Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia 579
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.
Obvious Reason (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Obvious Reason (Score:5, Funny)
With good reason. It's obvious by this that Wikipedia isn't doing enough to attract women to contribute. Such a small representation among women is shameful and certainly something must be done to address this glaring example of gender bias.
Re:Obvious Reason (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe women just want to put nice things on pinterest instead of arguing about pedantic bullshit all day.
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There we go, the real reason.
I mean, face it, men are just more willing to be the trolls and make life miserable for each other. Women see that and avoid the whole issue altogether.
We saw it with that article on games vs. women article. They simply see what happens as basically a bunch of horny teenagers with ragers going on, and simply steer clear to avoid the trouble. Wikipedia is the sam
Re:Obvious Reason (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, face it, men are just more willing to be the trolls and make life miserable for each other.
WAT?! You ever see what happens when you get a group of women together?
Sheesh. Asking a slashdotter for his insights about women is like asking a Mormon about his favorite microbrews.
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I mean, face it, men are just more willing to be the trolls and make life miserable for each other. Women see that and avoid the whole issue altogether.
Turns out that's a steaming pile, who knew eh. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... [dailymail.co.uk]
They simply see what happens as basically a bunch of horny teenagers with ragers going on, and simply steer clear to avoid the trouble.
Too bad you don't know any actual female gamers: http://www.pokket.tv/wp/wp-con... [pokket.tv]
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Oh look, a feminist shooting the messenger. Quelle surprise.
Re:Obvious Reason (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a woman, I've edited wikipedia. But not frequently.
If I happen to run across something that I know is incorrect and which I can find the sources for fairly quickly, I probably will again. I do recall another female wikipedia editor, a colleague when I was still in computational biochemistry, who avoided our particular area on wikipedia because she'd gotten tired of the acrimony. (I was really working more on the computational side, where she was a far better biochemist, but she didn't correct mischaracterizations about the feasibility of the work we were doing and had been doing for many years because the people who frequented that area were too "mean". And she wasn't exactly your shrinking violet; more, I think, that it met it less something she was willing to invest time into.)
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> I mean, face it, men are just more willing to be the trolls and make life miserable for each other. Women see that and avoid the whole issue altogether.
Are you kidding? Women love politics and backstabbing. In fact, they are much better at it than men are. They just like to pretend that they are better. If anything, all of this committee nonsense sounds like the sort of thing fueled by women rather than something they would flee from.
Re:Obvious Reason (Score:5, Funny)
If women don't like it, maybe they should make their own wikipedia,
Chickipedia?
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Did you provide a decent source? Are you willing to provide a link to this particular incident? Not saying you're wrong, but it's possible there's another side to this.
Women fight differently and are not more mature (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Heh. What's funny about that is that those "womens' techniques" are the techniques that men usually use
Re:Obvious Reason (Score:4, Interesting)
So does this mean that any woman engaging in sexual relations with a man should be looked down and possibly arrested because, after all, she is taking advantage of a 14-year old hormonally imbalanced orphan? Or did you mean "absolutely truth" as in "look how cool I am"?
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Or maybe "pedantic bullshit" is the only way to manage a project like Wikipedia, and choosing not to take part in that also means choosing not to contribute.
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> pedantic bullshit all day.
Agreed. Wikipedia's policy is that in order to not have an article maliciously deleted that it must have two citations. The last nine articles I added had between six and fifteen citations, but they were still deleted by the jerk-off deletionists. After that experience, I will never contribute to that anti-information site again. Never.
Of course men will accept that sort of BS as a challenge and keep contributing, but anyone logical would give-up on that site forever.
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I wondered why the thing is littered with ten year old bad tempered exhortations to replace everything on the site with something better.
I might start taking the advice of the educational establishment and stop using it
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FTFY
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Agreed. Emphases should be on feeling instead of facts. A 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.
It is difficult for women to compete with men, because of this men should make place for more diversity. Wikipedia should empower women to express themselves free or peer judgement, divergent opinion or fac
Re:Obvious Reason (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you mean by gender bias? Does wikipedia need to do something special to attract girl? That would be gender bias. The way it works now is gender equality, and it's nobody's fault that women have other interests in mind.
But nevermind me, let me hear your suggestions on making this site better suited to women!
Re:Obvious Reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it "shameful"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Simone de Beauvoir and Jonathan Coe called, they say you've successfully substituted objectivity with male subjectivity [wikipedia.org]. If women don't participate in Wikipedia, Wikipedia cannot be said to be "encyclopedic" -- everybody at Wikipedia up to Jimbo Wales accepts this fact without discussion.
Your proffered explanation of a "natural skew"
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something must be done to address this glaring example of gender bias.
