The New York Times piece on Wikipedia’s gender gap has given rise to dozens of great online conversations about why so few women edit Wikipedia. I’ve been reading ALL of it, because I believe we need to understand the origins of our gender gap before we can solve it. And the people talking –on science sites and in online communities and on historian’s blogs— are exactly the ones we should be listening to, because they’re all basically one degree of separation from us already, just by virtue of caring enough to talk about the problem.
So below is a bunch of comments, culled from discussions on many different sites — people talking about experiences on Wikipedia that make them not want to edit. Please note I’ve only included quotes from women, and I’ve aimed to limit the selections to first-person stories more than general speculation and theorizing.
1) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because the editing interface isn’t sufficiently user-friendly.
“Wikis are not very friendly – that’s for sure! I guess I also in the rare 15% because I have not only edited but created Wikipedia pages in the past! Like you, I wish the interface was nicer but I think the whole wiki-point is “stripped down” or perhaps it’s just “for geeks only”.” [1]
2) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they are too busy.
“Want to know why I’m not editing Wikipedia? I’m busy doing science.” [2]
It’s true that study after study after study has found that around the world, women have less free time than men.
But it’s worth also noting though, that a 1992 survey investigating why women didn’t participate much in an academic discussion list found that women were in fact LESS likely to describe themselves as “too busy” to contribute, than men.
“Both men and women,” study author Susan Herring wrote, “said their main reason for not participating was because they were intimidated by the tone of the discussions, though women gave this reason more often than men did. Women were also more negative about the tone of the list. Whereas men tended to say that they found the “slings and arrows” that list members posted “entertaining” (as long as they weren’t directed at them), women reported that the antagonistic exchanges made them want to unsubscribe from the list. One women said it made her want to drop out of the field altogether.” [3]
3) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they aren’t sufficiently self-confident, and editing Wikipedia requires a lot of self-confidence.
“I think my experience may explain some of it – I’ve never edited anything because I’ve never felt I had the necessary expertise in a subject. It was always “oh, I’m sure there’s someone who knows a lot more than me! Besides, who am I to go change what the person before me has written?” Which, now that I think about it, is a very socialised-female kind of behaviour. Boys don’t tend to be encouraged to doubt themselves and defer to others nearly as much.” [4]
“I thought I’d do something about [the gender gap], by updating a wikipedia page on an institution I’ve attended (one of the few things I have felt knowledgeable enough about to contribute to in the past). Sure enough, since I last looked (over a year ago) someone has updated the page to say that women are required to wear skirts and dresses. It’s not true, (although it may be wishful thinking on the part of some old-fashioned administrators). Still . . . I hesitated to correct it . . . because . . . because it’s already on the page . . . because I might be wrong . . . because someone more knowledgeable or influential might have written that . . .” [5]
Not everyone feels self-doubting, though: “It’s not that it intimidates me. It’s more than, well, if I spend three hours carefully composing a concise article on something, complete with blasted citations and attention to formatting consistency, the chances of it being poof!gone the next day are still high, and on top of all my work I don’t get anything back apart from the ineffable sensation of contributing to humanity’s knowledge base. I want friends who will excitedly inform me how pleased they were by my penultimate paragraph, dammit. I want a way to team up with someone who knows the markup and can help iron out problems before stuff gets published. I want a social backbone to keep me contributing and caring, one that doesn’t depend on the frequency of my contributions. Contests for “best article about birds in November”. Basically, give me a LJ-flavored wikipedia editors fan community.” [6]
4) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they are conflict-averse and don’t like Wikipedia’s sometimes-fighty culture.
There is lots of evidence to suggest this is true.
