March 18, 2006
Wikipedia Dumps 'Marina Girls'
A battle has been raging behind the scenes at Wikipedia. No, it's not over copyrights or veracity or how well an article explains its premise. It's over whether or not the entry on San Francisco's Marina District should include an explanation of the term Marina Girl (and, by extension, Marina Guy). The main arguments for deletion is that it's a stereotype and that the content of the article is heavily biased against the Juicy Couture clad set at The Matrix. But if you look at the standing article at the SFGate, it describes to a tee the Marina Girl without actually mentioning the term:
Today the apartment buildings, shops and restaurants seem to be bursting at their seams with beautiful, young and fit 20- and 30-somethings. The singles scene is hopping on Friday and Saturday nights, with lots of fresh-faced postgrads with cocktails in one hand and cell phones in the other. Union is arguably the best street in the city to window-shop the hours away on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and, a few blocks down, Chestnut has an incredible variety of high-quality restaurants catering to every palate.Of course, the definition can be found over at the Urban Dictionary, as well as at Answers.com (which just scraped the older Wikipedia article). Here at SFist, we don't think Wikipedia will be complete until they've reinstated the Marina Girl and provided a snarky definition for their natural enemy in the wild, the Mission Hipster. It might go something like:
The Mission Hipster is a twenty-something self-proclaimed 'artist,' usually seen drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon at dive bars when not riding up and down Valencia on their track bike. They take pride in their relative poverty (though more than a few have wealthy families), working jobs as baristas or bike messengers. Their signature look includes a fauxhawk (male) or short bowl cut (female), aviator sunglasses, an ironic t-shirt, ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors. They can be found in great number at Slim's or the Bottom of the Hill on any given weekend where they prefer the sounds of acoustic guitars played by troubled singer-songwriters and upbeat post-punk-pop. They often avoid the upper Mission on those same nights, complaining that it's overrun by 'slumming yuppies from the Marina.'Thanks to Mike for the tip! Photo from The Sweetest Thing.
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It should also be noted that so-called "Marina Girls" are so iconic that last year during San Francisco's Halloween celebration there was actually a "Marina Girl" flash mob, calling themselves the "Whoo! Girls". They were mostly comprised of drag queens: here's an excerpt of a post (with photos) I wrote after they crashed a party I was at:
"Also Saturday, don't forget the "Whoo Girls", a group of drag queens who showed up to the dominatrix's party along with another group -- a mob of angry villagers led by Frankenstein and Igor. It was quite a party. But the Whoo Girls were all named Katelyn, and were inspired by black drag Katelyn's recent experience in a Mission district bar where she overheard two blonde Marina district girls talk about how they liked to visit the Mission bars because they are "edgy and dangerous". (Meaning, poor and Latino.) So they all dressed like Marina chicklets, and ran around going "Whoooo!" like the women in the Girls Gone Wild videos. Hilarious! They later left and met at a bar with another costumed group of Abe Lincolns who were all gay and calling themselves the "G'abe Lincolns."
Post URL: http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2005/11/lips_like_sugar.html
Whoo Girls photo:
http://tinynibbles.fotki.com/halloween_05/dsc03424.html
I was lucky enough to be teamed up with some of the Whoo Girls playing water-pistol assassin and hunting, you guessed it, Mission Hipsters. Good times.
The whole "neutral point of view" policy makes me generally uninterested in contributing to Wikipedia, though I do get what they're going for.
The removal of the Marina Girl article means I should probably step up my efforts with my (not yet public) San Francisco only Wiki: http://ess-eff.com/Guide/
Jackson, you're welcome to come write the Marina Girl and Mission Hipster articles... even the Pacific Heights one, if you want.
As much as I found that entry amusing, it just didn't belong in Wikipedia. So I'm not sad to see it go, as it will probably end up somewhere else. Maybe on SFist? Hmm...
The main problem with the article was presenting parts of the stereotype as fact... "The two largest employers of Marina Girls are [[Salesforce.com]] and [http://www.gap.com Gap, Inc]." Unless someone surveyed *every* Marina Girl, to find out where they worked, there's no way to present half of this article as fact.
The main problem with the article was presenting parts of the stereotype as fact... "The two largest employers of Marina Girls are [[Salesforce.com]] and [http://www.gap.com Gap, Inc]." Unless someone surveyed *every* Marina Girl, to find out where they worked, there's no way to present half of this article as fact. Also it presents common habits of marina girls as if they were thing they do in a mechanical fashion, "On clear sunny days, MGs sunbathe in tiny triangle bikini tops..." not many sunbathe and many wear..., but it enforce the thing as if THEY DO THIS, no questions ask.