Wikipedia is a very odd target for the culture wars

Wikipedia – by certain metrics – is the largest “compendium of human knowledge” in the world. It is also a sexist, racist, marginalising, macho endeavour that scrubs women from the history books in favour of the middle-class white men who author it. Didn’t you know? It was news to me too – perhaps I am brainwashed by those same middle-class white men; so captured by their cultural hegemony that I cannot even see my chains. (Agh! The middle-class male strikes again.)Thank God for Sandi Toksvig, then, here to lay it all out, immune from the internal misogyny that afflicts the rest of us. The British/Danish TV presenter told a crowd at Cheltenham Literature Festival in the UK last week that Wikipedia, for too long, has been allowed to favour the accomplishment of man; that it approaches women with a mindset more suited to the early 20th century; that it is patronising, merely pretending to be egalitarian in nature. Only 18 per cent of Wikipedia profiles concern women, she says. Because the majority of the volunteer editors are men, she goes on, the gender bias is to be expected. And so, if Wikipedia is the go-to source for anyone after low-barrier, easy-to-consume information, then the world is in trouble. In fact, maybe the sexual revolution never happened; and all advancements in gender parity were an illusion. Justice will elude women until they achieve proper Wikipedia representation. And so Toksvig is setting up her own venture, “Mappa Mundi”, with colleagues of Cambridge University – “an interactive digital atlas where we can find a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted”.It is true that there are not many women featured on the “List of state leaders deposed by foreign powers in the 20th and 21st century” page. “Ancient Roman generals killed in action” and “Roman consuls who died in office” are comparatively weak on women representation too. Cleopatra’s page does not pass the Bechdel test. “List of Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation” might send Toksvig into a swivel-eyed rage. But, pre-empting this accusation of ahistoricism, Toksvig cites one example of a woman physicist denied a Wikipedia page until she won a Nobel Prize. READ MOREFine, justice for Donna Strickland then. Otherwise, this is a culture war from the imagination of Paddington Bear: glib, inconsequential, twee and inflected with the spirit of the Liberal Democrats. I suppose it is the sort of thing Justin Trudeau might have found compelling in 2018. Who is this for? If you take great interest in gender parity on the internet – and there are better uses of your energy – Wikipedia is an odd target. There are some very dark corners out there. A website that can tell you as much about the taxonomy of citrus as it can about the death of Socrates (white middle-class man) is not one of them. But this is just what the cultural soft left do – pick the wrong targets, misfire, consume all the oxygen for pointless and self-important reasons and fail to say anything interesting at all. I am reminded of the 2020 push to “decolonise” the classics. The subject was deemed white, obsessed with rape and bloody wars, hyper-focused on words produced by men. The Society for Classical Studies in the US complained of “the complicity of classics as a field in constructing and participating in racist and anti-black educational structures and attitudes”. Whatever that means. And what else of the classics makes it a worthy target? I suppose it is nice to assume that the absence of women from the historical record is just a clerical error; a problem of reportage that can be amended by some careful rearranging of old primary sources. This is the same fallacy that Toksvig is falling into – that the women of human history carried equal weight and influence (and literacy skills, and tools of production, etc) as men. Same goes for race in Ancient Rome. We know this isn’t true. And we know that acknowledging the realities of the past is not the same as condoning them. But eliding or concealing those realities for contemporary political wins is, meanwhile, dishonest. [ From quiet quitting to iced coffee: What is Gen Z’s problem with work?Opens in new window ]Anyone seeking a book deal to redress the apparent gender imbalance of the historical tradition needn’t try hard. Take the reams of contemporary literature retelling the classics from a “female” perspective (Circe, The Silence of the Girls, A Thousand Ships and the 500+ other examples). For decades now, popular historians have sought to illuminate the hidden women of the past – the Suffragettes receive as much historical attention as any Tudor. In my classics degree, excessive concern was dedicated to Sappho (but one woman poet) as some awkward over-corrective measure. Toksvig’s war on the misogyny of Wikipedia is wrong for two reasons. It’s burdened by an ahistoricism that would not pass the editorial standards of Wikipedia itself. But it has also taken one of the best parts of the internet – that free, sprawling, considered, fair, democratic resource – and used it for navel-gazing and self-satisfied point scoring. Who are the points for? I can’t name a single beneficiary of a crusade against Wikipedia. Toksvig, perhaps.