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Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia
Andreas Kolbe writes Wikipedia is well known to have a very large gender imbalance, with survey-based estimates of women contributors ranging from 8.5% to around 16%. This is a more extreme gender imbalance than even that of Reddit, the most male-dominated major social media platform, and it has a palpable effect on Wikipedia content. Moreover, Wikipedia editor survey data indicate that only 1 in 50 respondents is a mother – a good proportion of female contributors are in fact minors, with women in their twenties less likely to contribute to Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless. Wikipedia's demographic pattern stands in marked contrast to female-dominated social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, where women aged 18 to 34 are particularly strongly represented. It indicates that it isn't lack of time or family commitments that keep women from contributing to Wikipedia – women simply find other sites more attractive. Wikipedia's user interface and its culture of anonymity may be among the factors leading women to spend their online time elsewhere.
They are too busy complaining about the gender gap.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Well the genders are identical so it must be some social factor that the patriarchy is responsible for creating.
Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless
Clearly the solution is to round up these capitalist, bourgeois women and force them to edit Wikipedia. FOR THE GOOD OF THE MOTHERLAND.
Protip, chucklefucks - men and women are different, and in a free society, you're not going to get equal representation of genders, sexual orientations, religions, races, et cetera. People. Like. Different. Things.
And that's a-o-fucking-kay.
Foul language because I'm tired of feel-good quota idiocy.
Yes i am aware of the irony of posting this AC. Though i prefer to think it makes my point.
Any time someone attacks anonymity, ask what they stand to gain by it. Ask what the platform that is promoting their article or post has to gain by it.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html
Read this, it'll open your eyes.
Lets file a deletion request for that patriarchistic imperialistic Wikipedia!
Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless.
Why must everything be gender balanced? Why not let women do what they want instead of trying to force them in to places that aren't necessarily their thing?
If women are actors instead of objects, they can make their own damn choices and do what they want to do without requiring others to try to sweeten the deal specifically for them to try to entice them.
Only the most lawful stupid contribute to Wikipedia now.
Women more interested in inane social bullshit than actually learning about world history, politics, technology, industry, the arts and sciences?
Color me shocked!
Its not bias against women. its women choosing not to participate. End of argument.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Men in general seem to have less tolerance for what they perceive as error and a greater willingness to fight to correct error.
That's not the say that men are more often correct than are women. They just seem more eager to do battle, even if it is from behind a keyboard.
Anyone that's been involved in an edit war of wikipedia knows that the winner is often isn't the one with the best grasp of the facts, but it's the one least willing to give up the fight.
If you can't post a selfie or complain about your first world problems then contributing to Wikipedia really isn't worth the effort.
Perhaps because men are very aligned to compartmentalizing everything in little boxes and wikipedia suits this well. We like a little box for everything, it's in the male nature to do this. Wikipedia is great for looking at specific topic nuggets. I have read that women tend not to do this and flow between topics more easily rather than get hung up on single areas of interest.
It is pretty easy to date the why. In 2006 there was a thing called the Userbox wars. There isn't a good page on wikipedia about this. Prior to 2006 Wikipedia user pages were sort of like myspace pages for wikipedia editors. They had lots of personal information and people chatted. Jimmy Wales wanted userspace to be about the encyclopedia. At the same time he didn't want mass deletions. There were mass deletions and the this wasn't easily reversed. The tone changed. This was one of the big steps towards the deletionists winning control of Wikipedia entirely. But if you want to know when the gender's changed this was a crucial moment.
Of course the deletionists winning even more battles probably didn't help
Links:
A few statements on Userboxes but not enough to understand what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What "deletionists" are and what Wikipedia was like before them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Gee, I hope there's an equally alarmist campaign seeking to rectify the inexcusable gender balance on Pinterest! What a disgrace!
Web traffic is voluntary. Let's focus our collective ire on things that matter--like gender bias in employment and research.
Women (mothers) provide the housing, rather, basements, where the majority of male contributors live.
We need more women to work on our encyclopedia because VAGINA!
I am a guy but the reason why there are less women on reddit is that women don't really obsess over telling their opinions about things to other people across the globe.
For the same reason intelligence men have no time for wikipedia. The whole system is rigged. Intelligent discussion is suppressed. Power-mad idiots rule, etc. There is no point participating.
There are too many NT people trying to via for position on there. It's just like other "common-folk" sites where intelligence is a hindrance and social ability (aka lying) is rule.
also women make up a larger chunk of gamers than men, but guess what? they don't play the same games as men, mostly PC and console games like Half Life, Halo, Silent Hill, shit like that. while men play real games, women, apparently are playing retarded games like what they find on Facebook or are tricked into getting from ads on Facebook/the like. they also play a ton of really crappy cellphone games, all of which are scams and basically don't amount to shit.
women: they avoid doing cool things, true techy things, are manipulateable, uneducated bitches who don't understand science, and are socialized bimbo's who open their legs on command. men do the real work, are the true geeks, and continue to make the best accomplishments and continue to be interested in the hottest things, while women continue to socialize and get used by men and would rather show off their bodies. they also sleep with men reviewers for positive reviews on their shitty games while making up stupid stories about sexism in the video game industry.
all the best tech sites continue to be viewed almost exclusively by men. while women get hooked on advertisements and commercial services somehow, as if some huge force has set out to steal all our women because they're more profitable to target (and dumber, because men don't fall for the same tricks).
