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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.'"
Futher, "adopting openness means being 'open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,'" also seems to be non-intuitive. I wonder what evidence drew those conclusions. If it was a Wikipedia article, at least I could follow the citation.
A bonus disagree comes from
I don't think that's ironic at all. 85% of experts wear black socks, ironically 85% of the population also wears black socks.
Being "open" also means being open to people who might not want to participate. What difference does it make?
Or is imposed diversity actually more sexist than a natural gender imbalance?
Not to be sexist, but does it really matter? Is there some reason that having a larger percentage of women contributors would make Wikipedia a better place? If not, there's no reason to go out of the way to increase the contributions from women, especially if it degrades the quality of Wikipedia in the process.
If it's a problem of members being sexist or misogynistic, take steps to fix that. Trying to force some quota probably isn't the best solution to this problem, if it even is a problem.
I don't see that trying to bump the percentage, in itself, would be wildly useful to the project(trying to bump the absolute numbers, certainly; but the ratio, less obviously)...
However, efforts to modify the current situation might well have broader benefits. Criticism of wikipedia(aside from that of sniffy old media types, which is rarely all that interesting) largely focuses on the perception, sometimes the reality, that swaths of it tend to fall under the most obsessive rules-lawyering assholes with sufficiently long attention spans. On the plus side, these types are something of a bulwark against pure chaos and obvious troll-edits. On the minus side, as anybody who has ever played a tabletop RPG with an obsessive, rules-lawyering asshole can attest, such people are hell to work with and can crush the enthusiasm and patience of virtually anybody by sheer force of persistent pedantry.
If they want more female contributors, they'll have to do something about that. If successful, they will probably end up with more contributors across the board.
Wikipedia is full of jerks obsessed with rules, with dominance and penis waving.
Women see this and take off, because it's jut not appealing to most of them. So do a lot of men. What's left is the aggressive types who further escalate the problem every step of the way.
Oddly it's much like Congress.
I guess the intention was to inform people about the wikipedia gender gap by demonstrating how it comes into being: The woman of considerable expertise gives a polite, considered, and conservatively stated opinion-- while the man of no particular qualification gives an exaggerated and speculative answer... and the reporter responds be deemphasizing the woman's qualifications, ignoring her position, and running with whichever view is most aggressively promoted or fitting his preconceived notions. Kinda like how Wikipedia works. Women are systematically excluded not because they're women, but because the entire process promotes assholes and women are flaming assholes a little less often.
Easy way to get women to correct more Wikipedia articles: change the template so that every article starts out with "Your husband says that..."
I've always found computers, coding and gaming to be a social experience, and indeed any online community is exactly that, a social group. I pretty much got into computers when I found other kids at school who were into them also. Any partiuclar hobby or career may have it's clique, and such social groups tend to recruit new members as they grow.
This may explain gender imbalance, once the social group becomes predominantly one sex or even one demographic, it makes it harder for the other to enter.
So the solution is... well I don't know, but knowing the above, that gives some idea on how to make change? Get high profile women involved, who can encourage others?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It's not as if women are doing nothing while being blocked from doing things that are more open to men. Women are doing whatever it is women do and most of the time, it's whatever they WANT to do. It just so happens that what women want to do is often different from that which men want to do. Why is that wrong?
Equal participation and equal access are not the same. There is already equal access. My internet connection doesn't check for a penis before letting me route traffic. So what's the REAL issue here? What's the real goal?
There are many things where men aren't expected and aren't exactly welcome. I rarely... actually, NEVER hear about that. Women are not the "under-privileged sex." Why do we have to keep acting as if they are?
I was a teacher for a while, while my daughter was in an all-women college. The fact is that women find group participation harder than men. We saw it in the classroom all the time. Teachers had to gently restrain over-eager boys while calmly encouraging the girls to speak up. But surveys at the end of the term ALWAYS showed that both the boys and girls said they "got more out of" classes that had mixed gender participation. Why would the wikipedia environment be any different?
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Just sayin'.
~Idarubicin
Okay, so we have an organization that invites everyone to join in and write stuff. There is no discrimination, as long as you follow the guidelines which are perfectly reasonable for keeping Wikipedia a useful and informative source of information. Years pass. Then some analyst comes along and says there aren't enough women contributors at Wikipedia... Well, it isn't like there was a sign that said 'no girls allowed.' There was nothing barring women from joining the community at all, except possibly their own personal decisions not to.
Wikipedia is 'equal opportunity' in just about every sense of the term. If they start incentivising or somehow attempting to skew the population of contributors to get more women, they become LESS so, not more. This is like the manager of a McDonalds seeing he only has white employees so he posts a sign that says "Black help wanted." It's completely batshit crazy. Maybe women who use the site just don't want to become contributors; maybe the majority of users of the site are men; maybe people in general don't know how to become contributors (which is at least somewhat more of a legitimate issue).
There could be any number of reasons for the shortage of female contributors, but as long as there are no restrictions on women joining and putting up their information I don't see this as any problem. I'd be saying the exact same thing if they said only 13% of the wikipedia contributors are men, or black, or jewish, or whatever denomination. It really doesn't matter when they haven't prevented anyone from joining.
Women dominate in certain fields of endeavor and it is generally accepted that the female brain is wired for social interaction. Men routinely dominate Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions. Perhaps there is something in the wiring of the male brain that favors the accumulation of arcane bits of knowledge. If so, then forcing gender balance in Wkipedia makes about as much sense as forcing gender balance in the LaLeche League.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
But not by Wikipedia, since anyone can contribute.
No, the problem is that WOMEN discriminate against Wikipedia, deciding that they have more important things to do with their time.
So women must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into becoming Wikipedia contributors. This sounds like the perfect opportunity for the FCC to force women to spend more of their time in this way. I suggest they call it "Sex Neutrality".
... is that 85% of the allegedly female 13% are also male too.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Here: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/01/guys-create-wikipedia-for-free-thats.html
Why artificially increasing number of women, gays, minors anywhere is good? What equality or fairness does this bring? Why are you treating them like disabled?
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.
Anyone think it was ironic that I was going to read this to my wife, while she was on her computer finishing the month-end reporting for our business (just before she went downstairs to get some housework done)?
If you think about it for a second, perhaps you'll see why more men than women post on Wikipedia.
-Styopa