The double difficulty of Quebec women on Wikipedia

For the past four years, the author Marilyse Hamelin has helped create and edit hundreds of pages of women from the Canadian Francophonie on Wikipedia. Its mission was paid suddenly last December, after the platform closed its account following a contribution to a feminist page.

Marilyse Hamelin’s contributions on Wikipedia began in early 2021, when she realized that no woman writer she knew there was a biography.

Self -taught, she created an account, then set out to work by collaborating hundreds of files, ranging from those of the writers Pascale Navarro, Brigitte Pilote, Marie Demers and Alexie Morin, to those of humorists Maxime Gervais and Julien Bernatchez.

Editing biographies on the platform was a real hobby For her, until you close your account in December.

Four months later, she managed to recover it, but wishes to testify to her experience in order to invite to Collective awareness Regarding the place of women on Wikipedia.

Mission: save the slaughterhouse page

Its history begins in the winter of 2024, when people call for help on social networks in order to strengthen the references of the Wikipedia page of the militant feminist blog slaughterhouse, threatened with a lack of sufficiently supported sources.

Marilyse Hamelin, experienced, answers the call: I like that, to intervene, to help maintain pages that speak of feminismsays the writer.

In vain, since the slaughterhouse page on Wikipedia is now closed.

This dismantling does not surprise Catherine Bernier, administrator of WikiMédia Canada, the Canadian component of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia. The page probably did not have enough sources recognized in the Francophonie.

On Wikipedia, Quebec sheets only represented 1 % of the content of the platform in French in 2022, all subjects combined. The European population being less familiar with the sources of the province, the task is more difficult to convince Internet users of their validity, explains Catherine Bernier.

If we want to create the mayor of Chibougamau, for example, it will be more difficult. French could ask: “What is that, The echo of Chibougamau. “

The task was doubling difficult in the case of the slaughterhouse page, since the items relating to subjects more typically femaleor created by new editors, are more offered to deletion than subjects typically maleindicates Ms. Bernier. Same story for the sheets created by women, she adds.

For what? This could be explained, according to the administrator, by the fact that women form 20 % of the French -speaking contributors to the platform, and men occupy the remaining 80 %.

We have fewer sources on a less historically covered subject. If there are few sources to talk about an artist woman, for example, it will be more difficult to justify the creation of her page.

We can act by creating sources, by involving academics, researchers and journalists to write raw material. […] If we award prices, we make portraits, we write dictionaries entries in bibliographies, we publish research articles, monographs, we will have material, we, volunteers, to create pages on people who are minorityshe said.

A witch hunt

Marilyse Hamelin has no trouble accepting the closure of the slaughterhouse blog on Wikipedia. It is possible that there were not enough sourcesshe admits. What is more difficult to swallow for her is what followed: a witch hunt To people having spoken in favor of maintaining its maintenance, she describes.

Patrouilleurs – volunteers who ensure that changes to the platform respect its founding principles – ordered the closure of its account, and at least three other identifiers, all wrongly accused of belonging to Marilyse Hamelin. The author indeed holds another Wikipedia account, but it has been inactive for months.

Carmély Jacob, teacher in literary studies at theUqamis the owner of one of these accounts accused of being a duplicate (or false nose, in Wikipedian language): The two, we are Quebeckers, from the literary environment and habit in Montreal. It is possible that we are expressed in a similar way.

Despite that she had revealed her separate identity to patrollers, her account remained closed.

The feeling we had was that the big problem of the slaughterhouse page was that it was a feminist and Quebec page. [Ces pages] French masculine pages are more severely judged, for example.

For the former president of WikiMédia Canada, Lëa-Kim Châteauneuf, whose account has also been the subject of restrictions in stride, this front approach [de certains patrouilleurs] that several new contributors end up abandoning, or even being banned. The existence of an imperfect page as a slaughterhouse does not endanger Wikipedia and should be an invitation to improve itshe adds.

Political climate degradation

Difficult, for Marilyse Hamelin and Carmélie Jacob, not to see any link with the current geopolitical context. Wikipedia has never been a left or right project. It is a collaboration project, a utopia. But at the moment, this project is core by right interestsnote Mme Hamelin.

In recent months, billionaire Elon Musk has shone the spotlight on the platform, which he accuses of leaning to the left. He called for his boycott. In France, The Pointa publication oriented on the right, also asked WikiMédia to establish much more effective safeguards against ideological diversions.

Catherine Bernier, administrator of WikiMédia Canada, remains cautious about this, because these events are too fresh to draw scientific conclusions. That doesn’t mean there is no surc, she says.

Where there is humans, there is humans.

She recalls that Wikipedia has existed for 24 years, making it a platform extremely resilient. Without confrontation of points of view, Wikipedia could not lastshe underlines.

Disenchantment

Nevertheless, for Carmélie Jacob, whose account has been blocked since December, it is disenchantment. I have a mourning to do my idea of what Wikipedia is, she says.

I sent them money frequently, I consulted a lot of Wikipedia and I praised it with my students at university. These events shaken my confidence in this institution.

Even if the water has flowed under the bridges since the event, the subject remains sensitive for Marilyse Hamelin. There is a shame that comes with it, to have made mistakes. Even if they are errors of good faith.

Four months after having suffered a first refusal to recover her account, Marilyse Hamelin sent a letter to the patrollers responsible for her closure. In the public square, people debated for a few days to determine if she had learned from her mistakes and could recover her account. The vote leaning in its favor in early April.

Relieved, she has not lost a second to get back to work and contribute to Quebec cards on the platform. But she counts Stay away from very hot debates.