You're joking, but they're doing exactly that [slashdot.org]
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They're not specifically doing anything to attract either gender to contribute. Everything they do is gender neutral. This is a non issue.
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With good reason. It's obvious by this that Wikipedia isn't doing enough to attract women to contribute. Such a small representation among women is shameful and certainly something must be done to address this glaring example of gender bias.
I'd say Wikipedia isn't good enough for *anybody* with more than two braincells to rub together to contribute to. Pseudoexperts deleting content without any explaination at all just because it was posted by anons, flat out wrong content, political scirmishes, lack of sep
Articles on the elementary education imbalance? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Articles on the elementary education imbalance? (Score:5, Informative)
Every time you hear about a gender gap in STEM, it's because someone didn't do their homework and are operating from a false premise. The truth is there's no gender imbalance in STEM. This is this is the best kept secret out there: they omit biological _sciences_ from the "STEM" definition because women are an overwhelming majority of those fields. When you add them back in there is. no. gap.
This is all just the result of gender feminists playing games with terminology to benefit their pet projects. It's since taken on it's own life and now people think we need more women in STEM. The REAL gender gap is in education and academia. Men are only about 13% of school teachers and that's got to change if we want our kids to grow up with a balanced view of the genders.
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Women actually put as much effort in to impressing others of their own gender, actually. Sometimes more.
Discrimination (Score:5, Funny)
Well the genders are identical so it must be some social factor that the patriarchy is responsible for creating.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also why is it that WP should do more to appeal to females but FB doesn't need to do more to appeal to males?
Uhh, because 64/36 female/male user ratio isn't that far out of line. That aside, I'm sure there are top men in Facebook working to pull in a greater number of men while not pushing out their female user base. Top men.
Wikimedia Foundation doesn't neccessarily need to do more to appeal to women and they are not suggesting that they do. But it is certainly in their interest to understand why such an extreme gap exists.
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Ah yes, the old "bias doesn't exist because men and women are different" argument.
Yes, I agree, the one defining characteristic definition of how women differ from men is the propensity to edit wikipedia articles. As we have seen, this is one of the most gender imbalanced places around so it this must be the canonical difference, with other, lesser differences such as professional sports[*] being mere shadows.
[*] Yep. Going by the results in the last Olympics, if women and men raced in the same marathon rac
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What, common sense? No, no, no! You have completely misunderstood what this fight is about!
In other news, women are waking up to the little side-effects of requiring equal representation everywhere (instead of the sane "gender-neutral opportunity" -- "equal" opportunity is not doable, as talents, interests and education differ between individuals): http://www.smh.com.au/federal-... [smh.com.au] Of course, if there are no differences between the sexes (yeah, right...), then this is all imaginary.
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You may be right. If we eliminated the barriers, then women might still not be interested. Either way, it's still bad that Wikipedia can't claim to be completely neutral if it doesn't represent a large section of human perspectives.
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Yet another attack on Anonymity (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
why the focus on gender balance? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:why the focus on gender balance? (Score:5, Insightful)
I like that - "actors instead of objects". That's a great turn of phrase.
And it emphasizes that any sort of gender/race/sexual orientation re-balancing is at its essence *objectifying* people. It's asserting that they must be defined by some label, and must obey some sort of normal distribution because of that label.
No doubt, history is filled with all kinds of evil misogyny, racism, and homophobia...and large swaths of the planet still have those problems, especially in the islamic world. But we lose sight of the truth, that people are individual *actors*, not *objects*, all too often. Fighting the scourges of discrimination of various sorts doesn't lead to some predetermined statistical balance, it gives individual actors the *freedom* to make the choices they'd like. Sometimes, those free choices are lopsided, and that's *okay*.
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Individual women are making choices in response to freedom.
I don't need to explain *why* they make their choices, and neither do they - just give them the freedom to choose, and get out of the way.
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Freedom of choice, and wildly varying individual choices. In regards to race in particular, choices made have very little to do with blood line or skin color, and much more to do with culture and upbringing. This differs from gender significantly, though, since there are real, biological and neurological differences between the sexes, whereas race is an arbitrary social construct.
Now, you could make the argument that one doesn't "choose" to
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While I can see the merit of action in classical gender gap examples, I too agree this goes to far. Imagine demanding a quotum on Pinterest: no more women allowed until the balance is 50-50. That would be insane. Now, I know that Wikipedia has a higher standing and is consulted as authoritative, so it will be deemed more important, but Wikipedia is about providing correct information, which is unrelated to gender distribution.
I don't get it either, unless it's about money, somehow.
