
Why women have no time for Wikipedia - lkrubner
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/
======
ars
What I've found is that for the most part only the obsessed edit wikipedia.

Anyone "normal" doesn't have time to sit there and argue back and forth over
stupidity.

So all the regular users give up, leaving only the obsessed, and the quality
of the articles suffers as a result.

For controversial subjects, the less neutral someone is, the more likely they
are to edit. Anyone with a neutral position on the subject just can't afford
to waste so much time.

~~~
3rd3
Why are the obsessed almost exclusively male?

~~~
ars
[http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm](http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346)

------
DanBC
They don't really mention the sometimes toxic environment at Wikipedia.

They do mention controversial subjects. It's obvious that editing "the Russian
Invasion of Ukraine" is going to be awful.

What people don't realise is that Wikipedians will argue about anything.
Here's over fifteen thousand words about dashes and hyphens.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_\(policy\)/Archive_101#Hyphens_and_endashs)
(sorry about mobile link).

This kind of pettifogging guff is common on a whole bunch of WP. See, for
another example, the bizarre hostility aimed at users who chose the wrong
username - two different admin boards just for names and holding pens and
bots. (And the WP software filters out almost anything that you might want to
be filtered out.)

~~~
tux3
In my experience The Internet in general will argue about anything.

~~~
sillysaurus3
No they won't!

~~~
pantalaimon
You are just playing the devil's advocate here.

~~~
krapp
Don't bring religion into this.

~~~
mjcohen
That was commanded by god, not God.

------
chubot
It's not surprising to me that women contribute to Wikipedia at a low rate,
because women also contribute to open source at a lower rate than they program
professionally. I suspect the same factors are at work.

My personal experience is that somewhere between 10 and 20% of professional
programmers are women, and a similar or slightly higher fraction of CS majors.

I've heard the number 1-2% batted around for the fraction of female open
source developers (i.e. 10x less than the professional rate). It's hard to
find good sources, but this site suggests that it's higher now:

[http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/FLOSS](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/FLOSS)

Although some of these numbers are about conference attendees and speakers,
and is looks like there have been dramatic increases there, probably because
of conscious effort. (I think this is probably a good thing; I rarely attend
conferences, but an all-male dynamic can be depressing.)

What wikipedia and open source have in common is "text-based interaction", and
I think that is offputting to some people, in particular women. I don't think
it is surprising that female programmers would prefer interaction in a
workplace or school to text-based interaction.

Likewise, you could infer that Hacker News probably has a lower fraction of
women than the fraction in the startup/YC community, because it's very text-
based. And looking at the top posters list, I think that inference would be
correct!

(I'm curious who the top female on this list is:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders))

~~~
DanBC
> What wikipedia and open source have in common is "text-based interaction",
> and I think that is offputting to some people, in particular women. I don't
> think it is surprising that female programmers would prefer interaction in a
> workplace or school to text-based interaction.

Why do women write more books than men? Why do women read more books than men?

~~~
chubot
Citation? It's not obvious to me that either is true.

I am not part of the literary world but apparently it is "male-dominated".

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/29/men-women-vida-
coun...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/29/men-women-vida-
count-2011_n_1310662.html)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9977417/Women-
write...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9977417/Women-writers-
suffer-in-male-dominated-literary-world-says-novelist.html)

~~~
DanBC
It's really clear for readers of fiction.

[http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/woman-read-more-
fict...](http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/woman-read-more-fiction)

As for writing: I got the quote from "Open Book", a BBC Radio Four programme.

Here's a similar quote:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9778413/Costa-
Prize...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9778413/Costa-Prize-women-
rule-the-literary-world-so-why-the-focus-on-men.html)

> Women write and buy vastly more books, and more fiction, than men, yet you
> wouldn’t guess it to see how literary prizes are discussed in newspapers.

