Fastfission wrote:
The problem is the categorization of disciplines can
be a very
controversial issue even if the discipline itself does not come with
specific and explicit political or cultural agendas, much less tied up
in questions of identity or the ability of individuals to make
decisions on account of their cultural heritage.
IOW categorization itself can introduce biases and POVs.
There is absolutely no easy answer to it. The question
of where
ethnic/gender studies (and its variants) fall within the organization
of knowledge has been something the American academy has been
periodically battling with for forty years (Peter Novick's _That Noble
Dream_ has some great accounts of how the discipline of History in the
US struggled with these issues in the 60s and 70s). The question of
disciplinary disputes (what sociologists sometimes call "boundary
work") has existed since before Copernicus (the question of whether
mathematicians could make statements which impinged on areas of
philosophy was a big one in his era). Categorization of knowledge was
one of the most radical aspects of the original Encyclopedie, and some
scholars (Robert Darnton in particular) have argued that it was in
categorizing religion in the same tree as black magic (rather than a
source of revealed truth) that really invoked the ire of the Church
(rather than the snippy little asides poking fun at the Eucharist).
The problem is older than that. The usual arrangement of the English
translation of Aristotle's works puts "Categories" in the very first place.
Which is just to say that while I don't think this
is necessarily any
example of systemic racism or sexism on Sanger's part (there are
legitimate reasons for not considering these fields to be top-level
categories, one need not attribute such opinions to philosophies of
prejudice), it is an example of what some of the difficulties with an
"expert-driven" system will be. The problem is, experts don't even
agree on very basic things at times, such as whose knowledge counts as
genuine, such as how knowledge should be organized, such as where a
discipline stops and ends. No matter what decision is made in these
sorts of issues, they will alienate entire disciplines of experts.
I think Wikipedia gets around it, paradoxically enough, by not
pretending to have any expert rule, as well as having a relatively
democratic categorization system (things can be redundantly
categorized). If you don't make the assumption that the material is
heavily mediated by experts, then you don't feel quite as bad if it
doesn't align with one point of view or the other. Or maybe experts
just don't pay a lot of attention to issues like this on Wikipedia for
one reason or another.
The premise that "Wikipedia is not paper" may help us on this. We can
add redundant categories without having to rewrite or re-arrange large
quantities of data. When a library changes its cataloging system it can
be many years before everything is upgraded. Some old less important
material is never recatalogued.
In any case... it will be interesting to see how Sanger
works this out
over time. He really can't afford to alienate the entire humanities
and if he is perceived as shutting out or, god forbid, segregating
ethnic/gender studies he will probably end up doing just about that.
(I'm not saying he's doing that, I'm just talking about how he will be
perceived.) If he insists on making determinations like this on his
own (if that is indeed what he has done), he will likely end up
stepping on a lot of toes.
In all fairness didn't the problem lay in his refusal to segregate
ethnic and gender studies from their larger supercategories. When you
give special status to ethnic studies you bring attention to it. When
there is systemic bias recognizing that bias is a first step toward
solving the problem, but if you overemphazixe a specific bias there is a
risk that you will generate new biases. Bias against African-Americans
may be a significant problem in the United States, but other Wikipedians
in other countries may see this as a particularly American problem. The
ethnic priorities in other countries can be quite different. If America
is indeed the great melting pot, what indeed is the point of classifying
African-American literature as something separate from plain old
American literature.