“My research into the gender dynamics of online discussion forums found that men tend to be more adversarial, and to tolerate contentious debate, more than women,” said Susan Herring to a reporter from Discovery News. “Women, in contrast, tend to be more polite and supportive, as well as less assertive … and (they) tend to be turned off by contentiousness, and may avoid online environments that they perceive as contentious.” [7]
This assertion is supported by women themselves — both those who don’t edit Wikipedia, and those who do:
“[E]ven the idea of going on to Wikipedia and trying to edit stuff and getting into fights with dudes makes me too weary to even think about it. I spend enough of my life dealing with pompous men who didn’t get the memo that their penises don’t automatically make them smarter or more mature than any random woman.” [8]
“Wikipedia can be a fighty place, no doubt. To stick around there can require you to be willing to do the virtual equivalent of stomping on someone’s foot when they get in your face, which a lot of women, myself included, find difficult.” [9]
From a commenter on Feministing: “I agree that Wikipedia can seem hostile and cliquish. Quite simply, I am sensitive and the internet is not generally kind to sensitive people. I am not thick-skinned enough for Wikipedia.” [10]
“From the inside,” writes Justine Cassell, professor and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, “Wikipedia may feel like a fight to get one’s voice heard. One gets a sense of this insider view from looking at the “talk page” of many articles, which rather than seeming like collaborations around the construction of knowledge, are full of descriptions of “edit-warring” — where successive editors try to cancel each others’ contributions out — and bitter, contentious arguments about the accuracy of conflicting points of view. Flickr users don’t remove each others’ photos. Youtube videos inspire passionate debate, but one’s contributions are not erased. Despite Wikipedia’s stated principle of the need to maintain a neutral point of view, the reality is that it is not enough to “know something” about friendship bracelets or “Sex and the City.” To have one’s words listened to on Wikipedia, often one must have to debate, defend, and insist that one’s point of view is the only valid one.” [11]
“I think [the gender gap] has to do with many Wikipedia editors being bullies. Women tend to take their marbles and go home instead of putting a lot of effort into something where they get slapped around. I work on biographies of obscure women writers, rather under the radar stuff… contribute to more prominent articles makes one paranoid, anyone can come along and undo your work and leave nasty messages and you get very little oversight.” [12]
“I used to contribute to Wikipedia, but finally quit because I grew tired of the “king of the mountain” attitude they have. You work your tail off on an entry for several YEARS only to have some pimply faced college kid knock it off by putting all manner of crazy stuff on there such as need for “reliable” sources when if they’d taken a moment to actually look at the reference they’d see they were perfectly reliable! I’m done with Wikipedia. It’s not only sexist but agist as well.” [13]
5) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because the information they bring to Wikipedia is too likely to be reverted or deleted.
From a commenter on Pandagon: “When I read about the shortage of women writing for Wikipedia, I immediately thought of this article and the ensuing discussion and the extent to which I do not have the time or emotional energy to fight this fight, over and over.” [14]
Another commenter on the same forum: “Even if I don’t explicitly identify as female in my Wikipedia handle (and I don’t), I still find myself facing attitudes of sexism and gender discrimination, attempts at silencing, “tone” arguments, and an enforced, hegemonic viewpoint that attempts to erase my gender when editing.” [15]
Barbara Fister writes in Inside Higher Ed magazine: “Since the New York Times covered the issue, I’ve heard more stories than I can count of women who gave up contributing because their material was edited out, almost always because it was deemed insufficiently significant. It’s hard to imagine a more insulting rejection, considering the massive amounts of detail provided on gaming, television shows, and arcane bits of military history.” [16]
From a commenter on Feministing: “There was a discussion about [women contributing to Wikipedia] on a violence against women prevention list-serve I am on. The issue was that the Wikipedia entries on the Violence Against Women Movement and Act were very misleading, incorrect in some cases, and slightly sarcastic and minimizing to the work of women rights advocates. Every time an advocate would try to make corrections and update the entries, it would be removed and edited back to it’s original misleading version. I think many advocates felt like it was pointless to try and change it-or didn’t have the same kind of time and energy around it that these majority male editors have to maintain sexist and incorrect posts.” [17]
From a Wikipedia editor at Metafilter: “I can add all kinds of things to male YA authors’ pages with minimal cites and no one says a word. Whereas, every time I try to add a female YA author, or contribute to their pages, I invariably end up with some obnoxious gatekeeper complaining that my cites from Publisher’s Weekly and School Library Journal aren’t NEARLY enough, and besides, this author isn’t SIGNIFICANT enough to have an entry, who cares if she published three books? They’re not NOTEWORTHY. Meanwhile, 1-Book Nobody Dude’s Wikipedia page is 14 printable pages long.” [18]
6) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they find its overall atmosphere misogynist.
