Sounds like the stuff of nightmares, right? Well, it’s real and happened at the Claremont Graduate School out in California in October.
Prominent gender and media studies professors from across the country converged recently to help host what was dubbed by organizers as a “Feminist, Anti-Racist Wikipedia Edit-a-thon” to create or influence dozens of entries on the online encyclopedia.
A Claremont Graduate University endowment fund sponsored the effort, which promoted creating and “improving” entries dedicated to: feminists; feminist theories; science studies; science, technology and society; human sexuality; artificial intelligence; and film theory; according to an email that announced the event to the Claremont Colleges community, as well as the “Edit-a-thon Wikipedia Page.”
This news was particularly shocking to me since I thought that Claremont Graduate University was generally conservative leaning, what with Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, being a professor there. So I asked a friend enrolled at CGU, and it turns out there are some conservatives there, but not many. “The conservative presence at CGU is a small but dedicated one,” he said. “The rest of the school is off their rocker crazy.”
Judging from the “Wikistorm,” it sounds like he’s right.
