

How to achieve a 94% female contributor ratio on a wiki - coenhyde
http://lola-pr.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-women-wikis-do-mix.html

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samfoo
Leaving aside the sexist subtext that women appreciate beauty more than men...

While Wikifashion is pretty and, that beauty certainly (I'm sure) helps
contribute to it's success: Don't you think your high female contributor ratio
has more to do with your subject matter being more interesting to women?

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MBee
I wasn't intending for my article to come across as sexist. I merely wanted to
point out that certain elements of our design may appeal more to women than
wikipedia's.

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samfoo
Ah, re-reading your article, I think I misunderstood your use of "pretty".
Where I was reading it to mean "well designed and aesthetically pleasing",
retrospectively it seems like you're using it as a catch-all term for "a-look-
of-some-kind-that-appeals-to-women"? In which case, I apologize for crying
sexist-wolf.

Incidentally; Wikifashion is __genius __. I'm totally going to score points by
showing it to my fashion-obsessed-and-wikipedia-contributing girlfriend
tonight.

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MBee
Apology accepted :) Glad your girlfriend will like it.

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nostrademons
Harry Potter fandom is roughly 99% female. Out of several hundred people I
knew in the fandom, I can think of 5 (including myself) that were male.

It is not hard to get a heavily biased female contributor ratio...you simply
need to talk about things that are of interest to females. Computers and
startups, unfortunately, do not seem to be among them.

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Stormbringer
To be fair, most blokes find talk about computers and startups to be dead
boring too.

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coenhyde
Disclaimer I'm a co-founder of Wikifashion.

Wikipedia Signpost also had a bit to say about it here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/In_the_news)

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khookie
coenhyde of brisbanephp fame?

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coenhyde
The one and only :)

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njharman
Why would you ever want such a skewed and biased ratio? It's not something to
be proud of, it's a failure.

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wladimir
Indeed, it's still skewed, but the other way around. The ratios should be
around 52%/48% to be representative of.the world population (AFAIK).

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can-tank-er
I would estimate that the contributors to the Vintage Sewing Pattern wiki
Wikia are >95% female, and many of them are older, too.

<http://vintagepatterns.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page>

When it first started, the pages were bare-bones and the UI was not "pretty"
in any way, so I don't think it was UI driven; I think it was content-driven.
Now there are >35,000 pattern images, with plentiful metadata, including
category tagging, and links to reviews and vendors.

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khookie
aha best line... "ergo Wikipedia you're that really smart nerd in high school
that all the cool girls secretly wanted to date but wouldn't dare."

