Adrianne posted a nice response on a website. Probably the best response I've seen so far:

http://hastac.org/blogs/wadewitz/2013/04/09/wikipedia-pushing-boundaries-scholarly-practice-gender-gap-must-be-address#comment-21716

To the point, from a Wikipedian point of view. I have been pretty overwhelmed by the response to this - things have surely blown out of proportion. I only hope that this engages more people to click edit.

-Sarah


On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Adeline Koh <adelinekoh@gmail.com> wrote:
FYI, I just got this link from Wikipediocracy responding to Liz Henry: http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2130&p=38953#p38953
"She claims there was no systematic move to put women into a separate category. It looks like she is wrong though: in this discussion people are pointing out that a single editor, Johnpacklambert (T-C-L), made thousands of edits reclassifying biographies."

Adeline Koh, Ph.D.
Visiting Faculty Fellow, 
Humanities Writ Large, Duke University (Fall 2012-Spring 2013)
Assistant Professor of Literature, Richard Stockton College
Email: Adeline.Koh@duke.edu or  Adeline.Koh@stockton.edu
Twitter: @adelinekoh 


On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Wikimedia community member Liz Henry blogs here:
http://bookmaniac.org/journalists-dont-understand-wikipedia-sometimes/
and does a little bit of digging into edit histories.

"Just from these three samples, it does not seem that there is any
particular movement among a group of Wikipedia editors to remove women
from the “novelists” category and put them in a special women category
instead. I would say that the general leaning, rather, is to stop people
who would like to label women writers as women writers *in addition* to
labeling them as writers, claiming there is no need for Category:
American women writers at all and that it is evidence of bias to
identify them by gender. ... The sexist thing we
should be up in arms about isn’t labelling women as women! It’s the
efforts to delete entire categories (like Haitian women writers, for
example) because someone has decided that that meta-information is
unnecessary “ghettoization”..."
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

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--
--
Sarah Stierch
Museumist, open culture advocate, and Wikimedian
www.sarahstierch.com