Because using neutral point of view is not the job of women
Kotaku and Zoe Quinn Accused of Exchanging Positive Press for Sex..
Facts?
Nah, I'd much rather post junk about blending fruit to create juice and how immunisation is evil.
Try having a fact-based discussion with a woman and see where it gets you.
On second thought, that doesn't work with men either . . .
I can vouch for you, +1.
I just realized that what Zoe Quinn was actually doing is prostitution. She is selling her body and sex for positive reviews of her games and also favors and positive press about her and her career, which ends up being turned into cash later once her games and ideas sells.
Really she should be tried for prostitution because she is receiving money indirectly and directly by having sex with powerful people in the gaming industry, all while cheating on her boyfriend.
If the laws don't consider this prostitution they should because my guess is she wouldn't be boning these big wigs at all if it weren't for the profit motive.
Women seem to have less tolerance for online bullshit than men do. It's extremely rare to find online flame wars between women for example. That's not to say women don't dwell in pointless shit and arguments, they just seem to prefer to do it in the flesh and not on a computer. Dealing with the Wikipedia hierarchy is mostly an exercise in futility and women have the uncanny ability to realize this early on whereas men are more prepared to do battle, pointlessly.
There are no "likes" for Wikipedia edits, unlike Pinterest or Facebook posts.
Women are social creatures and require a feedback loop to keep contributing. Perhaps if we applied gamification to Wikipedia we might get a more balanced participation as the participants would receive some feedback (positive acknowledgements, achievements, whatever) to keep them motivated to contribute.
We don't ask if a man is a father before deciding if his views are valid, and we shouldn't assume that a woman is less of a woman if she's never given birth.
I know I won't. I'm a 34 year-old (as of today!) female, and I stopped contributing to Wikipedia after the asshole deletionists there deleted nineteen of my articles despite the fact that they had an average of seven citations each. Their policy is to require three citations, but the men that run that site are so hateful and hate information so much that they deleted every single one of my articles and sent a male stripper to my home with the message that they wanted to murder me and the rest of my family. That was the last time I contributed to that cesspool. They are horrible. There is no question as to why that shithole of a site contains so little information and as to why so few other women contribute. They hate us, and as they said multiple times, they want us to die.
Last I checked Wikipedia was about facts and truth and gender has nothing to do with either. Cue sexist ranting about how 2+2 doesn't equal 4 if you have a vagina.
From the front page:
We exist to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with its structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, and general nonsense that issues forth from one of the world’s most frequently visited websites, the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Here come the holy knights of the true truth....
They should publish a wikipedia calendar with a naked wikipedia contributor on each page :-)
It's not like there is anyone out there telling women that they cannot contribute to Wikipedia or Open Source projects or even Redis. If you want to participate, then just DO it already.
And so, I find the attempts to "attract women" just so we can continue to hide our heads in the sand about the natural skew of participation due to NO ONE'S FAULT to be a wash.
I welcome women, of course, but don't believe in these rather condescending "outreach" programs. They always fail because they all are about ignoring the hard realities of human nature.
That unlike men, women are not altruistic.
And that is why no one will ever find females at writing Wikipedia articles.
Haaa Haaa Haaa.
How the percentages look like for normal, old-school encyclopedias? I know that for example in case of school textbooks gender ratio might be even skewed towards woman (at least in my country) - which is probably a side effect of majority of teachers being woman (83%). But encyclopedias? I cannot find any data on data - but looking at chief editors of Brittanica, all of them were man...
I think that problem lies somewhere before age of 25. At some point during early education, there is some kind of bias/peer pressure/whatever which makes woman being interested in other things. Putting Hello Kitty pictures in background of wikipedia is not going to help afterwards ;)
They're too busy pinning things to boards or something on Pintrest to write and edit things on Wikipedia. Just ask your wife/girlfriend/sister/daughter what sites she uses online. I promise facebook and pintrest are at the top of those lists.
I asked my wife why she never uses wikipedia. She said it's because she already knows everything.
Who was looking into why women don't read the newspaper, and found the reason.
"I am like the Red Queen from "Alice in Wonderland," forever running faster and getting nowhere. Entire hours evaporate while I'm doing stuff that needs to get done, but once I'm done, I can't tell you what it was I did or why it seemed so important. At work, I arrange carpools to band practice and ballet. At home, I write e-mails, and do interviews and research for work. "Just a sec," I hear my daughter mimicking me as she mothers her dolls. "Gimme a minute." She just stuck a yellow sticky note on my forehead to tear me away from writing this story, at 9:35 p.m., to remind me I'm late to come read Harry Potter for story time. Most days, I feel so overwhelmed that I barely have time to breathe.
John Robinson says I have 30 hours of leisure time every week.
Blame him for this story."
