Adrianne Wadewitz Quotes

When I used my real name, all of a sudden there was a lot of commentary. 'Oh, you're a woman' or 'You can't really be a woman' or 'You don't write like a woman.' Or all of a sudden my arguments were not taken as seriously or were judged as hysterical or emotional.... So I got much more interested in why this was happening.

Wikipedia needs to recruit women, yes, but, more importantly, it needs to recruit feminists. And feminists can be of any gender.

Teachers frequently talk about moments in which they became students again and how much that made them better teachers. For me, there has been no better way to improve my teaching, specifically my teaching in the composition classroom, than to take up a subject at which I am abysmal.

When professors teach, they teach what they love. What they are experts in. What it is easy for them to learn. Thus, it is easy to forget what it is like to be the student who struggles in the classroom.

When we’re talking both to Wikipedians and people outside of Wikipedia, we say, 'Look, if we want to include all of these other narratives besides the typical narrative that we usually tell of dead white men, we’ve gotta get it in there now.'

So in one respect, I would say that we need to add the voice of feminists to Wikipedia who are going to talk about– women as underrepresented groups.

If a piece of information is wrong or misrepresented on Wikipedia, it affects the way the entire world sees that topic.

I know something about how the first encyclopedias were developed in the 18th century. And those encyclopedias almost completely excluded the history of women. And it’s one argument that we make all the time.

Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience - that radical switch and growth

For me, one of the most empowering outcomes of my year of climbing has been the new narrative I can tell about myself. I am no longer “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, and Wikipedian”. I am now “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedian, and rock climber”.

So I think one thing that Wikipedia has to do as a culture is ask itself, 'Are we willing– to be this– this self-selecting– and– and be this small?' We can have many more people if we’re willing to be a more welcoming community.

We definitely wanna increase the number of women. But just increasing the number of women isn’t necessarily going to– improve the– the fact that content on Wikipedia itself is skewed.