Wikipedia Works To Close Gender Gap

Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Wikimedia Foundation collaborated on a study of Wikipedia's contributor base last year and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women and set a goal to bring it up to 25 percent by 2015. But now the NY Times (reg. may be required) reports that progress in reaching that goal is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women. 'The big problem is that the current Wikipedia community is what came about by letting things develop naturally,' says Kat Walsh, a member of the Wikimedia board. 'Trying to influence it in another direction is no longer the easiest path, and requires conscious effort to change.' Joseph Reagle says that Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd including an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women. Adopting openness means being 'open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,' adds Reagle, 'so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.'"

Comments

Why is this a problem?

[Brett Buck]

Being "open" also means being open to people who might not want to participate. What difference does it make?

Re:Why is this a problem?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If your project depends entirely on the effort of participants, trying to determine why some people don't want to participate, and then figuring out what non-participants can be converted without causing other damage, is pretty much the most important job the leadership has.

I don't think that focusing on the male/female ratio is all that productive in itself, a change that doubles the number of useful contributors but leaves the ratio untouched would be more useful than one that attracts a few more females to bump their numbers up to 25%, for instance; but it can be diagnostically useful.

If your numbers are 85/15, this suggests that there is something about your project that is leaving a number of potential contributors on the table. What is that? Are there changes we can make that would bring them in to the project? Would there be costs associated with doing so?

Since not all contributors are equally useful, not all changes that increase absolute numbers are good; but constantly trying to identify under-tapped potential contributors and figure out if they can be brought in in a useful way is a vital exercise. For a fairly mature project like wikipedia(everybody knows about them, they have more pagerank than god, ignorance is unlikely to be the reason behind most non-contributors), focusing on anomalies in your contributor statistics is a good way of identifying potential issues that might be standing in the way of your growth.

For J Random OSS project, it is easy(and often correct) to just say "obscurity is the problem" and go from there; but wikipedia is about as far from obscure as any entity without a 500million TV advertising budget can be. If they want new blood, their analysis will have to be more subtle...

Re:Why is this a problem?

[kdemetter]

I actually wonder how they can know the sex of all the contributors. I don't recall having to fill this in , and i just looked at my preferences , i don't see it there.

So how can do they know this 13% ? If they did a poll , that may only mean women are less likely to fill in polls.

Personally , if more women want to join wikipedia , they are welcome , if they don't want to , we should respect that too.

The idea that you need to change wikipedia , so it attracts more women, implies that you do not respect women enough to allow them to make up there own mind about whether to join or not ( as you already assume that they won't like it, before they had a chance to voice their opinion ).

Re:Why is this a problem?

[yndrd1984]

Wikipedia thinks having diverse contributors helps develop well-written, unbiased comprehensive treatments on various subjects. In this case, the argument goes, topics of typically male interest tend to receive more attention from the larger male contributor base, whereas topics of typical female interest receive less.

Which would be a good reason to recruit women, but I rarely see campaigns to add the views of senior citizens, Mennonites, or third-world people to most websites. Because of that, I suspect that their motivation has more to do with bowing to social pressure and a desire to look good than to actually add diverse viewpoints.

Re:Why is this a problem?

[causality]

The idea that you need to change wikipedia , so it attracts more women, implies that you do not respect women enough to allow them to make up there [sic] own mind about whether to join or not ( as you already assume that they won't like it, before they had a chance to voice their opinion ).

The message it sends is that women are not self-determined and able to decide for themselves, but rather, are some kind of commodity to be traded or prize to be won. For some reason this is celebrated with lofty talk about diversity and such... I don't understand why so few see it as the insult that it really is. It can be phrased as "we know what you women want even better than you do and clearly your failure to recognize that is why our percentage of women is so low."

Garden-variety arrogance is obviously condescending and is intended to be. The refined, concentrated kind is very good at disguising itself as some kind of noble impulse. The people who perpetrate it are not really liars. They're true believers because they don't see the hypocrisy of their position. It doesn't help that so many naive people thoughtlessly give automatic support to anything that sounds like it has good intentions.

Now if there are women who make good contributions to Wikipedia who are getting shunned for no reason except that they are women, by all means this needs to be stopped. There's no good reason to do that to anyone who follows the rules and makes useful contributions. But once that's accomplished, stop telling people what they should want to do and how many of them should want to do it, especially on the basis of some group identity.