Also taken from the article:
"Robinson is a 74-year-old sociologist at the University of Maryland. Widely known as the father of time-use studies in the United States, he codes, analyzes and makes pronouncements about how people spend their precious time on Earth."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/11/AR2010011101999.html
I just can't say it any better than she does.
Stop stalking women and harassing them about how many are in IT or in Wikipedia or in Whogivesafuck.
Buggoff!
Table-ized A.I.
Who cares why women chose not to participate on wikipedia. Let them make their own choice. Frking Communists.
How about not asking about gender on account registration and assigning a random username?
It'll make it hard to claim that Wikipedia treats females differently.
Hi there. 21/F who has contributed to Wikipedia in various ways since high school. I know there's no way to believe that, and the proof of burden relies on me, but I'll just have to ask for your benefit of the doubt.
The gender gap question is something that always used to pop into my mind while in high school, a time when the media wasn't too concerned about reporting on gender drama and the internet. Now that I'm older, and I've settled the difference within myself and everyone around me, it seems to be the fetishized topic of every formerly apathetic or neutral website I go to.
I have settled on the fact that it is a combination of mostly nature with a little nurture added in that produces this gap in demography. I think males are more naturally inclined to want to collect facts, devote themselves slavishly to organizing things and work without human interference. That is to say, the quite low incidence of these common traits ['nerdyness'] is lower in females than it is in males, but it's still uncommon across the board.
This is where the nurture part comes in. Contemporarly American culture seems to be absent of the cultural tropes and stereotypes of a bookwormish, nerdy female -- the kind that would be perfect devoting their time to Wikipedia. I know the cultural trope exists in other cultures like Japan [Sheska from FMA:B, or Princess Jellyfish even? anyone?] in stronger form, and that leads me to think that the already small number of female nerds would be disinclined to practice their dominant mental attribute because they don't see it emulated anywhere around.
This is also why you'll hear a lot of ranting and raving about women being 40-60% of the gaming population, but events like EVO and Awesome Games Done Quick are still shining sausagefests. Or why women technically use computers as much as men, but FOSS projects are still entirely wholly staffed by males. Few men and even fewer women are inclined to do repetitive, emotionless tasks, and those fewer women who might be inclined to do so are sometimes or usually driven out by either toxic male culture or toxic female culture.
I dunno. I only got shit for being 'nerdy', playing video games, and loving computers by other women. It's a self-perpetuating culture, and amongst females, the tendency is to seek validation and conformity as opposed to 'going your own way' -- despite what individualist American culture tells us.
With all the petty bickering, cliques, backstabbing, sucking up by wanna be admins, and multiple layers of bureaucratic rules that encourage passive aggressive behavior, I would have believed the opposite. I guess it is dominated by men who enjoy acting like teenage girls on Tumblr.
Women typically choose not to work at places with rampant sexual harassment, too. Does that mean there's no problem with sexual harassment?
There are no "likes" for Wikipedia edits, unlike Pinterest or Facebook posts.
Women are social creatures and require a feedback loop to keep contributing.
So pretty much the same reason that in youtube videos done by men the camera is pointed at the thing the speaker is talking about whereas in youtube videos done by women the camera is pointed at the woman's face.
Men's natural thought process tends toward "this this this" whereas with women it's "me me me".
If you want gender balance then to be able to post a certain amount of text on Wikipedia you should have to post a certain number of Pintetest photos. And in order to post a certain number of Pinterest photos you should have to write a certain amount on Wikipedia. The amounts could be tuned to give a gender balance on both. But does anyone really think that having a forced gender balance would improve either?
This is the case with the Internet Movie Database IMDB.com
as well.
If you look across various movie and TV show scores
one see's a typical 5 to 1 ratio biased to males.
Overall 4 to 10 ratio or more depending on material. SOmething
like Game of Thrones is 4 to 1 male to female participation
in rating game which is about as even as it gets on IMDB.
I've pondered the reason why for years.
Not having a huge pool of females to probe for reasons as to why this is, I toss it to that they have more important things to do.
Or maybe they are just being prissy.
I belong to a large 'meta' gaming guild with 1000's of active older gamers mostly involved with MMO type games over the years, and there too, the vast majority of members are male.
Something between the lines jumps out and bites your arm off. Soltan Gris / London
It would be interesting to get an idea what the effect is.
If they much rather waste their time "socializing" on Facebook, that doing something productive, why do want them on Wikipedia in the first place? What does "make Wikipedia more attractive to women" even mean? Seriously, I would like to hear an answer to that question without a tirade of female sterotypisation that we can see in the comments here.
Most of the science articles seem accurate, so in that regard, they must be doing something right.
So women behave like they have ADHD and can't concentrate on a single narrow topic long enough actually to write an article about it?
What the fuck are you trying to say? It's an encyclopedia not a social gathering. And apart from that, most of the 'talk' on the talk pages has named authors.