“One hostile-to-women thing about Wikipedia I have noticed is that if a movie has a rape scene in it, the wiki article will often say it was a sex scene. When people try to change it, editors change it back and note that unlike “sex”, the word “rape” is not neutral, so it should be left out according to NPOV. Example (this one actually ended up changing “sex” to “make love”, which, oh wow.), example. There are probably more but it’s pretty depressing to seek them out. (It’s not true in cases where the movie is explicitly about rape, like the rape revenge genre that’s got its own page, but please don’t tell me that should assuage my concerns.) There are a few other things I’ve found frustrating about Wikipedia, but discovering that feature was really jarring and made me feel unwelcome there.” [19]
A Wikipedia editor commenting at the blog Shiny Ideas: “Any woman identified as a woman who edits Wikipedia and dares to stumble into some territory some male or group of males has staked out will quickly find that the double standard lives and they will be criticized and their words twisted, even when men who say the same things are ignored or cut some slack. If they dare to persist in holding their ground or acting as equals in the conversation the criticism may escalate to insults and off and on wiki harassment. If a woman complains about a man’s incivility in its various complaint forums, her complaints are not as likely to be taken as seriously as when men complain about other men or about the occasional woman who rocks their world with incivility equal to their own.” [20]
7) Some women find Wikipedia culture to be sexual in ways they find off-putting.
From a comment on the Atlantic Monthly site from a female Wikipedia administrator: “Thankfully, I have never been harassed (much) based on my gender. But, for example, an editor with whom I frequently collaborate used to maintain a gallery of hot chicks in bikinis as a subpage of his userpage. It was ultimately deleted after a deletion discussion, but he was totally oblivious to the fact that things like that create an environment where women do not feel welcome.” [21]
“For what it’s worth, I am offended by the existence of pornography, for a variety of reasons none of which involve my being squeamish about sex,” said a female Wikipedian on the Gender Gap mailing list. “I am not offended by including pornographic images on articles about those types of images. Indeed, I expect Wikipedia to have images illustrating articles whenever possible; I don’t see why we should make an exception for articles about sexuality.” [22]
Another female editor: “In my personal experience, when I have come across material I found offensive I was discouraged from editing in the immediate area (or even commenting) and leaving my name in any way associated with the material. I personally would never generalize this discouragement to other areas of the wiki however. It hasn’t always been explicit material that I have found unpalatable. But I have always felt that there is level of material (of many varieties) on the wikis that I cannot not strongly object to as counter-mission that I wish to campaign for it’s deletion, but that I object to enough on a personal level that I will not do anything to help curate it. Certainly my participation in certain topical areas is discouraged by this. But I don’t know that this fact should be seen as problematic. Isn’t necessary that there be some pieces of material on the Wikimedia projects for every single individual to find objectionable and offensive?” [23]
And another: “I do not find sexually explicit images offensive. There is nothing inherently unencyclopedic about an explicit image, and often they do a better job than a line drawing might (see Coital Alignment Technique, for example. If that line drawing actually gives you an idea of what’s going on, you have better x-ray vision than me. A photo would work far better).” [24]
8) Some women whose primary language has grammatical gender find being addressed by Wikipedia as male off-putting.
From a female Portuguese Wikipedian: “I have no problem with the male “Usuário” (in portuguese). And sincerely, I don’t think the fact of see a male word will push me out Wikippedia. We are quite used to use a male word in portuguese when we don’t know the gender of someone, but yes, would be nice to see a “Usuária” in my page :D” [25]
And from a female German Wikipedian: “I’m one of those women Wikimedia would like to encourage (I’m interested, but I haven’t edited much more than a few typing errors anonymously). I don’t think male words will push people out of Wikipedia – that is, they won’t push out the women that are already in. But I do think that female words could encourage some of the women who are still hesitating and unsure. It says: “Yes, we’re talking to you!” I don’t feel unwanted if someone doesn’t use the female words. But I don’t feel wanted either. I someone does use female words, it feels like it’s more directed to me.” [26]
9) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because social relationships and a welcoming tone are important to them, and Wikipedia offers fewer opportunities for that than other sites.
