Wikipedia's Politics of Exclusion: Gender, Epistemology, and Feminist Rhetorical (In)action

Compositionists have celebrated Wikipedia as a space that privileges collaborative, public writing and complicates traditional notions of authorship and revision. Yet, this scholarship has not considered the implications of Wikipedia's “gender gap”—the highly disproportionate number of male editors over female editors. In this article, I explore how Wikipedia functions as a rhetorical discourse community whose conventions exclude and silence feminist ways of knowing and writing. Drawing on textual analysis of Wikipedia's editorial policies, as well as interviews with female users, I argue that Wikipedia's insistence on separating embodied subjectivity from the production of knowledge limits the site's ability to facilitate any substantial, subversive feminist rhetorical action. These limitations, I suggest, should inform a critical pedagogical approach to Wikipedia.