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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.'"
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?
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.
For being so fundamentally flawed, the product is quite remarkable, don't you think?
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.
This wp:article is wp:written in a wp:opinionated style, and contains wp:rhetorical questions. It should be wp:re:wp:wriwp:ttwp:en.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
women are notoriously more sane than men
[citation needed]
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.
Nah, there's a lot of stuff that could be there but isn't. Go check any anime related wiki and compare with the Wikipedia version. With anything but main characters, the difference gets more dramatic.
Now that might seem like a silly subject, and it is a silly subject. But there's a lot of that stuff migrating to other wikis. And while stuff like that isn't as important as say, WWII, my lunch conversations are more likely to include the Ginyu Force (wikipedia version), than Josef Mengele.
The reason for the difference isn't that the article would be empty, or that it's badly written. Apparently it's that somebody got upset that the article on Pikachu got longer than whatever subject they care about, and the solution to that is removing perfectly well written content from the disliked page, instead of finding something to add to the one they care about. I find that quite bizarre.
Just sayin'.
~Idarubicin
I don't know about you but women get into worst fights than guys do. Women are far better at backstabbing people and jealous rages than men are.
Go spend a day listening to the teachers at a day care and decide if you would rather fight men or women.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
There are many things where men aren't expected and aren't exactly welcome.
And lord have mercy on any transsexual that gets clocked in one of those places. Females are far more sexist and closed-minded than any male I know.
Let me share my experience with both genders when caught as the other gender in a place I shouldn't be as that gender.
There's a reason I use the men's bathroom at bars, even if I'm passing. It's just not worth the drama to use the bathroom of the gender I'm presenting as.
A guy who sees someone apparently female in the men's room is sometimes surprised or shocked. Sometimes the man will become angry, especially if he's older. But yet, at the end of the day, I have not had a single serious problem with being apparently female, even fixing my hair or something, in the men's room. No police, not a ton of drama.
Now, I don't know myself what it's like to be a guy caught in the women's room, but from what I understand, it involves the police, drama, screaming, more drama, and signs that get posted at clubs saying that "crossdressers" must use the men's room. Then you have to show your papers and make sure you always have that letter from the psychologist that says you may use the women's room. Even though that really carries no legal weight and you're still getting your ass escorted out of the bar anyway.
No, females are not the under-privileged sex anymore, if they ever were.
I rarely... actually, NEVER hear about that.
How many guys do you know who want to be in on a baby shower?
Why do we have to keep acting as if they are?
Because nobody understands exactly how men and women are different. It's frustrating trying to relate to a society that believes men and women are different, but in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons.
Once people learn to be as indifferent to a starving woman with 3 starving kids as a man who's failed to provide his family with food, once people learn that those two situations are the same thing, then we might get some true gender equality going on.
Women should not need to be coddled little children. Men and women are different, but women are certainly not weak. They do not need to be coddled. There aren't enough women contributing to wikipedia? What the hell is a man going to do about that? Anything a man does is, by definition, a man contributing to the project. He can't force women to participate.
Look into the drama surrounding a transsexual in an abusive relationship who tries to get into a battered women's shelter, and the truth shall set ye free.
It's a chauvinism designed to keep women irresponsible little children. The worst part is that, for the most part, its women who are propagating it. Women want to be able to walk through the door to the male side, but they don't want to let anyone in from the other side.
A woman just has to sit back and let her body just do its animal functions, because there will always be a man to rush in and save her whether personally or by proxy of government assistance. There will always be someone to feel sorry for her. A woman has no need for something like wikipedia. Wikipedia has man-knowledge, things that men write down so the next generation can build upon it. Woman-knowledge, on the other hand, is always about transient, animal things, like their period or their pregnancy, things they feel in the moment. Woman-knowledge is always renewed, but yet stagnant. Woman-knowledge is not knowledge for building and improving, like man-knowledge is.
But hey, if you had that deal, would you want to give it up?
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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
The problem with Wikipedia in respect to 1990 is actually fairly clear; to most Wikipedians, "if it's not on the web it doesn't exist." Their faulty, backwards "reliable sources" sections have left them ignoring, or sometimes destroying, records painstakingly crafted on the history of various industries in which much of the documentation is not found in newspapers, but in archives like USENet and inter-BBS communication.
Here's a great example of where wikipedia screwed up in covering and handling the topic of content management systems.
Or where obvious POV-pushing is not just tolerated by Wikipedia, but actively supported by Wikipedia insiders: Tellingly, it was later revealed that one of the Wikipedia editors who led the attack is actually an employee of Electronic Intifada.
And then there's what they do to actual researchers who try to contribute.
Understand the problem yet?
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.
How many people actually pay for an encyclopedia of any kind from any source?
Before the 90's it was very common for middle class parents to spend a month's wages on a set of encyclopedia (at least it was here in Oz).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
after all, women are notoriously more sane than men,
True. It's funny how nobody rants about "closing the gender gap" in prisons or mental hospitals, where men far outnumber women.
Men out number women in most extremes, high or low, but only one end is view as some injustice of society that can be somehow forcibly closed.
Lets have some affirmative action to get more women in prison shall we? The imbalance obviously proves that lots of female criminals are going unpunished, since genders are equal, by force of moral law.
And out comes the misandrists. No, women are NOT notoriously more sane than men. It's just that any time it is pointed out that a common behavior by women is insane, the person pointing it out is called a misogynist, and women's misandry is openly accepted and encouraged in our society. There simply isn't that much difference between men and women. The biggest difference is that here in the first world, one group spends their life knowing that no matter how bad things get, there is always someone that will pay your way if you sleep with them. This knowledge that is instilled from a very young age, brings about a very different set of behaviors than what you see in people who are taught from a very young age that in the end, they will have to do for themselves.
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.