Saturday, August 4, 2007

Overcoming Women's Wiki-Invisibility

It's not just that Wikipedia needs your help, with incomplete law-related entries, as previously noted. IntLawGrrls points out that women's Wiki-Invisibility -- the absence of coverage of women in the law on the web -- reinforces women's invisibility. IntLawGrrls posts on the issue of women in international law, specifically the absence of information on women serving on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. But clearly this is an important issue affecting the visibility of women and the law more generally, including women's legal history.

There are superb resources, especially Barbara Babcock's Women's Legal History Biography website. But as Diane Marie Amann suggests, it would be a great project for enterprising law students to take up improving and expanding the number of entries related to women's legal history on Wikipedia. Just one example, there is an entry for Judge Florence E. Allen of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the first woman to be appointed to an Article III court, but it is "a stub," and much less interesting than Allen's life story.

To get started, try going to History WikiProjects, and follow the links from there.