Is it just me?

[sixthousand]

Or is imposed diversity actually more sexist than a natural gender imbalance?

Re:3 Suspects

[vadim_t]

Actually, there's no longer a page per Pokemon and that's precisely part of what's wrong with it. A lot of stuff got trimmed by people under the weird delusion that it somehow will get Wikipedia to be a "Real Encyclopedia". But it will never be one due to the way it's made. And in doing so they removed a lot of valuable stuff that wasn't present in any paper encyclopedia, which was precisely what made it so awesome to me.

I like the idea of compiling all of mankind's knowledge about everything much better. Including Pokemon, though I don't really care for it.

Re:3 Suspects

[Shikaku]

women are notoriously more sane than men

[citation needed]

Re:Does it matter

[crath]

I am a Wikipedia (WP) contributor. The biggest problem I have observed with WP contributions is that there is a hard core of WP members who call themselves editors and who's primary contribution to WP is to delete contributions that do not conform to their WP code of contribution. These wikideletionists / wikipolice discourage newcomers instead of coaching and encouraging them.

One page I monitor was recently updated by a new contributor; but, because the newcomer hadn't provided any attribution for the new information one of the wikipolice reverted the edit with a comment that no attribution had been provided -- instead of simply sending the newcomer a message pointing out that the attribution was necessary. The newcomer didn't return to resubmit their info.; they simply gave up and went away... another potential contributor was alienated.

Bad WP behaviour is tolerated by WP leadership. This is very sad. Even more discouraging is that the leadership has identified a lack of women contributors as an issue, when the real problem is the bad behaviour of a small minority.

As a woman, may I just say this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am one of the (relatively) small number of women in the IT industry who regularly reads Slashdot. However, as with Wikipedia, I rarely contribute. Is that part of my nature? I am not sure. But I do not feel compelled to contribute, unless I am riled, as now.

There is nothing stopping me from contributing, least of all my sex. I am fully aware that most of the contributors are men, but I like men, mostly, and that doesn't bother me.

Now, the article as I understood it seemed to imply that some special measures needed to be taken to boost the numbers of women contributors. This is a form of reverse discrimination, and I have a real problem with that. I have suffered as a woman from the fallout of badly handled attempts at "affirmative action". The only system that works is a meritocracy. Any time you make special exceptions, in the end, you create injustice and unintended consequences.

The article discussed some of what we were "missing out on" by not being more "inclusive" of women contributors - apparently we don't have enough gender/political diatribes and excrutiating feminist biographies. Please, spare me the navel-gazing "Women's Studies" tripe. I read that stuff as a young woman struggling to make it in a man's world as a software engineer. Up to a point, it can be empowering. Beyond that point and it's poison. The worst of it encourages an impractical sense of natural entitlement, based on specious, gender-specific propoganda. It often leaves women socially isolated, embittered and unemployable, unable to function in an imperfect world.

Most times, when I see an organization like Wikipedia suddenly bent double in self-reproach that they are not "doing enough for women" it often comes down to a small number of very vocal feminist activists targeting that organization for very specific political purposes. Wikipedia has a lot of influence on the Internet. If you write an article defining "rape" in Wikipedia, no matter how crazy it is, that definition will appear in the first page of results in Google Search every time. So it's just a good PR strategy to try and bludgeon your way into Wikipedia if you can. You have to admire the chutzpah.

That's what I suspect this is really all about.

Wikipedia needs to be very careful here - in the interests of science and objectivity, Wikipedia needs to preserve it's culture of meritocracy, flawed though it may be. To potentially create a clique of writers who cannot be criticized or disciplined because it's "too politically sensitive" is a recipe for disaster. It would not be long before that small group ended up vetting the entire Wikipedia on the basis of feminist orthodoxy. At that point, you might as well just surrender.

The idea that "women" are being excluded from Wikipedia is nonsense. The idea that "women" need special allowances made because we are somehow "not capable" of making it in the male-dominated culture of Wikipedia is both absurd and highly insulting. Be very clear, these women do not represent all "women". They do not represent me. They do not represent the majority of the women I know. But then the only women I tend to hang out with are strong, assertive, feminine IT professionals like the women I work with every day. They, we, have no need of any phony "help", thanks very much for nothing.

Wikipedia will lose its reputation as a source of impartial knowledge if it succombs to this pressure. Don't fall for it Jim.