Wikipedia Works To Close Gender Gap 376
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.'"
Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Being "open" also means being open to people who might not want to participate. What difference does it make?
Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you. I don't think there is a problem. The goal of Wikipedia should be to aggregate facts and develop well-written, unbiased comprehensive treatments on various subjects. Focusing on anything else only detracts from that. It should be run like a meritocracy. In the likeliness of open source where the best code wins, may the best prose win.
Re:3 Suspects (Score:4, Insightful)
For being so fundamentally flawed, the product is quite remarkable, don't you think?
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:3 Suspects (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
women are notoriously more sane than men
[citation needed]
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ).
More benefits than you think (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing -- nothing -- that actually stops women from contributing. If they do not want to do so, then so what?
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why do we need to care about a gender gap? (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
The real goal is some sort of imaginary "equality". A few people suffer from the delusion that increasing the number of women will somehow magically make Wikipedia better. Sorry, but there are just as many stupid women as there are stupid men. Actually, there are probably more stupid women since women out number men.
The only thing Wikipedia should be concerned with is "are these articles any good". Period.
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, the stench of misogyny.
I suspect that it may rather be the case that women you know (probably only a handful) find your opinions and attitudes to be intimidating, offensive, and comparable to rape, and that you have confused your confused opinion with "facts".
Re:3 Suspects (Score:2, Insightful)
"if it's not on the web it doesn't exist."
Or, restated in a somewhat more sensible manner, "if the alleged source you citied isn't accessible on the Web, there's no way for anyone editing your article who doesn't have a triple doctorate, a $10,000 subscription to the specialist journal you quoted and a dozen plane tickets to visit museums, to check that it does, in fact, exist, and that you're not just making it up. So don't expect to get treated like an expert if you can't prove that you are an expert."
In a world where we have scanners and OCR, there's no longer any technical reason for ANYTHING to not be on the Web, except for the wilful choice to withhold it from public accessibility. Sadly, a lot of science does remain wilfully locked away from public verification - but that's hardly Wikipedia's fault, is it?
Re:3 Suspects (Score:3, Insightful)
"if the alleged source you citied isn't accessible on the Web, there's no way for anyone editing your article who doesn't have a triple doctorate, a $10,000 subscription to the specialist journal you quoted and a dozen plane tickets to visit museums, to check that it does, in fact, exist, and that you're not just making it up"
Funny. I can go look just about any source up. All I have to do is go to my local library, or failing that, the local university library. They can pull the article from their stacks for me, allow me to view it for free, even let me photocopy it, and they'll do it for maybe a few cents a page xerox cost. Worst case scenario, I have to have them request an interlibrary loan, which means I get it into my hands in about a week's time.
You're just lazy, like most Wikipedia "researchers."
Re:Does it matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:3 Suspects (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
I cancelled my membership in AAUW because they disagreed with this definition of feminism. They were not after equal opportunities, but equal outcomes. They were not focused on expanding opportunities, but merely leveling them. If a college (or sometimes even a high school) was spending more money on men's athletics than women's athletics, it was taken as de facto discrimination. They did not investigate, or ask the school to investigate, whether the men cared for sports more. They did not poll the women to find out what athletic interests they had, and whether there was sufficient interest across campuses to support a new intercollegiate sport. They simply said, "More men are playing sports than women; this is bad. If you can't get more women to play sports, you must cut men's teams until the numbers are equal." Then they'd sic Title IX lawyers on the school until the changes were made.
And the women wonder where their knight in shining armor is, when their sisters were responsible for the equestrian team and the fencing team being cut. They wonder why the guys around them are either jerks or wimps, when the men don't have the benefit of athletics teams to learn courage, valor, and decency. I don't recall the foreign languages club or the book club being cut or told to change their program to attract more men.
Yes, there are some folks in college athletics who aren't giving women's athletics a chance, and no I don't know the relative proportion of them to the good and decent folks. I doubt anyone's anecdotal experience is enough to count as statistically sound data. But cutting someone else's options because you don't have the ones you want is hardly kind, loving, or decent, and organizations like the AAUW whose definition of feminism can ignore these three basic virtues of civilization in pursuit of their agendas should wither on the vine until they change to being about expanding opportunities for all persons.
Participated in cycling, badminton, ultimate frisbee, and ballroom dance in college, which are all mixed gender in case it affects how you react.
As a woman, may I just say this... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.