From a commenter at Metafilter: “Although I mostly avoid editing wikipedia because of the rampant jerkwad factor, and partially because I can’t be bothered to learn the markup to my meticulous satisfaction, a large part of my reason for not contributing my highly esoteric knowledge is that I’m busy contributing elsewhere. Fandom stuff keeps me really busy – we have our own ways of archiving and record keeping and spreading knowledge, and it’s all very skewed towards female. The few times I’ve touched wikipedia, I’ve been struck by how isolating it can feel. It’s a very fend for yourself kind of place for me. Anywhere else online, my first impulse is to put out feelers. I make friends, ask for links to FAQs and guides, and inevitably someone takes me under their wing and shows me the ropes of whatever niche culture I’m obsessed with that month. It’s very collaborative, and prioritizes friendships and enjoyment of pre-existing work over results. Wikipedia isn’t like that, as far as I’ve experienced. There’s no reciprocal culture; to just plunge oneself into the thick of things and start adding information can be highly intimidating, and there’s no structure set up to find like-minded people to assist one’s first attempts. Instead I just find lots and lots of links to lots of information-dense pages.” [27]
Edited on Sunday at noon to add: This post is being talked about on Twitter, which is prompting me to add a little more caveating here. First, I want to be clear that some women obviously do in fact edit Wikipedia: 13% of Wikipedia editors are female. I probably should’ve done a better job calling out that this post is quoting mostly women who’ve tried editing and have stopped, who never tried because of various barriers/impediments, and those who edit despite barriers/impediments. I’m grateful to the women who edit Wikipedia today, whatever their motivations or feelings about Wikipedia may be, and the last thing I want to do is make them feel ignored or invisible or like they don’t matter. Second, a couple of people on Twitter are commenting that a lot of the reasons cited here by women also apply to men. That’s absolutely true. I think Wikipedia needs to become more welcoming and accessible to everyone, and I think the quotations from women here point us towards problems that are experienced by lots of people.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Johanna Janhonen, suepgardner. suepgardner said: Nine Reasons Why Women Don't Edit Wikipedia (in their own words) http://wp.me/pZNtT-9u […]
This blog strikes me as an emotional response to some form of discrimination aimed at females. “MLK said “I have a dream” not “I have a complaint””. He was male, but not sexist. Just because almost every male says females are too emotional to prove a point, doesn’t mean they are saying the females are not even welcome to try. Double standards may dictate that one may take credit for someone else’s work, but the ultimate achievement should be that one’s work was in fact used at all.
I agree with all of this, completely.
My own experience on Wikipedia, and the way I’ve seen women editors treated (and leave) supports these women’s claims. The response of the community was rather insipid, as if it wasn’t a serious problem, and before reading this I thought that your own responses in the media downplayed it a little too. The survey results generated a fraction of the debate that much less important things very frequently get, which I thought was entirely telling.
I don’t mean to sidetrack this discussion, but an important and entirely related collorary is Wikipedia’s exclusion of non-American/non-European editors. This ,extremely thoughtful essay examines some of the reasons why. The article doesn’t examine the credibility to assigned to various classes of sources either, another reinforcing factor in Wikipedia’s exclusion of anything that isn’t important to white male nerds (myself included).
I appreciate your efforts. I’m yet to see anything appreciable from the rest of the Wikimedia/Wikipedia (en) community.
“Wikipedia’s exclusion of anything that isn’t important to white male nerds (myself included)”
I would love to hear what these things are. Everyone comes up with this argument, and never have I read any list of things women are interested to read (in an encyclopedia!), but white male nerds oppose to even have there.
(OTOH, I could produce a long list of things young white male nerds would like to have in de.wikipeda but are denied in a couple of seconds.)
I’m not going to try to provide a list, but I can give you a couple of examples. I was part of a group of people who rescued the article on Lily Collins after it was proposed for deletion (by adding both content and references). Lily had been an actress, columnist, and model, but was not considered notable enough by some editors to have her own article. Attempts by some women to explain why (for instance) being selected to model major designers clothes at major fashion events was notable enough to mention in the article were criticized in the afd. Some editor put snarky comments in the discussion page about using the word “model and the word “writer” in the description of Collins, obviously feeling that the kind of writing she did, although professionally published, somehow didn’t qualify as writing, and her modeling didn’t qualify as professional either. A section on my talk page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Netmouse#Lily_Collins_AfD) I think illustrates the conflict over her article.
I didn’t have any inherent interest in any of those topics, having come across the Lily Collins article in a list maintained by the Article Rescue Squadron.