Here's an article that mentions the Open Book programme
[http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/feb/25/londo...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/feb/25/london-
review-books-women-reviewers-gender-inequality)

------
chipsy
I am increasingly critical of Wikipedia's project, and not just in terms of
its observed gender balance. The standard of "objectivity by media citation"
breaks down for many fields of study: For one example, there are many
criticisms of Wiki history in /r/AskHistorians. [0] [1] [2]

[0]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/281u8f/what_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/281u8f/what_are_the_best_and_worst_wikipedia_articles_in/)

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fa203/wikipe...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fa203/wikipedias_article_on_the_eurasian_steppe_claims/)

[2]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jvfe6/if_wik...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jvfe6/if_wikipedia_is_frowned_upon_by_askhistorians_are/)

~~~
justizin
Right, you can basically blog about something, cite the blog, and that will
stick, but a public figure can't even present a birth certificate to correct
their age, birth date, birth place - they can only try to get the media to
cite them correctly. One such person I know found that for some unbeknownst
reason, articles opposing him and his ideas tended to mistake his birthplace
and date.

So you have fact by media scrum, which is dangerous.

Also, there's no way that mom can just buy one volume of a 4g tablet at the
grocery store each week. ;)

~~~
misnome
Not to mention the many incidents of media "borrowing" incorrect wikipedia
information, then wikipedia then using said media article as justification for
keeping it that way.

------
tokenadult
Disclosure: I am a Wikipedian. I agree with several other participants here on
HN that the general atmosphere on HN is much more friendly to informed,
thoughful discussion on most topics than the Wikipedia editing culture is to
discussion of how to edit Wikipedia.

One thing that Wikipedia helps some people learn about is reliable sources.
With that in mind, I'll mention that the source kindly submitted here, the
Wikipediocracy site, is a haven for critics of Wikipedia of all kinds,
including people who were site-banned from Wikipedia for tendentious pro-Nazi
edits[1] and a variety of other people that no professional editor would ever
allow to edit an important reference resource. The mobocracy of Wikipedia's
initial editing culture indeed drew in too many idle young men with little
life experience and too few people who had ever had actual responsibilities as
editors or researchers.

I agree with the comments posted before this comment was posted that most
women, as a general rule, know better than to engage in time-wasting
activities like cleaning up the mess on Wikipedia. I have to carefully ration
my Wikipedia research and editing time among responsibilities for doing actual
paid work and caring for my children. Anyone with adult life experience and
mature judgment is likely to find Wikipedia more off-putting than rewarding,
but some people persist in trying to clean up one or another corner of
Wikipedia out of compassion for readers of the world's most visited free
online encyclopedia.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence#Ferahgo_the_Assassin_and_Captain_Occam_site-
banned)

[http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5063](http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5063)

~~~
chubot
Is this because Wikipedia is "done"?

I recall seeing that the rate of articles created has flattened out, so
current activity is more editing of existing articles than it used to be.

I am mostly a Wikipedia reader (although I have created articles before and
done minor edits). From my perspective it's just great and I don't notice any
of the angst or frivolity that goes into its curation.

I don't have extremely high expectations. It's a fantastic starting point to
learn about almost anything. I suspect some of the arguments are basically "in
the noise" for a user like me. That is, the way I use Wikipedia, the outcome
of the argument wouldn't really make a difference.

~~~
tokenadult
Wikipedia is very far from done in updating articles about psychology[1] or
genetics.[2] Most articles on Wikipedia on most topics still need a great deal
of work. Even by Wikipedia's own meager standards, few articles have reached
"good article" or "featured article" levels of quality.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-09-04/WikiProject_report)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-04-30/WikiProject_report)

------
ianstallings
Maybe they realize it's a personal waste of time. Obviously wikipedia does
great good for society. But making sure an article on wikipedia is correct
ranks pretty low on the hierarchy of one's needs in life.

Maybe it's just my personal experiences but I've found women to have a better
grasp on what's important and not important to their own life. They have more
_perspective_ , if that makes sense. Men on the other hand will kill
themselves trying to win an argument and forget their whole lives while doing
it.

------
alliejanoch
I think this article buries the real reason women don't contribute at the very
end. Wikipedia's efforts to make the editing interface more friendly to non
developers has been strongly opposed by the community. I think this is often
the case with strong community based products, when working at Fickr I saw
that many changes aimed at attracting new users were met with serious
objections from most active community members. Balancing the desire to please
existing community members with the desire to gain new members is never easy.