Wikipedia may have problems but Wikipedia not being Facebook is not one of them.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
As a teacher with 35 years under his belt, I posit that men and women are different. In my - admittedly limited and anecdotal, and restricted to younger that 18yrs - experience there is a different communication mindset with girls compared to boys (women compared to men?) . I constantly see girls in groups of 8 or so with often one queen bee, and lots of conversation, whereas boys are generally in smaller groups and are quite happy to insult each other, throw a punch and grunt. Facebook emulates what I see in the yard with girls, Wiki-whatever emulates what I see in the yard with boys. Shoot me down if you feel the need to do so.
you should be some special kind of stupid to say this.
You mean, FB and Pinterest are not boxes ?
are you even fo reals ?
I am FeralOink on WP (shhhhhhhhhh ;o) I have Commons open on my adjacent browser tab right now!
I haven't been run off when editing articles about most topics of interest to me. This is even true for controversial articles e.g. Edward Snowden, AIG, Reptilians, Freedom Fries, cryptocurrency, Ambassador Chris Stevens, David E. Shaw, Codex Alimentarius, MongoDB and brassiere. Some articles are emotionally sensitive to other editors, e.g. Murray Rothbard, Ven currency, so I avoid them. It is easy to discern the situation. I have even made some horrific mistakes, deleting a huge chunk of Gen. Ghaddaffi's article was the worst, yet I was amazed that once I explained and apologized (I had also broken a genuine WP rule), the regulars on the article were very understanding. The only incidents of truly rude encounters and massive reverts of hours of my work has been for female-relevant articles. Both pertained to cunnilingus. I am still seething with irritation at the use of crappy references (Cengage Learning books instead of CDC or reputable websites), bare links, sloppy Google books citation without templates and bizarrely tangential content. Also... well, enough.
Wikipedia does omit a lot due to male PoV, even if unintentional. Here's an example. John Nash's sister wasn't mentioned at all in his bio, and his pre-university education was incorrectly modernized. Also, his wife is a graduate of MIT, a physics major in the class of 1956 or so. That's when Nash met her. His bio didn't mention that, but instead dwelt on her father "being of Argentine extraction"!
There are lots of little cliques that I sense, infer, and camaraderie. It would be great to be a part of that.
tempus fugit
Selfiedia
If you want women to participate the easiest way is for women to randomly win shoes. Word would quickly get around and female participation would sky rocket.
It's an outrage! Something must be done!
Maybe women have better things to do with their time than having edit wars all day for free?
Womens are famous as Google, because they know everything. since they have entire knowledge about everything. and wikipedia is for getting knowledge.
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Seriously who gives a flying fuck. What does it really matter? Are you so far up the communists' asshole that you think everything on this planet is going to be completely 100% representative of the population of the planet?
You must be a brave or a stupid man. I would not eat anything prepared by somebody I treat like that. (Not that I treat anybody like that...)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Gender imbalance is not Wikipedia's only problem. The real problem is that the vast majority of the religious leaders in the Wikipedia caliphate - you know - the ones who dictate all of the content so that it meets Wikipedia's "rules," are openly misogynistic, hostile, and condescending towards women.
It's like the "good 'ole boys'" clubs in the old south where women were property rather than people, kinda like the Muslim world is today.
This is a problem that is probably beyond repair as anti-feminism is too deeply entrenched in Wikipedia's corporate culture.
We're all the same, aren't we? No differences between men and women I've been told...
Absolute truth. Women as a group tend to be more emotionally mature, and apt to avoid senseless conflict.
I've been on the board of a non-profit which whose members are predominately women, usually middle aged women. I also run a company where about 3/4 of the employees are women. Furthermore I grew up in a household where I was the only male most of the time. I can assure you that women are as a group absolutely not more (or less) emotionally mature than men and if anything women are more likely to engage in senseless conflict. HOW they fight is very different. More passive-aggressive, backbiting, alliance building, etc. It's like watching some crappy reality vote-the-other-guy-off-the-island show. In some ways women's conflict tactics are even nastier than the ones men typically employ. Guys might actually try to beat the crap out of each other (physically or verbally) but women will try to exile each other from social groups.
Anyone who thinks women's average level of maturity is higher than men's has either been watching too many sitcoms or never been around actual women for any meaningful period of time. Women tend to react to conflict differently but that doesn't mean they are any more mature about it. Men are no better but they aren't any worse either.
I think it's true that women enjoy working as part of a team, where there is a feedback loop. One area where women do disproportionately well in Wikipedia, I think, relative to their numbers, is the Featured Articles process which brings articles up to Wikipedia's highest quality standard (there are a few thousand such articles, identified by a gold star). This is usually constructive team work, and women do enjoy it. You also get teams of two or three women collaborating to bring an article up to FA standard, and the results of such collaborations can be outstanding. This is probably the sort of thing Wikipedia needs to encourage more.
I don't agree that women's thought process is "me me me" vs. men's "this this this". If you look at Pinterest for example, it's all "this this this". What is true is that women do enjoy a real social component to the work, rather than just an imagined one.
I have edited Wikipedia. Recently I found an error on a mathematical web page. I fixed it, explained the error in the logs, and it stayed fixed. No problems
Males are also just 30% of the wikipedia contributors. The rest are mindless bots that revert and delete randomly.
It is rumoured that the german wikipedia consists of up to 95% deletion-bots.