After I helped with a Strategic task force on Reader Conversion, I tried an experiment in article creation, trying to create an article I thought was possibly more related to female interests than male – a short article about a well-established cleaning product, Bar Keeper’s Friend. It was immediately nominated for speedy deletion. Another editor recognized the article did not qualify for speedy deletion and removed the tag, but I was impressed that my first try demonstrated in spades the challenge of introducing new articles on topics not generally viewed as interesting or appropriate by the guys who dominate the scene.
I don’t know the immediate reasons why Durova left, but that, for me demonstrates how bad the problem is.
This is fascinating – thanks so much for compiling it!
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I don’t edit Wikipedia because I see no reason why I should work for free for Jimmy Wales.
There are already more than enough jobs that women do for free – why on earth would I add to my tasks the drudgery of editing Wikipedia?
That said, I find your analysis offensively patronising.
I’m sorry you find the post patronizing. Seriously. I’m a woman: the last thing I want to do is patronize other women.
But I’ll point out also: there really isn’t much analysis here. All I’ve done is compile a bunch of quotations from women, in their own words, talking about their experiences. That wasn’t an accident — I’d been reading a lot of really loose, broad speculation about women’s motivations, attitudes, behaviours, etc., some of which seemed plausible to me, and some of which didn’t. My goal here was to simply to make it easier to hear what actual women were saying, by collecting their quotes together in a single, easy-to-read post. Lots of signal, not much noise :-)
Some of the observations posted in this article seem a bit overly sensitive. For me Hildegard’s post crystallizes the idea that the fault might not be entirely Wikipedia’s. Womankind has not reached a state of absolute perfection. And as Hildegard’s comment about working for Jimmy Wales illustrates there are idiots in both genders.
<chuckle> Well, some of us do not assume there are only two genders.
Personally, many of the reasons in this catalogue of complaints are why I do not edit Wikipedia. They are reasons to not edit; they are not specifically or exclusively reasons for women (or womyn, or girls, or people born with exclusively XX genes, or any other exclusionary class you choose to identify with) to not edit.
An interesting post. Thanks.
I’m thinking that wikipedia probably has a bigger gender gap than a lot of other sites with a lot of user-contributed material? Haven’t done a systematic survey myself, but my impression is that a lot of fan sites and even more knowledge-based blogs (like scientific blogs, say) have a better representation of women.
I am involved in a volunteer organization with some very fun volunteer opportunities that has significant problems recruiting and retaining women primarily because they simply aren’t as able to commit free time as men.
But, even where there is time, there is also the problem of reticence (?)–women sometimes seem unwilling to grab the opportunity for themselves. A much better recruiting tactic is to tell them we need them, which kinda troubles me.
Conflict aversion seems to be a generational problem to me, though it may well be more prevalent among women. Young people, generally speaking, seem much more averse to standing up alone for their point of view. Young men seem to gravitate to uni-vocal groups, young women to having no opinion. All conflicts of opinion are interpreted as conflicts between people, with little value being given to ideas as such, they being, at best, secondary considerations.
My feeling is that in order for this to change, institutions and organizations and men will have to change, but so will women.
> All conflicts of opinion are interpreted as conflicts between
> people, with little value being given to ideas as such
This is very true, in my experience teaching undergraduates. There seems to be very little training offered at school or home in critical engagement
I would agree with pretty much all these reasons, and I rarely bother to edit WP any more. I haven’t personally encountered problem 6, though I can certainly believe it is a problem. I think the vast majority of people – but a higher proportion of women – are being excluded by aggressive territorial and in-group behaviour. I think it’s similar to the problems that have been seen – and are being addressed to some degree – in free software communities.
[…] Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words) The New York Times piece on Wikipedia’s gender gap has given rise to dozens of great online conversations about why […] […]
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This is really interesting. I remember reading one of the Wiki execs saying something about how they felt their content was “very heavily slanted towards the interests of 20-something male computer geeks” (not a direct quote, I don’t remember the exact phrasing). I wonder if they know people with other perspectives feel excluded and unwanted?
“Flickr users don’t remove each others’ photos. Youtube videos inspire passionate debate, but one’s contributions are not erased.”
That’s because users of those sites can’t do that.
If the contents of this blog were included in a wikipedia article they would be immediately removed. Pretty obvious cherry-picking ([[WP:CHERRY]]). Sad….