We all know that women make up a small fraction of the developer community, so
it should come as no surprise that women haven't contributed much to a product
that has historically required a little understanding of "programming" in
order to edit (of course it don't seem like programming to developers, but to
non developers it is scary). With an easy to use interface for editing
articles, that is strongly advertised and pushed (despite community
objections), Wikipedia could start to make headway with gaining women editors,
but overcoming history is not going to be easy.

~~~
Someone1234
As a very casual Wikipedia committer (less than half a dozen articles ever,
and a handful more edits) who also happens to be a programmer, I agree. Every
single time I go to edit a Wikipedia article or make a new one I have to spend
ten minutes familiarising myself again with the markup.

Just go read up on this page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup)

Even for a very basic article that won't be immediately nuked you'll need to
know a lot of that including how to correctly cite, link to sub-sections,
other Wikipedia articles, and so on.

I can honestly see that being a barrier to entry.

~~~
squid_ca
I think this is a problem with "markdown-style" HTML editing in general. Sites
that use it seem to think that using their special markup language is somehow
easier for newbies to use than vanilla HTML, just because it doesn't have
angle-brackets.

IMHO, markdown etc. solve one problem only: when you need to have text that is
easily readable by humans, but can also be easily converted to HTML. In a
content-entry situation, it just seems to solve the problem of saving
keystrokes for people that already know HTML.

What I think average users really need is a WYSIWYG editor (which, I'll be the
first to admit, is a real PITA for generating sane HTML).

~~~
cwyers
Markdown etc. solves another problem as well: HTML is a complicated system
with multiple standards and different interpreters for that standard, which oh
by the way most of them WILL parse certain parts of it as a Turing-complete
programming language. There's a lot of reasons not to want untrusted users to
be able to input HTML, which is why you may want to have users input a much
safer language that you can convert to HTML.

~~~
squid_ca
That's a good point.

Serious idea: Maybe a WYSIWYG editor that generated markdown, which you could
then submit to the server to parse as HTML?

------
madamepsychosis
It has always seemed to me that a main payoff of many open source/ Wikipedia
editors is intellectual authority. Other commentators have mentioned the
hostile atmosphere on Wikipedia- I'd argue that that's a symptom of
contributors having their intellectual authority threatened.

Women are granted significantly less intellectual authority in their IRL
lives, so it makes sense they aren't so concerned about establishing it
online.

------
wyager
>But for Wikipedia to actually become a platform fully embraced by women, it
would have to change its culture in fundamental ways, reducing its emphasis on
anonymity and providing more opportunities for meaningful companionship and
satisfying social relationships between its contributors.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a social network.

~~~
spenrose
That distinction is obvious to some people, and obviously invalid to others.
In a gender-laden way. Which is the point of the article.

~~~
wyager
>That distinction is obvious to some people, and obviously invalid to others.

Anyone who doesn't see the distinction and complains about Wikipedia's
inaptitude as a social network shouldn't be editing wikipedia.

Information sources shouldn't have to pander to <insert demographic> just for
the sake of attracting users of <insert demographic>.

------
Torgo
The existence of Twitter has falsified the hypothesis that women don't
participate because they are put off by online conflict.

~~~
kansface
Twitter has a vastly user experience than Wikipedia. Imagine if hostile
Twitter users could trivially untweet/hide your content.

~~~
drdeca
vastly what user experience?

------
tedks
Man, what is _up_ with the Wikipedia community. The level of vitriol over the
new image viewer (which I personally loved) is just ridiculous. What software
changes do they approve of if any?

~~~
justizin
REVERTS!

------
harmonicon
"the sites where men are most dominant – Wikipedia and Reddit – are on the
whole very dry and text-based. ...The sites where women predominate
...Pinterest is full of gorgeous, nourishing images uploaded by contributors."

While I agree with the point that more images and more attractive layout would
help attract female visitors/editors, I do not like the language the author
used here. Why is text portrayed as "dry" while images as "nourishing"?
Personally I prefer text much more over image when I am trying to gain
information on a subject. Text is straightforward, precise and quickly
processed. Unless I am browsing a geography, food or history article I turn
off the image all together. Most of the time they don't tell me anything more
than the text.

Wikipedia's purpose is to provide information and knowledge. Not
entertainment.

------
megaman22
Wikiwand looks awful. I can't even click on anything, divs are flying around
whenever I move the mouse

------
galfarragem
Even if both genders claim the opposite: Men are the idealists and women are
the pragmatists.