I think this is true, but then the problem is that Wikipedia offers insufficient opportunities for women to engage in their preferred mode of operation. There are some such opportunities, of course, and women are indeed well represented there: Wikipedia's Featured Article process, for example, was for many years run by a woman (SandyGeorgia), and my impression is that women have been more active in that effort (which produces Wikipedia's "gold star" articles) than elsewhere, partly because the process of reviewing Featured Article candidates and polishing them and bringing them up to scratch is a team effort, with a joint achievement at the end of it.
How does that work? Who says, "They don't know Who I am; so I won't contribute?" Or is it the fact Others are anonymous? But Who disassociates just because of that? Why would it be a "Woman thing" since Men and Women are supposedly equal?
Should be "Why Sane People Have No Time for Wikipedia". FTFY.
That is all.
Can anyone tell me why I don't see more articles about the gender gap in elementary eduction? There is a HUGE 87% to 13% gender imbalance there that hasn't changed in decades. And yet I don't ever seem to see any articles about it anywhere. All I see are tons of articles about much smaller imbalances in the STEM fields.
Someone? Anyone?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
So they're saying women don't want to edit on Wikipedia because it isn't pretty enough and doesn't let them call attention to themselves? O_O This is going to cause a runaway reaction of feminist anger that will destroy the universe!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I think you are all overlooking the most basic reason, at least if the experts are to be believed. Women are more about communication and feelings, men are more about facts. Wikipedia is about facts, well at least it is suppose to be. Whereas Facebook and Pinterest are less facts and more communication. Again, if the experts are to be believed, it is just the way we are wired.
Men are the builders of civilization. We build cars, houses, machines, computers and social platforms. That's our interest, our nature, our purpose. That women have, for whatever reason, less interest in these pursuits is NOT the fault of men nor should it be our responsibility to drag 50% of women kicking and screaming into these pursuits just to satisfy the SJWs, social "engineers" and other assorted social malcontents. [br] [br] The women who are interested in these things are in these fields already. That's why these ratios are never 0/100. It does a great disservice to the women who have worked their way up in these fields to be surrounded by quota hires who are there solely by possession of a XX chromosome and it also does a disservice to the women pressured into pursing fields they find uninteresting solely to satisfy some other person's misguided "equality" crusade. [br] [br] Equality was achieved when women were able to enter these fields (in whatever number they chose). Equality is not served by FORCING everyone to comply with some arbitrary and fascist ratio.
Women already know everything, wtf they need Wikipedia for?
Hope is the currency of fools
Men are the ones most pressured by their careers to 'splain shit. If you can't 'splain shit, you are shit. Women aren't expected to 'splain shit.
That was rather sexist of you to assume that it was a man.
Just another day in Paradise
It's an encyclopedia.
If you're going to compare it with Facebook and Pinterest, then all you are doing is demonstrating how how ignorant you are about what it is.
Maybe it's just the nature of Wikipedia - that you're donating work. Growing up with my stay at home mom, who had no money of her own after leaving her job to have kids, but worked and volunteered all the time, it was made very clear to me how much she hated it and how much I would hate it too. So my aversion to working for free provides just enough inertia to put Wikipedia at the lowest priority.
Not true. The Wimmin in my family consult WP daily, for likely 'facts'. But they can't post because their lifegiving-lifestyle would be 'original research', and what they want is exchange of experience (and anecdote). Things like 'MumsNet' do that well; it's not a competition.
"Gender Imbalance" has, like TBBT, Apple, Microsoft and a myriad of other things, become another guaranteed Slashdot clickbait/flamewar buzz/content generator, so can either the mods stop baiting us, or we not get into it.
On-topic, I'm going to go out on a limb and say "Proof that women are statistically less foolish than men". I say statistically, because most people seem intelligent enough to remove themselves from Wikipedia editing for *ALL OF THE CONSTANTLY DISCUSSED PROBLEMS* that it's developed into. So, of the small fraction of the population that still stays there, you have the problematic people, people who refuse to give into the problematic people, and those that are a combination of the two.
So, I have no problem with believing that, of the people that fall into the categories above, women are less.
Women, as a generality, are much more concerned about garnering attention for themselves. Hence, massive selfie collections and statuses that beg their friends to ask "what's wrong?" Wikipedia is all about others. It just doesn't appeal to women, and only an egalitarian equalist (aka reality denier) would find issue with that.
I don't think gamification is the answer as women, while being social, are interested in attention. Not sure how a woman can garner attention for herself while editing an article about Uganda...especially anonymously as wikipedia handles it.
If you're a restaurant that is bleeding money because you only get 2 customers a day, the proper question isn't, "Why are both those customers men?"
The real issue is the mass exodus of expert contributors from Wikipedia. Male, female, adult, or child, people are leaving Wikipedia because of Deletionists and their committees.
Have either of you read your responses on this thread? Your back-and-forth arguing on the issue, employing various debate tactics and resorting to name-calling and other nastiness? What you're doing is representative of what men do on the internet, and a very good reason why there are little to no women here, or on Wikipedia
.
