Hi all. I know I haven’t been by in a long time. Maybe seeing the place again as something of an outsider makes me notice things differently.
I’m looking back through old notes and I found one about this article, which I must have created or at least interacted with in the past. Make a Public Comment at a City Council Meeting
In the “Community Q&A” I just found this:
While I really appreciate this article, the drawings seem to depict pretty homogenous demographics. Would it be possible to show more diversity?
It’s not a question about the article itself, so I’m not going to answer there, but they certainly have a point. The picture people all read as basically middle-aged white guys, while the one likely woman appears to be a clerk. There’s an awful lot of that in the hired illustrations.
In an article like this one, it just reinforces stereotypes about who has a voice.
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It’s not viewing it differently as an outsider. I’ve noticed this too. Even though we had a great increase in image diversity after I and several others pushed for it a few years back, the contracted illustrations have fallen right back to just white people, or primarily white people with one method with black people. There’s a few artists who actually do really nice work and are really good with diversity, but for the most part it seems like a lot of the artists that really paved the way for diversity standards are no longer working with us and even our current-day best ones still have some issues.
What I’ve noticed is that the long-term artists seem to do a much better job of creating diverse images - they’re not perfect, and there are some long-term artists who don’t make diverse images, but they generally do much better at it. When we have artists who just drop in and do one or two batches of images, they’re more likely to do the exact thing described here: art primarily of white males. This is very poor representation at best, and outright harmful at worst - it’s discouraging for women, POC, and non-Christian people to never see themselves in art representing a person in power, it’s discouraging for fat people to never see themselves in the fashion topics and can actually contribute to eating disorders, and it’s a major problem for only white people or just boys and men being depicted on certain health topics that don’t apply only to them (like ADHD or autism, where girls and people of color are outright refused diagnosis specifically because of the stereotype that it’s a “white boy’s disorder”, or articles on menstrual health where the images are of white girls). And I don’t think much of the visual team realizes that race is not just black people and white people, that a person of color is not a white person with a skin tint, and that diversity includes body diversity, gender and sexuality diversity, and religious diversity as well.
To my knowledge, the Wikivisual work is outsourced to workers mostly in the Philippines, so I would not be all that surprised if there might be some cultural differences and/or language barriers that result in some of these issues. But what I’m really disappointed in is that we had a really impressive improvement in our diversity after the initial push for it, and in the last year or so, that has largely disappeared. I know
the visual team is capable of sticking to these things because part of the push for better images involved more sensitive depictions of topics like mental health, addiction, and disability, and for the most part they have been able to stick to that even throughout all the artist rotation. Why are the artists now not being held to these standards? Especially now with the discussion about Black Lives Matter and related subjects, it’s disappointing for these issues to be cropping up again. I know images aren’t always going to be at the forefront of everyone’s minds, especially considering how issues like Google rankings and COVID-related financial stresses are affecting us, but images are a big part of wikiHow in multiple aspects. Readers will get a message about us, and we need to make sure that message is one that shows they have a place in the world, too.
@Dvortygirl
, I’d like to formally apologize for hijacking your post with an entire essay. It’s not personal. I do this a lot.
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Not sure how relevant this is, but I do recall there was an incident where an illustrator accidentally whitewashed Beyoncé and Obama. Apparently there was one person doing the drawing, and another doing the colouring. wikiHow did say they were going to talk to their illustrators to encourage diversity.
You can find the tweets about it here: https://mobile.twitter.com/wikiHow/status/824001434853052417
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A lot of images do lack diversity. In a number of chess articles I’ve seen only males, mostly white with a few dark skinned people. For example, in Win at Chess
there are no female chess players. Chess is already a male dominated sport and the images do not help. This also occurs in [[study chess]] and a few others (I was happy to see female chess players in [[Become a better chess player]]).
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Just saying, wikiMarkup doesn’t work here.
.
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Oops. I’m still learning.
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It’s one reason I’m not enthusiastic about the trend of using “characters” instead of using images of different people for each step.
I know it’s well-meaning and provides a sense of continuity, but it also often reduces diversity.
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For what it’s worth, two of the “community Q&A” questions I answered there were “Can kids speak at city hall?” and “Can teens speak at city hall?”
I’ve heard extraordinary comments from young people, and they can make a tremendous difference, standing up at a city council meeting to say that the street past their school is too busy to cross safely on foot, or that they’re discouraged by how much litter they find around town.
At least in my city, a disproportionate number of the people who do attend city council meetings and speak are old enough to be my parents.
So that’s another type of diversity these images are lacking.
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And in reply to @MissLunaRose
People’s brains in general seem to be hard-wired to use archetypes to represent categories of things. Ask people to draw or name a bird and you’re likely to get something like robins, pigeons, sparrows, and less likely to get penguins or ostriches, even though most everyone knows that penguins and ostriches are birds.
So when you start to make characters or roles in drawings, it’s unfortunately not that surprising that you get pictures of a “bicyclist” that are younger, slimmer, men Ride Sweep for a Bicycle Group
, or that a “teacher” is probably drawn as a woman, and so on. We’re probably going to keep having to ask for the penguins and the ostriches if we want more of them included in illustrations of birds.
Photography and contrived diversity can also miss the mark, unfortunately, as in this stock photo of a “beautiful” (?!) woman soldering
in what appears to be a biology lab, by holding the end of a soldering iron that would be hot enough to melt metal if it were plugged in, against the wrong side of a circuit board. Oops.
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Yes. People often think of chess players as middleage or older men. This leaves out the fact that many kids and teens play chess! (I believe Magnus Carlsen became the highest rated chess player at age 19)
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JayneG
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Thanks for taking the time to bring this up Dvortygirl and thanks to everyone else who has commented. We covered this a little bit during the meetup, but I also wanted to pop a note in here.
I know that the wikiVisual team has been working hard on increasing diversity, but there is always more we can do. Thomas is reaching out to all illustrators this week to talk about this issue, as well as reaching out to a couple of individual illustrators that will likely benefit from specific guidance.
If you see articles that do not feel inclusive, diverse, or would benefit from an update, please reach out either to me directly or on wikiVisual page (which I monitor!) This way, we can work together to continue to move forward on this.
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