Funding by the state of Hessen, Germany: Wikipedia should become more feminine

WIESBADEN. The Hessian Ministry of Science and Art has decided to support projects that promote more entries by and about women in the Wikipedia online lexicon . Accordingly, the state is supporting the associations “Kinothek Asta Nielsen” and “FIM - Women's Rights is Human Rights” with around 50,000 euros in making the website more feminine. "This will make the digital transformation fairer step by step," said Hesse's Minister of Art and Culture, Angela Dorn (Greens), explaining the project.

With the “Women Writing Wiki” project, Kinothek and FIM made an important contribution to closing the so-called “Gender Knowledge Gap”, an alleged gap in knowledge about the role of women, explained Dorn. With the commitment of the associations, for example, in the Wikipedia article on the Prostitution Protection Act, the achievements of Hessian women would become clear.

Only ten percent of the encyclopedia contributions were written by women. In addition, around 16 percent of the German-language biographical articles dealt with women. "Knowledge is power - and even in 2020 this knowledge is still very male dominated", criticized the Green politician.

Funding is "politically and ideologically earmarked"
The science policy spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group in the Hessian state parliament, Frank Grobe, criticized the decision of the science and art ministry. This is a "free encyclopedia not financed with tax money".

In his opinion, the funding is "politically and ideologically earmarked". He also considers the statement that knowledge is male-dominated to be questionable. “Knowledge is either factually correct or incorrect, it has no social or other gender and is not dominated by one,” Grobe clarified.

Source: Junge Freiheit