Both of you are representative of the actual problem. Have y'all ever been on Pinterest or on a women-dominated post on Facebook? There's none of this argumentative debate theatrics crap. Instead, women tend to be more social and cooperative, and when they do disagree, they tend to do so in mild terms while giving ample credence to the possibility of having been wrong. Compare this with Wikipedia or especially /., where a flame war breaks out just about every hour on various edits. Men tend to imbue their posts with the righteousness of true Alpha Male status. And then when another man challenges or rebuts, we whip out our penises and flog both our keyboards and the internet with our righteous hairy sausages of justice until the inevitable Hitler ejaculation erupts. It's no wonder women tend to shy away from Wikipedia, /., and most male-dominated job fields in Tech. They don't want to participate in being antagonistic status jockeys--and when we do stop doing so, women are able to come in and do some amazing work.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I thought it might be - well, let us say, instructive - to simply re-post some of the choicer responses to this story, all modded up to +4 or +5.
Because the "social justice warriors" tell you it must be. And if they don't get their way, they'll whine, cry, and call it rape.
Men in general seem to have less tolerance for what they perceive as error and a greater willingness to fight to correct error.
Man? Have you ever dated?? Women are the single most argumentative, must be right, cant change their minds, NEEDS AN APOLOGY EVEN WHEN PROVEN WRONG group out their.
the big problem on Wikipedia is that most edit hurt feelings, especially when you write a lengthy article about your favourite celebrity and someone come behind you and rape all your work with facts. Such senseless rigour are symptom of the patriarchy.
Wikipedia actively tries to avoid bias, including systemic bias. If the majority of the contributors are from certain countries, professions, social classes, genders, ideologies, religions, then it is probably that even unconsciously some subjects are covered with a bias or undercovered.
As an example, it could be very possible that a certain bar in Oxford has a very good article because several editors are patrons, but whole regions of Africa could be scarcely covered because no Wikipedia editor lives there.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
They should use the OMG Ponies theme!
If women are actors instead of objects
Surely that should be actresses...
Hello,
I've considered contributing to wikipedia, but why would i since some editor might decide that, for example, what i know about the Golden Nectar Plum vareity isn't "worthy" of retaining and trashing it? (Is hard drive space so expensive, REALLY?) Or that it isn't "supported by citations" (I know it from personal experience!)
Why not just take EVERYTHING people want to offer? If someone's going to bother taking the time to write it, MAYBE someone's going to want to know it. I can see putting warning labels on articles like "not supported by citations" (which is done to some extent) I can also see moderation for things like hatred, correctness, and sexual or other offensive content, but other than that? TAKE IT ALL.
I mean, *I* don't care about Justin Bieber's dog, but I bet there 100,000 people who do, so just because *I* consider it trivial and stupid doesn't mean it doesn't have value to anyone!
If Wikipedia wants more contributions, open up the culture and be more tolerant! And also perhaps adopt a slashdot-like community moderation system?
While a lot of people would like to think the reverse is true, I'm 100% convinced based on 32 years of experience that men are plain more creative, in practically any area. That doesn't mean that all men are creative, or that all women are not. Some women are definitely more creative than some men. But by and large my observation is true. Men are much more likely than women to be geeks about things and spend hours on improving small details or leaning everything about a subject. Women are only likely to do that if there's a distinct benefit to themselves or their children. Women generally do things to obtain some benefit (put something on their CV, brag to their boss etc.) and rarely for the thing itself which is what I consider the 'geeky' aspect of the way men gets interested in things. Since creativity tends to be fostered by spending a lot of time on a subject, men are far more likely to actually produce something and be creative.
So in short, women don't want to contribute to Wikipedia because the personal gains to them are small. Men do it for the fun of it, for the creative process.
People don't like this answer so they try impressively hard to explain it away with other factors -
Major Wikipedia contribution requires hacking (in the broad definition of the term, ie low-level attention to detail, exhaustive research on a narrow topic, investment in seemingly arbitrary semantic distinctions, ect.). EVERY SINGLE FIELD which has required these traits has a severe distribution bias towards men - electrical engineering, theoretical physics, early programming, actual computer hacking, ect. Even more telling, the percentages are always similar - women make up 10-20% of these fields.
I'm sorry, but it's obvious that women are simply less drawn to this type of work. There are probably evolutionary reasons behind the cognitive difference, but that's outside my expertise.
I wonder if this is really a gender thing. What is the break down of male and female contributions in the different wikipedia languages?
A "bias" is a belief that affects a decision. That there are fewer women editors on Wikipedia (Wp) is, in itself, only a fact, NOT a bias or a proof of any bias. I am a man, and yet I don't bother to contribute to Wp for many of the same reasons previously given as to why women don't contribute: I dont want to have to learn yet another markup language, just to get started. And I don't like trolls and mean people (I have my filter set on +1 here on /.). Now, these apply even though I firmly believe pedantry is entirely appropriate and necessary in the Wp context. It is entirely possible to be pedantic while remaining polite and considerate.
