Why are women unwilling to contribute to wikipedia?

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wikipedia/the-antisocial-factor

by yummyfajitas • 15 years ago

6 3 15 years ago

tiffani• 15 years ago

I think that article is wayy off and the title of this thread is teetering in the same direction. Nothing about that article explicitly says anything about women being "unwilling" to contribute to Wikipedia.

I used to spend a lot of time editing and contributing to certain articles, but notice what I said, "spend a lot of time." Sure, you can quickly fix spelling and grammatical errors, but to really do anything useful on the site takes more time. I'd easily spend a few hours a week (depending on what else I had to do) during college editing articles.

But, for every woman that has time to do that, there are plenty that don't (think of women who still operate according to traditional gender expectations--taking care of family, etc.). This is not to say that men don't have other demands on their time, however. The author misses the mark entirely when it comes to that aspect, though. You'd only know that if at some point you've spent any time contributing at all. I'd have to wonder if the author ever has...

Plus, I don't think we should be so quick to throw gender on top of everything as a reason why something has or hasn't happened. I could be wrong, but I really don't believe that the average Wikipedia visitor even really pays attention to who wrote any given article, much less going so far as to find out whether they were a male, female, or any variant.

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

Nothing about that article explicitly says anything about women being "unwilling" to contribute to Wikipedia.

The authors all implicitly agree that unwillingness is the reason. Logically, there are only two reasons women would not contribute - inability and unwillingness.

They speculate various reasons why women are unwilling - women disproportionately dislike the neutral point of view, they prefer a walled garden, they dislike edit wars or hacker elitism, or they dislike "anti-social" behavior such as sitting at home writing a wikipedia article.

They never once suggest inability as the reason women don't contribute.

farlington• 15 years ago

I've heard it stated (and I can't remember where) that the major difference between the social behavior of women and men online is that women tend to use social networks to extend existing real world relationships, and men tend to use social networks to replace or substitute for real world relationships.

Like any generalization, I can think of plenty of counterexamples and exceptions, but as a general statement it kind of rings true for me.

Why are women unwilling to contribute to wikipedia?

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