Not notable enough: feminism and expertise in Wikipedia

Wikipedia promotes itself as a community that anyone can join as long as they know the rules. In this paper, we reflect on our attempt to join this community and to edit Wikientries on ageing so that they include an intersectional perspective, especially with regard to gender. Our excursion into Wikipedia reveals how certain entries act as sites of contestation between different communities of practice, such as feminist scholars and Wikipedia experts. We document and discuss three interconnected discursive guidelines over which contestation takes place: notability, verifiability, and tone. These guidelines govern the way that Wikipedia operates in relationship to dominant discourses on age and gender. They are at the heart of its inequitable treatment of content matter.