Now, I believe the main reason women tend to flock to FB & Pintetest is that these sites are predominantly social. So, if Wp added a much more social component, it might help. Another issue is that far fewer women currently enjoy technical things. That, too, is a fact but it is caused by dozens of social norms and biases. In order to make up for that, Wp could make editing an article as easy as editing a FB post. And dont give me that crap about how the Wp markup is easier to type than HTML. There should be a simple, WYSIWYG editor.
Finally, I think anonymity should go away, at least in the back end. If someone wants the priviledge of editing then Wp should be able to know exactly who they are. People should be required to prove who they are to register as an editor. They can enter a "handle" for the rest of the world to see, but if you are an ass, Wp will know exactly who you are and can truly ban you for life or take legal legal action if necessary. That should clear up a lot of the meanness.
This reminds me of a story a friend told me. He has two small daughters. They both had dolls and one daughter broke her doll. She started crying and was really upset and the dad asked what he should do. The daughter with a broken doll said to break her sisters doll.
If the question is why women between 18 and 34 are more attracted by facebook than by wikipedia editing, the answer is easy: facebook is fun for them, while wikipedia editing is tedious for anyone. They don't need to have a different brain: they have boobs, which automatically bring them admiring followers eager to comment on the picture of their last meal. People without boobs tend to have to work harder to be admired.
Looking through all high-rated posts, I didn't see the most obvious reason why we should be concerned:
Wikipedia is a (incomplete) knowledge base. Women have knowledge they could contribute. If no woman edits wikipedia, we are losing HALF the opportunity to increase that knowledge base.
Statistics show that women are much more likely to use poison.
Also, feminist logic immediately shows that AC is a man, as AC is obviously an asshole and only men qualify for that.
So I deduce that you are anti-feminist as you are not following feminist logic.
That said, I am anti-idiot myself.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You're trained in Gorilla warfare eh? Do those Gorilla's put up a good fight? Oh, you must be refering to Geurrilla Warfare. People make me laugh.
Most of the reasons for the lack of female participation in Wikipedia, including those above, are false. On Newslines, my crowdsourced content site that aims to replace Wikipedia's biographies and news-based events, 80% of our contributors are women and minorities. See our leaderboard
Wikipedia can never work for minorities and women because its software and policies are specifically designed to exclude them. The reason we get more women posting is because Newslines is created specifically to allow users to add content without the conflicts that are inherent in a wiki-based system. Wikis are built through conflict. Wikipedia's conflict-driven software and policies attract ego-driven white males eager to gain power through the display of their knowledge. The intensity of this conflict excludes other groups.
I go further into this in this post, but the gist of it is that 1) we pay our writers to contribute 2) we have system that allows people to add information with no conflict -- so far over 11,000 posts with no trouble 3) posts are assessed on the quality of the post, not on who made them -- no conflicts of interest or harassment possible 4) and we don't allow editors ownership of the page -- denying powerful groups the ability to censor people and text.
The real crime though, is to blame the people who are excluded for the failings of the system. How many times do we have to hear -- by the people who created the system that excludes them -- that women and minorities are not interested, they don't have enough time, they don't know enough, they can't use the interface, they prefer fluffy stuff, and that they are are lazy? It's time to move past these old arguments and see Wikipedia's dysfunction for what it is - a software, policy and leadership failure.
I don't understand why the astute Slashdot readers haven't posted the real explanation for what is going on.
First, we readers (males and females) know that females are completely capable of submitting 50% of Wikipedia's content, or more. Women have the education, knowledge, and insight to contribute on an even level. If they choose to.
But they don't. Why not?
The answer is that a cabal of 90's pseudo-feminists know that they can contribute, but choose not to.
And by being negative role-models, they more than offset the positive role-models of the majority contributors.
What's their exit strategy? How do they plan to cash in on this choice?
Experience teaches us what to expect.
Spokeswomen will tour college campuses, proclaiming that men subtilly but perniciously hold women back.
Outrage will be expressed. Programs to advance women will be proposed.
Hiring and Tenure preferences will be given to women.
But that can't last. Some new fad will come; some new slight will be manufactured and capitalized on.
This future time, too, is forseen by the sinister women holding the great masses of women back.
Finally, after this is all played out, women will notice, admit, and rejoice they they can contribute what they want when they want.
A couple of steller women who have contributing all along will step forward, and we will already know their names.
Can't we just skip ahead to that part?
Most adults without an ax to grind down have time for it either. Reference it my class and it's an automatic F. (and yes I check to see if your references all match.)
I'm amazed by the gender gap. As a woman and a mother, I enjoy editing Wikipedia when I get a bit of free time but almost never bother with Facebook and never tried Pinterest at all. Nothing about Wikipedia feels like a "man" thing.
Maybe women in general are more interesting in appearing to be masters of present culture, style and relationships rather than being secret masters of historical data? You could just as easily criticize men for not spending time on Facebook. We are different.
It wasn't on Wikipedia but on CNet. When I read the article summary, I thought, "If the author were speaking of a guy, there's no way he would have written, "man or woman". http://www.cnet.com/news/googl...
The rest of the Universe is a blur... The further out, the greater the blur.
