"Just" a dress? How Wikipedia blew up over a wedding dress.
The following is an analysis paper I wrote for my Writing and Popular Media class I took this past semester. The original intent of this paper was to analyze how collaborative writing works in spaces like Wikipedia. I chose to analyze the discussion in the "Talk" page of the entry for Kate Middleton's wedding dress. I had heard about the "controversy" over it but this was my first detailed exploration of that discussion.
Fair warning: This will be a lengthy post. For those who want a tl;dr...Wikipedia editors didn't like that someone tried to create an article for Kate Middleton's wedding dress so they tried to delete (or at least merge) the article. There was a 36 hour conversation and it was eventually kept. The attempt to delete the article is indicative of the problems of having editors (the majority of whom are male) deciding what is important for the larger community, many of whom have different interests than said editors.
Note: The sources credited in the parenthetical citations throughout this post are acronyms for the various Wikipedia pages I was looking at for this project. The links are included at the end of this post.
Fair warning: This will be a lengthy post. For those who want a tl;dr...Wikipedia editors didn't like that someone tried to create an article for Kate Middleton's wedding dress so they tried to delete (or at least merge) the article. There was a 36 hour conversation and it was eventually kept. The attempt to delete the article is indicative of the problems of having editors (the majority of whom are male) deciding what is important for the larger community, many of whom have different interests than said editors.
Note: The sources credited in the parenthetical citations throughout this post are acronyms for the various Wikipedia pages I was looking at for this project. The links are included at the end of this post.
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| Middleton arriving at Westminster Abbey. Credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images from Vogue |
On 29 April 2011
Prince William, Duke of Cambridge married Catherine “Kate” Middleton (now
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge) in a lavish ceremony in Westminster Abbey in
London, England. According to its edit history on Wikipedia, user Chzz
attempted to start an article for Catherine’s wedding dress, at 12:00pm. The
article was short, consisting of only brief information about the dress known
that had only been recently released and confirmed by Buckingham Palace and an
edit note stating, “start, because it is inevitable this needs to be spun off”
(RH). Chzz seemed to have realized the importance of having an article page for
the dress and was attempting to get one started. At 12:16, user Erolos
submitted a Vote for Deletion due to its being a “completely non-notable
unexpandable stub article” (RH). In just 16 short minutes the fate of a
stand-alone article about the wedding dress (and the fate of future articles
for similarly notable wedding dresses and iconic outfits) was held in the
balance. In this analysis I will attempt to analyze both the discussion that
occurred over the course of 36 hours on the Article for Deletion page for the
wedding dress as well as the article itself (as it exists today). I feel it is
important to address both the article and the behind the scenes discussion in
order to fully understand the importance of both the dress itself and what it
represents within a space like Wikipedia.
First let me provide some backstory.
The dress had been the subject of wild speculation for months. Almost as soon
as the engagement had been announced industry insiders were throwing out ideas
for who would design the dress. On the day, as Catherine stepped out of the car
in front of the Abbey, the Palace issued a statement that the dress had been
designed by Sarah Burton for the British fashion house Alexander McQueen.
Images of the dress bounced around the world in seconds thanks to both the
wedding being telecast live as well as the vast social media coverage it was
receiving. Immediately compared to Grace Kelly’s wedding dress and garnering
praise for both Burton and hailed as a triumph for British fashion and a design
house as iconically British as Alexander McQueen. Within minutes even the
casual observer of the conversation happening around the world about the dress
could tell that this was not just “any” wedding dress.
Back
to Wikipedia, at 12:17pm Erolos tries to redirect the article for the dress to
the page for the Royal Wedding using the excuse that there were no other
articles for wedding dresses. This would become a key argument used by
deletionists in the conversation that would unfold on the Talk page. At 12:31
Chzz urged for a redirection back to the dress having its own page and called
for a discussion to take place on the Talk page for the article. At 12:35, Chzz
then comments, “apparently, I need to establish ‘notability’ despite Google
News showing me 20,000+ refs, within the last hour (RH). Starting around 13:04pm
on the Articles for Deletion page for the dress a vote for whether to keep the
article, merge it with the article page for the wedding, or delete it outright
began. Over the next 36 hours the dress, and its notability and cultural
significance, as well as the significance of similar iconic wedding dresses and
garments, would be discussed by the Wikipedia editing community. The archived
transcript of this discussion (AfDWD) is fascinating to say the least and is
indicative of the difficulties of collaborative writing spaces like Wikipedia
where not all members of the community share similar ideas and opinions of what
is “important” or “significant.”
