Against the Zygarchs

(reposted from Portal_talk:Feminism, and reedited)

In going around looking for articles covered by WikiProject Gender Studies, I discovered that many key variations on Gender equality had been hijacked six or so months ago by redirects to both Zygarchy (Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Zygarchy) and Equalism, and had actually begun to affect the conversation across the internet.

This is bad news, as these terms have nothing behind them but ill-defined assertions. I've rarely been embarrassed for Wikipedia, but this is one of those moments where the site's power was left in the hands of POV/OR mischief-makers.

"Zygarchy" is a made-up word that would never meet the WP:NEO standard if anyone had caught it. It has never meant "rule of two genders" before someone asserted it on Wikipedia. There are a couple hundred blogs out there crowing about the "new word they'd learned" while learning less than zero about notable, verifiable internationally-established gender policy. (Somewhat ominously, "zygarchy" is an obscure but genuine term for an ancient military formation involving two chariots. I think the chariots were used to run infantry over... or to cut them down with a chain between them...)

"Equalism" has been used by notable sources and scholars-- but never consistently. There was some effort to use it to refer to communism in the fifties, anarchism at various points, and some among the Facebook crowd seem to like it better than "feminism"; one news citation in Sweden counts it as a subset of feminism. That is to say, it's a semantic game: There is no "-ism" there, just a desire for one, a moving target without a developed philosophy behind it. I've redirected it to a far more notable article, Egalitarianism.

Nearly every instance of a wikilink to Gender equality had been piped to Equalism. That's what last night was all about for me: finding and removing the plumbing from this phantasm.

I've reestablished the Gender equality article with cites to the UN and an external link to the World Bank. I've added it to the various gender studies and feminism templates. This is one of this (Gender Studies) project's central concepts, and we really have to watch these pages. Cheers, Yamara ✉ 21:43, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

^{Pictured above right: Slave giantesses Fenja and Menja consider their selfish owner, King Fróði. Apparently, he thought it was a great idea to keep them chained to the magic millwheel that created all his worldly peace and prosperity.
Take your time, ladies. I'm sure you'll come up with something.

...Maybe a "rule of two"?}

May 2008

Gigantic Days

Wikiproject Time is gaining members and notoreity, and the Time Portal is up and running, though it still needs some genuine automation.

I've been hacking apart the unviable mutant article Immortality and trying to get it to make sense. First I ejected half of it into a crufttrap called Immortality in fiction, and then waded into what remained, which was largely pop-Transhumanist POV speculation stitched to an article about eternal afterlife written by an editor with a serious interest in Hell. Ideally, the article should be a master overview of immortality, much as Time is an overview of the many approaches to time; other encyclopedias have accomplished a meaningful article on immortality, why not Wikipedia? But it needs something that immortality is to tie it together. Time is experienced by all, but immortality is uncertain to be achievable. What can one say about all the many speculations that have been made that isn't OR or POV?

And then it hit me today.

Immortality... is a goal.

Look alive, everyone. —Yamara ✉ 07:23, 24 May 2008 (UTC)