Comments on: How Many Women Does It Take to Change Wikipedia?

By: Anthony

Anthony — Wed, 02 May 2012 03:29:42 +0000

So men do much more unpaid work online than women, and they create accurate and useful content to improve the sum of human knowledge?

Feminists usually do flawed “studies” about men not doing enough unpaid work. Even ignoring their flawed methodology, if they were to add Wikipedia contributions by both genders to their figures I expect that would more than fix the “problem”.

How about we praise men for the great things they do instead of pretending they’re evil sexists all the time?

By: Anne Flournoy

Anne Flournoy — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:43:42 +0000

Fascinating that the internet has its own sexual politics. I mean, duh, but it wasn’t obvious.

By: Plop

Plop — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 09:51:23 +0000

I was reading on wikipedia when I stumbled on the article about the mysterious author of Death Note. She/He is unknown but the nickname is female and the main hypothesis is that it’s the work of a collective of women… The article state the female name – aknowledge that it is female – and carry on calling the author a male !
I changed it, along with many grammar mistakes but my correction wasn’t taken in account. I was surprised by the gender assumption.

By: amy cross

amy cross — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 23:31:57 +0000

I applaud this effort to decrease this asymmetry. How about involving the women’s colleges to do a few in course work?

By: Gregory Kohs

Gregory Kohs — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 21:02:39 +0000

This was an interesting piece. A 70% female incidence at an Edit-a-Thon is a wild anomaly, given that female participation on Wikipedia is in the severe minority.

In November 2008, women accounted for only 13% of the editors on Wikipedia.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/08/31/only-13-of-wikipedia-contributors-are-women-study-says/

After Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner made it a priority to increase that ratio, you’d think that the percentage would be going up over time. However, an April 2011 study showed that the percentage who are women had actually *dropped* to only 9%.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/10/wikipedia-editors-do-it-for-fun-first-results-of-our-2011-editor-survey/

This evidence doesn’t seem to bother most Wikipedians, they predominantly being boys and men who much prefer their Seinfeld and Pokemon articles without the interference of women.

By: Susan Gerbic

Susan Gerbic — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 05:52:40 +0000

Great article, Yes there are fewer women editing Wikipedia, but want to assure you that some of us are out here willing to train and are very vocal. I’m a member of the skeptic movement that focuses on editing more critical thinking into Wikipedia articles. We call this Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia. One of our sub-projects is We Got Your Wiki Back! project where we re-write stubs or create sparkling new pages for our skeptical spokespeople. Many of which are women.

This blog I wrote for “She Thought” might explain better about this project and how you can get involved. http://shethought.com/2012/01/30/wikipedia-and-skeptic-women/