Very
early in the discussion the dress is dismissed as being a case of recentism the
main counts against it are: 1) non-notability 2) all the text currently exists
in the wedding article 3) it’s incapable of being expanded beyond a stub 4) no
other “wedding dress of” pages exist and 5) Wikipedia is not a news source. Some
users (such as Jennie--x) point out that articles about Catherine’s dress as
well as the dresses of Diana, Princess of Wales and Princess Elizabeth (Queen
Elizabeth II) and others might be of interest to the audience of Wikipedia, but
these articles need a chance to be created and developed. User Kingpin steps in
early (14:07pm) as a strong advocate for keeping the article and points out
that it only took 16 minutes for the article to get flagged and that it had not
had enough time to be developed beyond a stub and that Chzz had intended on doing
more work on it over the following period but, “due to your persistent attempts
to delete it and lack of proper discussion with him a bout (sic) the matter, he
no longer plans to have anything to do with it until the drama has died down in a few days time” (AfD, emphasis in
original). In the rest of their defense for keeping the article, Kingpin goes
on to elaborate and offer counter claims for the main reasons (listed above)
for deleting the article. While there are plenty of voices voting for deletion,
the main split quickly appears to be between keeping it as its own article or
merging it with the article page for the wedding itself. Throughout the
discussion the two sides, delete/merge vs. keep, are represented by both
level-headed members and those who seem happy to reduce the discussion to
snark:
“Delete
- ‘Wedding dress of…’ as an article in an encyclopedia?
Exactly the sort of thing that made me all but quit as an active user on this
project.” (emphasis in original)
“Delete
- I’ve seen some pretty retarded
articles around here over the years…but this tripe gives them a run for their money…Mention it in the main
article, but there’s no call to devote encyclopedia treatment to a flippin dress.” (emphasis mine)
“Keep
- None of the AfD arguments make sense…A lot of the argument seems to boil down
to ‘I don’t think this ought to be notable.’ But notability isn’t some kind of
reward Wikipedia gives to its subjects.”
“Strong
Delete - Totally absurd article. Snap out of the hypnotism.”
“Keep
– how pathetically stupid is this? And how pathically stupid will WP look if
we’re the only people who don’t think the dress is a ‘notable subject’?”
There were also
mentions about the fact the both the article for Kate Middleton and for the
Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton had both been flagged for
deletion at the time of their creation. About half way through the discussion
however, an interesting turn of topic began to develop and some users felt as
if they were being subjected to personal attacks:
“Strong
Keep – I believe that our systemic bias caused by being a predominantly
male geek community is worth some reflection in this context. Consider
Category:Linux distribution stubs – we have nearly 90 articles about Linux distributions,
county only the stubs. With the major distros included, we’re well over a
hundred. One hundred different Linux distributions. One hundred. I think we can
have an article about this dress. We should have articles about one hundred
famous dresses.”
“Keep
– The topic clearly has enormous notability and so our editing policy is to
keep this material. Note also the Foundation’s concern that there is
insufficient participation by women in Wikipedia. We have here a computer gamer
– creator of articles such as List of Dungeons & Dragons deities – trying
to delete a fashion article which is of great interest to millions of women.
This seems to be a case of improper bias.”
This last quote
is perhaps one of the most interesting of the bunch, as well as the long reply
that followed as a rebuttal (not quoted here). This comment, and many similar
comments in relation to the gender issues on Wikipedia, and the role this
article plays in those concerns, has problematic elements and many of the
Wikipedia editors in this discussion seem to be missing the overall point. And
this brings me to my conclusion about the discussion on the talk page and my
analysis of the article as it stands today.
The users/editors involved in this
discussion are so busy thinking about their own opinions of the dress that they
fail to think objectively about the real issue. Ultimately it is not about the
dress. It is about what the dress (and others like it) symbolize. As a scholar
of fashion history, fashion rhetoric, cultural studies, and memory studies, I
have learned that garments like royal wedding dresses have huge cultural significance. The gown worn by Diana, Princess of
Wales (designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel) set the style and tone of
wedding dresses throughout the 1980s. That women chose white as the color for
their wedding dress is due in large part to the fact that Queen Victoria chose
a white dress in 1840 to her marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and
Gotha. Burton’s design for Catherine is reminiscent of the gown worn by
Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco and has spun off several similar versions at
various price ranges. From an economic standpoint alone, the ramifications of
the popularity of this dress make it notable. Something the members of the
Wikipedia community didn’t seem to register. Instead, because it wasn’t
important to them it was deemed to be
not important at all. In a
collaborative writing community, that seems to depend on an army of volunteer
editors to create and maintain articles on a vast array of subjects, this kind
of subjective thinking seems potentially damaging to the community and its
reputation. To automatically dismiss the significance of the dress and the
importance of having an article devoted to it, as well as articles devoted to
other iconic garments seems to be shutting out a substantial audience base for
the site.
