more difficult it is to maintain a web site.

However, dusty web page content comes from a time when BLINK ruled, and the only formatting we had, regardless of use, was HTML tables. Then the only issue on most of our minds was keeping pages up to date–keeping the cobwebs off, as it were. Since we had to do this manually, no wonder we didn’t want to create too many pages.

Now, though, the days of static web pages are over; long live the cobwebs.