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When a huge chunk of the human race chooses en masse not to participate in something when there's no particular reason they shouldn't - the intelligent person wonders why and tries to correct the problem. Folks like you just ask vapid questions and perpetuate ignorance and bias.
Re:why the focus on gender balance? (Score:5, Insightful)
the intelligent person wonders why
I have no problem with this, it's always helpful to try to figure out how something came to be.
and tries to correct the problem.
This can be problematic. We can try to figure out what influences the male muscovy duck to hold the female down and force copulation for example, but why is it a "problem"? and why should it be "fixed"?
Since when is people choosing what they want a "problem" that deserves "fixing" with indue influence?
Science is a tool used to try to figure out how things are, it doesn't judge them as morally good or bad.
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Why must everything be gender balanced?
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.
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You mean, let them care about cooking and pink dresses instead of dealing with psychopathic jerks on wikipedia? I'm sure that if you think this through, you will at some point (maybe in a decade? nah, optimistic) reach some from of enlightenment on the issue. It helps if you talk to actual women, too.
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No, it's a real problem here. Wikipedia is all about (1) information about the world, and (2) a neutral perspective on that information. Women do have a slightly different perspective, focusing on different information and different aspects of information. Including those additional perspectives will make wikipedia content more complete and also more accessible to female readers.
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Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless.
Why must everything be gender balanced?
I don't know about everything, but perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation simply would like to have a larger pool of contributors? There are often pragmatic reasons to worry about a gender gap.
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Gender imbalance is self selected (Score:4, Insightful)
Its not bias against women. its women choosing not to participate. End of argument.
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How do you ensure NPOV, when entire demographic group(s) self-select out?
Re:Gender imbalance is self selected (Score:4, Interesting)
If the reason women don't participate is because women are more likely to have their edits reverted when people see they are done by a feminine name, then the choosing to not participate is based in bias. Asserting your preferred answer doesn't change reality, no matter how much you want it to.
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Or you know, women could find the interface horribly bad to work with and don't find the time required to learn it well spend? Personally I can't be bothered learning the markup and thus I can't be bothered contributing.
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Women have no trouble participating on facebook or Reddit where you'll find your links and posts deleted or buried for entirely arbitrary reasons.
The burden of proof is upon YOU to prove sexism is the result of anything here. All you have is a statistic with no causative association. You can show correlation, but no causation of ANYTHING in this issue. And absent that you have no evidence of anything. Statistics without a proven causative link are not evidence of ANYTHING. Its just data. No more of relevanc
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That's not the end of the argument. That's the beginning. Why are they choosing not to participate? Can they be encouraged to participate? Will that net a positive result? (It seems likely that it would. More varied input and points of view would likely make a site like Wikipedia better).
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No, he is not right. Because his assumption is based on the idea that if women -choose- not to participate it must be all on them because there could be no unpleasantness which dominates that choice.
Karamshock is basically an idiot. He generally spams any thread like this with poorly reasoned arguments as to how the status quo is fine, nothing is wrong and nothing should ever be done.
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Sure, turn the last 4000 years of philosophy on its head and say it is my responsibility to prove you wrong not YOUR responsibility to make a consistent substantiated argument.
What you have is a hypothesis. But it has ZERO evidence. None. Nothing. If I were to say you're a transsexual vampire from mars, it would have literally the same validity as your point... aka none.
So are you a transsexual vampire from mars or do you now understand how utterly baseless your point is here?
Provide evidence. A statistic o
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What you have is a hypothesis.
So do you. Your hypothesis is merely that women are choosing not to because they are women.
But it has ZERO evidence. None. Nothing.
Well apart from that there's no evidence that the difference between men and women is that great. Hell, if you look at the thing where men are clearly physiologically at an advantage (sports) the differences is often not that great.
So are you a transsexual vampire from mars or do you now understand how utterly baseless your point is here?
How did y
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It does.
It just doesn't resolve it.
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Pretty much. There are professions women tend to dominate and there is no crusade to get equality there. There are also low status male jobs that women don't seem interested in doing. Garbage men. Lumberjacks. Fishermen. Coal miners.
Until women are willing to take up these jobs in equal numbers I really have zero patience for their equality crap. They have equality already. They just don't have equal interest or in many cases ability. Deal with it. We're not all the same. Stop whining about it.
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There are professions women tend to dominate and there is no crusade to get equality there.
Ah the old: It's worse elsewhere ergo nothing is wrong here argument.
Total bullshit.
Also, it turns out there are movements in nursing and teaching to get more men.
There are also low status male jobs that women don't seem interested in doing. Garbage men. Lumberjacks. Fishermen. Coal miners.
