Sour dictionary?

In a country where Youtube has been blocked for over 3 years, it’s hard to think of a trusting source of media. In Turkey, the media is unfortunately heavily controlled by the government, and the government can easily pull the plug on anything that challenges the government. The reason why Youtube has been shut down is because of the videos that insult the founder of the country, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It is understandable that Turkish people would definitely want to see these videos, however, freedom of speech should allow for other parties to express themselves also.

Even though there are many women who works in the popular media sector, they are still very underpresented. It will take many years for the country to get to the point where media puts women in a better place, however, this one website is already doing a great good job at this.

eksisozluk(which literally translates to “sour dictionary”) is a user collaborative website. It could be thought as urban dictionary meets Wikipedia where users enter informative entries and talk about everyday life as well as comment on contemporary news and events. It has a wide array of topics to talk about, but I would mainly like to talk about the demographics and the effect on media.

Mainly the users are between the age of 18 and 25, college age people and a huge majority is very liberal. This is especially interesting since Turkey is currently under a conservativ

e government. A lot of these people are very involved in the politics and the website as a whole is very critical of the current government. However, it is smartly covered by the censorship by a single sentence at the footer of the website: “Nothing written on this website has truth”.

The users have nicknames and they don’t use any real names. There really is no way to tell what kind of person is behind an entry. This also means that we can’t tell if it’s a female or a male user. But we do know from the statistics that about 150.000 users are male and 75.000 are male. That’s a 2:1 ratio which is pretty high considering the women population in the popular media.

On a platform where you can’t distinguish a man’s idea from a woman’s, it’s impossible to judge things by the gender. I believe this form of media is one of the most effective kind. A woman’s idea should be taken into account but many times it’s been heavily prejudged because of her gender. However, taking in the account of this huge number of female population, anything that’s written on the website might be coming from a woman’s point of view.

Not only women are users contributing, there are also women moderators and admins on the website who controls the entries that are written. The whole point of the moderation is to keep the conversation civil and as academically written as possible. There are not only political discussions on the website either. People also talk about arts, music, Turkish culture and everything imaginable. Taking the women population into account while reading the entries makes the experience very worthwhile.