Wow, that’s a huge work of research/filtering. thanks you
Well, I’ll admit i already had read some of them, like the NYT’s :)
Wow, this is so depressing that I did not finish reading… I am a woman and an active wiki editor. I have to agree with most of the stuff. I have survived (yup, it was a struggle) by retreating from the fighting scene of pov pushers, revert warriors, trolls, etc. to the obscure corners of Wikipedia where no one else is interested. But that also leaves the place feeling very empty and lonely — if no one is interested, no one will appreciate your hard work. So I see two alternatives: 1) vicious battleground or 2) hollowing loneliness, neither of which are welcoming to women.
Renata, gah, my goal is not to depress you!
A couple of people have pointed out that these issues don’t affect only female editors: most affect anybody who wants to edit. That argues for deep culture change. So the best audience for this post is actually experienced Wikimedia editors, because they’re the people best positioned to help make change.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap
BTW, I just realized 5 out of 9 reasons (#4, 5, 6, 7 &9) can be basically summarized as “Wikipedia=battleground.” And yes, this affect everyone.
Sue, can you please explain how the Foundation will change the wikipedia culture without any involvement of the communities in this change?
Sorry to point at the emperor’s new clothes but, AFAIK this initiative is not a grassroots initiative coming from the communities, but something coming from the outside and driven by (sorry to sound unrespectful) paid staff, and very well paid (it reminds me a lot to the last member of the wikipedia paid staff, Larry Sanger, trying to tell communities how they should behave…), and not by leader wikipedians (sorry Sue, but you’re a mediocre wikipedian, with less than two hundred editions).
The problem you point out is real. The alleged reasons behind that problem are a clear sample of amateurism. Coming here, cherry picking among the mails you’ve received and trying to come out with a conclusion is low-quality original research. I understand that the WMF has to justify somehow why most of the people that donors donate to wikipedia goes actually to pay salaries of people that is unable to do anything for the communities and not to the maintenance of the project. And last but not least, try to say English Wikipedia whenever you now say Wikipedia. The Wikipedia projects are far more than the English Wikipedia. Best regards.
I would agree that it is important to involve the communities in this change. Do you have any suggestions for how to do that? Unfortunately, most of the people hurt by this and complaining about it are not what you would view as active members of the communities, either because they have been discouraged enough to stop participating, or they simply don’t have time to contribute lots of small edits. Sue may work on staff, but most of the people I know who have spoken to me about this issue are not. Just because it’s not an internal-to-the-community-you-know movement doesn’t mean it’s being imposed from the top down.
The culture that only views a person as a good and engaged wikipedian if they’ve made hundreds of edits is (again) one based in a community of people who have a ton of free time on their hands (generally, young men). If that community insists on not valuing the input and work of people who cannot devote that much time to their projects, even if they make high quality contributions, that only reinforces the situation Sue originally blogged about. From time to time I’ve considered getting more involved in the community, but I don’t generally edit controversial (e.g. highly touched) topics so I don’t have much name recognition, plus I don’t qualify for the minimum levels of office because I only have 827 edits to my name – after 5 years of being one of the most active wikipedia editors I know personally (IRL).
“this initiative is not a grassroots initiative coming from the communities”
Everything in Wikipedia happens by majority vote. Any minority view has no power. The majority of active editors on Wikipedia, by default, see no problem at all with taking a combative, hostile attitude to anyone who disagrees with them. The majority of editors on English Wikipedia are young American men with all of the arrogance and insularity one expects from that group – they will never start a grassroots inititiative to bring more people onto Wikipedia who would challenge their perspective and ensure they didn’t always get things all their own way, because they have predefined getting their own way as NPOV, and anyone who challenges that gets kicked off as persistently trying to make challenging edits and “being argumentative” because they don’t submit calmly to the the settled will of young white American men.
The “alleged reasons” are real reasons. I’m a woman, for a while I edited Wikipedia tolerably regularly, then I quit. I might have gone on, but I couldn’t tolerate “the communities”. English Wikipedia is an American encyclopedia edited largely by young American men and so it will always be.
“Flickr users don’t remove each others’ photos. Youtube videos inspire passionate debate, but one’s contributions are not erased”
The result is, however, that there are millions and millions of FlickR photos, and at least hundreds for each popular topic, none of which are (or have to be) considered as at least some kind of “definitive”.
Is this feasible for the text of an encyclopedia? It would mean that we’d have dozens and dozens of different articles on one topic. It’s the opposite of Wikipedia as it is, and it’s not an encyclopedia, but a collection of texts. It’s data, not knowledge.
