As if! Kate’s wedding dress (a.k.a. the dress that changed our lives) is deemed “irrelevant” by Wikipedia

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As if! Kate’s wedding dress (a.k.a. the dress that changed our lives) is deemed “irrelevant” by Wikipedia

By Alexandra Grant | July 16th, 2012 | 12:30 pm

Photography by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

The very thought of debating whether or not Kate Middleton’s wedding dress was important seems ridiculous, but that’s exactly what happened when Wikipedia published an article entitled “Wedding Dress of Kate Middleton” the day of the royal wedding. It was immediately flagged for deletion, and Wikipedia contributors soon got in an uproar on the article’s “talk” page. They called the article trivial and irrelevant, one even going so far as to say:

“The sheer presence of this article is one of the lowest points ever reached by Wikipedia! What amazes me is that there’s acculturatede [sic] people (since the article was well written) who has such interests, and free time to lose to devoted themselves for such totally irrelevant arguments.”

So a dress that has spawned hundreds of copies and has already become an iconic emblem of both fashion and royal history is irrelevant? It seems a bit shocking that something that has had such a huge impact is being deemed as unfit for mention from the same people who confidently post article after article on Game of Thrones characters.

Fortunately, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales acknowledged the site’s gender-gap last week at Wikimania, the annual Wikimedia conference. He attributed the problem to topic bias: given the fact that only nine per cent of Wikipedia editors are women, the topics that are deemed worthy of having their own article obviously have a stronger male influence. He promised to make changes and admitted that the online encyclopedia has a lot of work to do when it comes to its fashion portal.

To the Middleton dress bashers: watch this. If there was anything worth noting from The Devil Wears Prada, it’d be Miranda Priestley’s icy “You think this has nothing to do with you” speech — proof that even those who think they’re unaffected by fashion are.

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