Wikipedia is well known to have a very large gender imbalance[citation needed][unreliable source], with survey-based estimates of women contributors ranging from 8.5% to around 16%[corrected in footnote below article to 25%][citation needed]. This is a more extreme gender imbalance than even that of Reddit[citation needed], the most male-dominated major social media platform[citation needed], and it has a palpable effect[citation needed] on Wikipedia content[citation needed]. Moreover, Wikipedia editor survey data indicate that only 1 in 50 respondents is a mother[citation needed][again corrected in footnote to article that submitter didn't bother to read] – a good proportion of female contributors are in fact minors, with women in their twenties less likely to contribute to Wikipedia[citation needed]. Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless[citation needed that they've attempted to do so]. Wikipedia's demographic pattern stands in marked contrast to female-dominated social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, where women aged 18 to 34 are particularly strongly represented[citation needed][apples and oranges - Wikipedia is not a "social media site."]. It indicates that it isn't lack of time or family commitments that keep women from contributing to Wikipedia – women simply find other sites more attractive[citation needed][note survey methodology etc. is unquestioned by article on site directly critical of Wikipedia]. Wikipedia's user interface and its culture of anonymity may be among the factors leading women to spend their online time elsewhere[citation needed].
Must be a slow news weekend to put such obviously biased material up, eh? It's OK, FTFY.
WHO CARES?!?!? Some things attract women and some things attract men. MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT! Why this is such a mystery to anyone in this day and age is only because of pure, ignorant, political correctness bullshit. Why should any particular website try to achieve gender parity? Some things are manly and some things are feminine. I'll bet that this website has a female to male proportion in the other direction - http://www.sofeminine.co.uk/ - while this one will be mostly male - http://uncrate.com/. Who cares? Men like to argue and mix it up. Wikipedia is perfect for that. So it's not a female thing. Get over it. Actually, now that I look more closely at sofeminine, and see that article on the Kama-Sutra, I'm guessing that the numbers may move a bit over the next few days, but then probably fall back later.
Heh. The large gender imbalance has been reported by the Wikimedia Foundation for years. The survey-based estimates (sources are the UNU survey and a WMF survey) are not corrected in the footnote (which is about which statistics to use to estimate the percentage of mothers). The gender imbalance of Reddit is cited to Huffpost, it's 72% male (which is less male-dominated than Wikipedia), and the most extreme of all the major social media sites listed there. There are multiple citations for effect on content, including New York Times, Atlantic and a recent Guardian editorial. 1 in 50 relates to survey respondents, not contributors (which some have claimed may have a *slightly* higher proportion, based on sampling bias). For participation dropping after age 20 see UNU survey (linked). WMF efforts to address the gender gap are well publicised, Sue Gardner talked about it to the press until she was blue in the face. Women aged 18-34 in Facebook and Pinterest: sources linked. The surveys were commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation itself, and comparison to social media is relevant in relation to the argument that women have no time to be online. Relevance of anonymity on women's participation per quoted text from Wiley Handbook. User interface impact is a hypothesis, based on recent discussions on Wikipedia's Gender Task Force page.
If your post is representative of Wikipedians' ability to read sources, Wikipedia is not destined for greatness.
It's like you put down one wrong thing and it's like "That's wrong, you idiot!"
Women hate that.
Hey guys - check out the other posts from this troll. That "How else do you explain your need to respond" seems to be a common theme.
If it wasn't for his quote I'd write him off as a bored teen instead of a possible bitter middle aged man.
I occasionally edit Wikipedia when I read something that's wrong, or if the grammar is off.
I don't recall telling them I'm female. Maybe there are more women who do that?
Reddit too. Male dominated? Very possible. But how do they know? I'm a redditor, female, and unless I tell them, everybody keeps assuming I'm male.
On Reddit, we call that "male until proven female".
Untrue. Take a look at the page history. Every edit has a "thank" link.
Assuming you are logged in.
I suspect that forcing women to make their real names available to the Wikipedia "community" wouldn't be universally acclaimed either.
dnt forget to check out www.buddychoice.com
Seems to me Wikipedia is edited by children, biased spiteful children. They'll do a "Speedy Deletion" on you if they simply don't like the person or entity you're writing about, despite having valid references and significant information.
They themselves also "vandalize" in areas they think most Wikipedia officials may not notice.
Wiki claims there are no designated "editors" or "monitors" in the Wikipedia site. But you just try to add a new article or edit an existing one... At least a couple editors (who were watching) will jump all over you, practically call you names, change your article around (a lot), then even threaten you that you'd "better not violate the site's protocol" again or you'll be banned from making contributions. This has happened to me more than once. Note: My contributions were right on point and inoffensive in every way. (Then they dare to ask us for donations!)
Seriously, who cares if there is or isn't a gender gap.
The only relevant statistic should be the completeness + correctness of all the information provided in each and every language!
Personally, I don't care if the information is written by a male or female, as long as it's correct!
You've actually talked to women right? ;)
"Women aren't putting in as much work as men. Pay us more to make up for it! Free shit! Because, patriarchy, or something. Don't like it and I'll say you raped me."