Where an approach like this _is_ feasible, we already have it: on the Commons. Since the human mind can process 200 photo thumbnails pretty quickly, and chose what one wants to see and explore more deeply, that’s all right there.
200 text definitions to choose from on any given topic would be a nightmare, though. That’s google, not Wikipedia.
Andreas, I could not have said it better. You are exactly right. Flickr and YouTube are not collaborative projects, and are not comparable.
And, frankly, I agree with others that this analysis offensively patronising… As if we « poor wimmin » cannot handle the Wikipédia project environment: it is user friendly to men and not to wimmin; wimmin are busier than men; wimmin are not self-confident enough to edit Wikipédia; wimmin don’t like the « flighty environment », wimmin can’t handle reverts, etc. like men, etc., etc., etc.
Bleah !
I mean, Essa … women said those things.
I like the interpretation that “Wikipedia = battleground; battleground = inhospitable intellectual environment for many people, some of whom are women,” but from the quotes in this article, it does sound like the represented women Wikipedia editors feel that Wikipedia’s harsh atmosphere has gendered qualities.
Where are you seeing the patronization as coming from? From the compiler of this article, from the women themselves, from somewhere else?
Regarding your point 6, whether or not individual female editors are offended by pornography, I’m sure there are many who question why there is so much gratuitous use of pornographic images in WMF projects.
When a Wikipedia admin denies a request to delete a gallery of nearly 700 images (which include images of the insertion of anal beads, “Simulated Forced Fellatio in Bondage”, and topless adolescent girls) because “it’s a gallery of freely licensed images”, what message does that send?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nmatavka/N0rp
The message that we don’t believe in censorship and U.S. puritanism?
Sue, I was so caught up in your post, I got excited and blogged on it and forgot to come back and comment!
I wonder (and this is a question for you and all your thoughtful commentators): since Quora is an open, editable knowledge base, would we expect to see similar issues over time there — or is there already a significant difference in participation by gender that echos Wikipedia’s?
BTW, if you’d like to see how your post became a springboard, my post is here: http://bit.ly/fdEQJc
Reason #1 ought not lead one to a stereotypical misperception. Women are not inherently less competent in technical matters than men. “Geeky tools” are a real problem, but the underlying gender-specific problem is “geek culture”, where norms of discourse create barriers to enquiry for those who are not acculturated to male-dominated geekdom.
Another reason:
Administrators will block any woman on wikipedia if they do not reval themselfs as woman. There are too many males who will stick to “there are no women on the internet” phrase. If you want a place where you can make changes with out being forced to reveal your idenity, wikipedia is not the place for it.
Not that I make an intense effort to hide my identity, but my Wikipedia profile and username do not broadcast my gender and I have certainly never been blocked for it. I’ve made contributions to wikipedia under a gneder-neutral username for five years. It is most certainly possible – don’t be discouraged by this anonymous comment.
Very well done on collating that post Sue, it must have taken a tremendous amount of time to sort through all the material and then categorise.
I certainly recognise the ‘fighty-culture’ from other forums I frequent where I’m often exchanging messages with men. Other forums I am being intentionally and acceptably POV because it’s a discussion based on what one thinks (arguing about current politics in the UK, for example). I’m very different on Wikipedia where the conversation is centred around building something based on reliable sources.
Wikipedia is strange in that you often have to divest yourself of an opinion. That’s not what most forums (and talk pages are often something like a forum) are for. I can see why most people find it hard to change their approach from one place online to another.
Bodnotbod, Wikipedia is not a forum or stump speech venue. It’s an encyclopedia. It should be as fact-based and opinion-free as possible. Of course there are structural biases in it. But I don’t think we should criticize it for trying to be balanced.
And I second your compliment to Sue.
[…] (and also some pointing with a very big stick from less kind Wikipedians). So this well researched article about why women don’t contribute more (13%) to Wikipedia really hit […]
Hi Sue, I just read your post and have blogged about my thoughts as a wiki founder. I run Wikifashion which has a female contributor base of 94%. If you’re interested here’s my post http://lola-pr.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-women-wikis-do-mix.html
This is a great article! I had forgotten about my own post until I got the pingback, so thanks for bringing it back to my attention. (I write Mo’s Blog.)
