Why women have no time for Wikipedia

http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/

by lkrubner • 12 years ago

45 52 12 years ago

megaman22• 12 years ago

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

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.

makomk• 12 years ago

From what I recall, their efforts were strongly opposed by the community in large part because they were imposed on it despite being spectacularly broken, difficult to use, and leaving damage behind that other editors had to clean up. (Also, women are not idiots and are in fact quite capable of comprehending things like wiki markup.)

janardanyri• 12 years ago

Barriers to entry such as wiki markup are rarely about whether a group of people are theoretically capable of doing something. The larger problem is that an article about [x] will now only be started/improved by the cross-section of people who both care about [x] and are willing to spend time on the unrelated concept of wiki markup.

Someone1234• 12 years ago

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

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_ca2• 12 years ago

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).

chubot3• 12 years ago

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

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)

DanBC3• 12 years ago

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?

corylehey2• 12 years ago

Because those are solitary endeavors, not "interactions"

chubot3• 12 years ago

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.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9977417/Women-write...

1ris• 12 years ago

In the OSZE PISA studies women/girls are better than their male counterparts in reading comprehension in every single country in the studies.

idlewords• 12 years ago

My girlfriend asked me to write that you're an idiot.

DanBC3• 12 years ago

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... (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• 12 years ago

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

sillysaurus3• 12 years ago

No they won't!

jleyank• 12 years ago

In my experience The Internet in general will argue about everything. FIFY.

notahacker• 12 years ago

It's worth suggesting that this is both cause and consequence of a lot of the other apparently weird Wikipedian demographics (according to the survey: less than a quarter of Wikipedians are over 30, less than a third in full time employment... and they're more likely to be children than have children. All in all, probably not the people you'd naturally put in charge of creating a latter-day Library of Alexandria)

Then again, I also strongly suspect that the survey data is somewhat skewed by male students who apparently have 6.4 hours a week on average to contribute to dash debates being also disproportionately likely to reply to surveys compared to the working mothers who like to make occasional edits to things they find important.

ars2• 12 years ago

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.

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

Yeah.

I have attempted to make edits in the past and in my experience it is like slamming your head into a brick wall no matter how (verifiably) right you are and how uncontroversial your edits should be are.

I still use it to look things up all the time, but I haven't even tried to make an edit (even when I see known and easily verifiable wrong information) in years.

3rd3• 12 years ago

Why are the obsessed almost exclusively male?

ars2• 12 years ago

http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346

ianstallings• 12 years ago

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.

tedks• 12 years ago

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?

justizin2• 12 years ago

REVERTS!

Torgo• 12 years ago

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

kansface• 12 years ago

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

drdeca• 12 years ago

vastly what user experience?

glomph• 12 years ago

Did you read the linked page?

madamepsychosis• 12 years ago

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.

chipsy• 12 years ago

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...

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

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

justizin2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

The standard of "objectivity by media citation" breaks down for many fields of study

To me, this isn't a problem with Wikipedia specifically, its a known feature of tertiary sources. (And its really not specific to any particular field of study, its true everywhere; its one reason that, when I was in secondary school, encyclopedias were considered a useful research tool in much the same like, say, a very heavily annotated general-purpose bibliography with a subject-matter organization, but not citable directly for information (except in the case where the information was the fact that something was presented in a certain way in the encyclopedia in question.)

For one example, there are many criticisms of Wiki history in /r/AskHistorians.

I'd be surprised if there is any publication concerning history which would not have many criticism if you asked a wide and diverse group of historians about it.

wyager2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

wyager2• 12 years ago

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>.

harmonicon• 12 years ago

"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.

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

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...

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

chubot3• 12 years ago

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.

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

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...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

andreasvc• 12 years ago

Interesting that you compare Wikipedia with HN. I think it would be great if Wikipedia embraced a voting model to moderate contributions. On HN you only get to be on the frontpage if enough others support a submission with votes. On Wikipedia each and every edit is immediately bombarded into the version that the whole world sees, which is what leads to edit wars I think.

galfarragem• 12 years ago

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

Why women have no time for Wikipedia

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