QUOTE(Newsfeed @ Tue 9th August 2011, 4:19am)
Wikipedia seeks out female contributorsWomen in Technology09/08/2011 Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written by the general public, is on the search for more female contributors. Jimmy Wales, who founded the website in 2001, claims that as the majority of its unpaid staff are "26-year-old geeky,
...and more »View the article All these stories are based on Jimbo's Haifa talk, and his entire remarks are based on THIS study, which nobody seems to have read:
http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipe...h2010-FINAL.pdfIt's a return survey of WP users that has about 170,000 returns. We have no idea if women are more likely to return the survey or not, so we start out with a bias that is never discussed.
But let us look at the results:
The answerers use the following language wikipedias:
26% Russian
25% English
13% German
11% Spanish
4% Dutch
There are many more languages, but only 8 more with more than 1% each (and none of these above 3%)
The countires are dominated by 4 areas:
Russian Fed: 18%
German 11%
US 10%
UA (I don't know what this is, but perhaps UK and Australia) 4%.
The rest of the world made up more than half the responders, but most of THOSE used English WP, not the others.
So this survey is dominated by Russian-speakers IN Russia, and those who do speak English don't live in a first world country 1- [14/24] = 40% of the time. Where the hell are they? My guess is India. Some also perhaps in China.
The mean age of the male responders was 26, that of the females 24. Gosh, that's just about the age where people are married, or looking. Alas, only 1/3 of the responders has a "partner" and just 15% had one or more children. This is where you can que the monolog about Uncle Miltie seeing the world a bit more clearly than Ottava and his fellow wankers, who seem to be represented here. There is something odd about these people, and lack of sex has something to do with it. Or to put it another way, responding to Wikipedia surveys is highly correlated with not having anything else to do on a Friday night, because this demographic should not look like this.
The gender data is on page 6, and the frustrating thing about it is how disinterested the statisticians are, in figuring out what they can even from the data they have.
Only 25% of the responders are women, which means that even if they are fairly represented in responders, only 1 in 4 users of WP (even just to read it) is female. Most of the users don't edit, and the rate of "reading without editing" is higher in women than men (84% vs. 63% read but don't write), yet still, at least half the "female lack" on WP is due to the fact that men are 3 times as likely to look at WP at all. Even if we used the relative tendency of females to be passive and read but not edit, if women made up half of WP users, and these only edited at the low female rate of 16% for a female user, the fraction of wikipedia contributors who are female would be at least 30%, not 13%. There's half the problem right there: lack of female use of WP, not some toxic environment that keeps women from editing it.
And remember, that we're looking at women (in more than 50% of cases) in the third world. Gee, why might they not be reading WP as much as men there? (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/blink.gif) (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/ermm.gif) Sue? Ms. Datta? Any ideas? You've been very quiet down at the end of the board table, there. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) Comment? Hmmm.
The rest of the survey is infuriating. Somebody looked to see if the 15% of people with children were less likely to be editors, and it had no effect, but nobody bothered to break this down by gender. Since 87% of the total contributors were men, we have no way of knowing if the lack of effect of being a parent was entirely due to the fact that nearly all these young contributors were male. It would have been nice to know.
Did being in a relationship similarly have any effect on whether the user used WP only to read, but not edit? Nobody bothered to look.
Arghhhh. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/tearinghairout.gif)
Anyway, to sum up, roughly half of Wikipedia's problem is getting the
women of the world to READ the damn thing at all, let alone write it. For all I know, these women are not even on the net. For all WMF knows, also.
WP Gang Banging : Why Such Negative Connotations For Women?, The Never-Ending Story : No Date Tonight