I am currently in the process of a
long term research project that focuses on Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (as
well as three other notable past and present fashion icons, with two more
possibly being added at future stages of the project). While Wikipedia is not a
“source” for my research, it is a place that I find myself going to at the
start of a project, just to see what foundational information exists. I first
started the project after this discussion had occurred and at the time I didn’t
bother to look at the Talk section or the Revision History. I was also lucky
that by the time I had started the project pages for Princess Diana’s dress and
the pink suit worn by Jacqueline Kennedy on the day of President Kennedy’s
assassination, as well as the navy blue Issa dress worn by Catherine during the
official engagement announcement press conference, had been created. These
pages were all beneficial to my early stage research process and it would have
been a shame if they had not survived their initial creation. While not every
Wikipedia editor would agree with me on their importance, that fact that I, as
a visitor and user of the site, went to Wikipedia specifically to search for
these items seems indicative of their notability and significance within
Wikipedia.
As for the wedding dress article
itself, it’s not without its issues, though I certainly give credit to the
various editors who worked on it throughout its (rocky) history. The article is
broken up into three main sections: 1) Pre-Wedding Speculation 2) Design and 3)
Reception and influence. The Pre-Wedding Speculation section is well documented
and shows the intense interest that surrounded the dress. The Design section is
perhaps the strongest, with great attention paid to the technical details of
the dress and its construction. When looking at the talk page discussion
surrounding the lace used for the dress there was a lot of attention paid to
make sure that the article included the most correct information and that it
didn’t feature misinterpreted information found in a press release. But even in
this section a basic misunderstanding (and unwillingness to even attempt to
understand) of the finer details of the dress’s construction are evident. One user
stated, “referring to the embroiders at the [Royal School of Needlework] as
‘dressmakers’ is incorrect. The RSN specializes in traditional hand embroidery,
not fashion or couture” (T). Another user followed by commenting, “I can’t
quite understand the objection to using the term ‘dressmakers’, on that basis
that, despite whatever qualifications and titles they might have, they were in
fact making a dress” (T). Though this commenter ultimately agrees with dropping
the term “dressmaker” from it’s association with the RSN it’s still indicative
of the problems of having editors who are not knowledgeable on the various
aspects of design and construction making changes to these articles.
The
misunderstanding here is simple, but would still lead to inaccuracies in the
article if they were allowed to stay. The embroiderers at the RSN made pieces
of lace and embroidery that were then passed on to the team of couture
dressmakers at Alexander McQueen to be included in the dress. The RSN is home
to impeccably trained and highly specialized embroiderers and needle workers.
This is a completely different skill from dressmaking. It would even be
inaccurate to call the team of couturiers at Alexander McQueen “dressmakers”
because while they are, in fact, making a dress, they are doing it to a
standard far above that of a typical “dressmaker”. A lack of regard for this
distinction in terms further illustrates a lack of regard for the various
fields of fashion design and technology in general, not only within but also well
outside the realm of Wikipedia.
In regards to the Reception and
influence section this is the section that could use more revisions. At is
current state, it is primarily a collection of quotes about the dress from
members of the fashion industry. However, we’re still too close to the event to
be able to have any serious long-term historical analysis of the influence of
the dress. That influence will, no doubt, exist and become apparent as the
years go by, so in the meantime, it’s a considerable victory for the inclusion
of iconic garments in Wikipedia that the article has been allowed to exist and
that the precedent has been set to allow for similar articles. Overall, the
article does a decent job of staying objective and highlights the most
significant information. It is well sourced with 41 resources cited and was
last modified (at the time of this paper) on 22 August 2014. While I’m sure
many of the article’s original detractors would still find the piece irrelevant
and insignificant, I would probably be inclined to say the same thing about
those 100 Linux articles. But I would still defend the inclusion of those
articles if there were people willing to work on creating and maintaining them.
In the end, I think the more interesting story about this article is the one
that occurred behind the scenes among the member community and what has
resulted from that drama and discussion.
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