Well, you've managed to pick a selection of jobs where men do have a real, measurable advantage which is physical strength. Except
A willingness to fight (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:A willingness to fight (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, that's what I was thinking. Also a seemingly inherent need to pontificate about any random philosophy, statistics, or trivia they may or may not actually be experts on.
Really, this should have been completely obvious to anyone who posts on slashdot (not to mention the gender gap here makes Wikipedia look like a bridal shower in comparison).
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Men in general seem to have less tolerance for what they perceive as error and a greater willingness to fight to correct error.
[citation needed]
Re:A willingness to fight (Score:5, Insightful)
Man?
I am.
Have you ever dated??
Yep.
Women are the single most argumentative, must be right, cant change their minds, NEEDS AN APOLOGY EVEN WHEN PROVEN WRONG group out their.
Once you move into the realm of "all women are X" for some attribute like that you're essentially engaging in textbook sexism. All women are not like that. Some are, some aren't. Some men are, some aren't. There are plenty of tales of (male) bosses at work who must always be right no matter what.
Userbox war (Score:5, Interesting)
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/... [wikipedia.org]
What "deletionists" are and what Wikipedia was like before them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That's all interesting but can you show that the gender balance was fine *before* the Userbox wars? Otherwise this seems that you took an opportunity to inject a personal grievance into an irrelevant discussion.
I understand it. (Score:5, Funny)
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 . . .
Women crave Feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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There are "likes" for Wikipedia edits, they are called "Thank".
Women crave Feedback (Score:3)
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".
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I would mod you up if I had points.
The summary states that anonymity is a problem, but surely if sexism is the problem then there should be complete anonymity - difficult to be sexist against someone if you don't know their sex.
You say 'Look to the culture within Wikipedia and you might start to find some answers.' Maybe you should log in and expand on what the problems with the culture are, because the story comments here are mostly stale memes.
What does being a mother have to do with it? (Score:2)
What about real encyclopedias? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ;)
Don't Ask. (Score:3)
It'll make it hard to claim that Wikipedia treats females differently.
demography & culture (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:demography & culture (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:demography & culture (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting read! After reading through all of the comments here, my take on this has been that relative to something like facebook, neither men nor women in general like editing wikipedia. I'm pulling statistics from different years, but I think this is roughly in the right ballpark:
World Population (2010):
Female: ~3.42 Billion
Male: ~3.48 Billion
Total: ~6.9 Billion
Active facebook users (2009,2014):
Female/Male ratio: ~1:1.35
Total: ~1.28 Billion
Female: ~0.74 Billion
Male: ~0.54 Billion
% of all females actively using facebook: ~22%
% of all males actively using facebook: ~16%
Active wikipedia users (2014):
Female/Male ratio: ~12:100 (rough center of survey according to article)
Total: 0.000131 Billion
Female: 0.0000157 Billion
Male: 0.00011528 Billion
% of all females actively editing wikipedia: 0.0004%
% of all males actively editing wikipedia: 0.0033%
So when you get down to it, there just happens to be a very slightly larger fraction of the male population that is willing to invest their time in Wikipedia. When by and large, people in general don't do it, I think it's hard to make any kind of generalization about whether or not there are specific barriers for either men or women. The bigger trend imho is that there are barriers for everyone.
a palpable effect on Wikipedia content? (Score:2)
It would be interesting to get an idea what the effect is.
Subject (Score:2)
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.
perhaps men and women are different? (Score:5, Insightful)
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My Wikipedia editing experience (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Noticed a gender imbalance in garden clubs too (Score:2, Informative)
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?
who cares? (Score:2)
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?
Animal House. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Because using neutral point of view is not the job of women
Ah yes, nothing to do with rampant sexism of exactly the sort you are displaying. Nope nothing at all. Must all be the fault of "women" for having "inferior brains" or something.
Re: (Score:2)
Because using neutral point of view is not the job of women
Ah yes, nothing to do with rampant sexism of exactly the sort you are displaying. Nope nothing at all. Must all be the fault of "women" for having "inferior brains" or something.
Where did the parent say that?
Re: (Score:2)
Where did the parent say that?
Erm learn to read. He said:
Because using neutral point of view is not the job of women
Re: (Score:2)
Where did the parent say that?
Erm learn to read. He said:
Because using neutral point of view is not the job of women
Because of course that statement means that all women have inferior brains, right? Looks like some reading lessons are in order - not for me though.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, men are about the same, just with a different variant of social bullshit. My take would be that 99.99% of men have nothing to contribute to Wikipedia while 99.999% of women have nothing to contribute. What, that makes this "gender gap" look insignificant? Well, while lying with statistics is easy, truth is a little harder but usually possible.
Re: (Score:2)
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...)