Have you seen wikifashion.com? It’s a wiki where 94% of the users are women. It’s designed to be visually appealing and user-friendly. If I knew a THING about fashion I might try editing something. I’d love to know if the editorial culture is different there. Could be a very interesting case study.
This is a really excellent blog post, I wish I’d read it before I wrote mine on the subject: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/03/wikipedia-is-dominated-by-men-so-what.html
I don’t think the fact that it’s difficult is enough of a reason to give up the fight though.
I’m a female editor of Wikipedia, as my ID here and there probably make obvious enough. This has never caused any positive or negative reactions that I’ve noticed.
Fortunately my tastes in items to edit generally run in areas that aren’t high traffic. The main problem I’ve dealt with is contentiousness in deletion debates. This worries me when I see it aimed at new editors. It’s not only women, a lot of men leave Wikipedia because they don’t want to deal with the hostility and the revision wars, etc. I also know men who feel they don’t have enough expertise to edit, though someone with less expertise and less interest will come along and edit after they’ve decided they aren’t suitable for the job.
I kind of agree with the agist statement somewhere above. My biggest issue is establishing notability for people and things that were notable just before the internet explosion. They would be so easy to reference and establish… if only I could find the 100s of magazines they were in that don’t happen to be archived on-line… People who are a little young for understanding that will come along and have issues with the items not being the top on-line news of the day. “We used to have these things called print books and magazines…”
In regards to the Hildegard comment above, which I personally found contentious, we do not edit Wikipedia for Jimmy Wales. We edit it for the vast hordes of people who go there for education, research, and general look-up ease.
In general: as with anywhere, the jerks and sexists are on Wikipedia. They are annoying. If you let them drive you off, the verdict is that it is fine for them to decide what is notable and how history should be written. I’m personally too stubborn for that verdict. It’s probably easier for me, though. I’ve been on-line for a couple of decades and rode out the usenet flame wars in my higher energy days (Wikipedia can’t begin to compare). I doubt there are many flames or sexual jabs that would be new to me.
Bravo!
[…] “I believe we need to understand the origins of our gender gap before we can solve it,” scria ea intr-un post recent pe blog-ul personal. […]
“The fish stinks from the head down.” Look at how your Admins handle issues brought to their attention, and you’ll see why many people (not just women!) have left. If those left are primarily young geeks/men, that’s the culture you’ve encouraged, whether on purpose or not. Stop being such enablers of bullies and you’ll start attracting a wider group of people. Although I doubt the sincerity of the desire for ‘diversity’ when your only outreach program is to college students. Same old, same old.
Gina Trapani, creator of Lifehacker, has written a wonderful piece on women in open source at her blog — well worth a read for her valuable insights on community-building and inclusiveness.
http://smarterware.org/7550/designers-women-and-hostility-in-open-source
You don’t need to use only anecdotal evidence about why people don’t edit Wikipedia. We have survey information from 2008 (http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation/Attracting_new_participants_and_retaining_existing_participants). I was on a task force that discussed many of this information (http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Task_force/Reader_Conversion) last year, though we foundered when I hit the exhaustion of the first trimester of my pregnancy and didn’t produce clear recommendations.
I think one issue is obvious, though – it is not easy to figure out how to react when you feel you or your work are getting picked on -how to complain about a user or admin, for instance. And there’s also no real community consensus on notability that you can refer to. –the discussion that’s there is dominated by the (mostly male) voices of existing editors. The inclusionists and the exclusionists just keep circling each other without clear leadership.
Take my article on the artist A. E. London, for instance. Flagged in 2009 as possibly not being notable enough for an article. While, as the NYT article pointed out, there are long articles about fictional characters in video games… With regard to topics like A.E. London, people who are not versed in the subject area have almost no basis for identifying “recognized peer reviewed publications, credible and authoritative books, reputable media sources, and other reliable sources” but even if they try, with regard to gender balance, one might need to note that the vast majority of the published media are still controlled by men. So the definition of notability is one that is tipped in favor of topics that are of interest to men.
Why are girls less likely than guys to edit Wikipedia?…
Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, answers exactly this question on her blog (https://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia-in-their-own-words/). She makes insightful points, backing them up w…
A very resonant and informative piece, certainly reflects my experience online.
It’s important to collect and make available what I heard one woman call ‘pin-pricks’ – everyday reminders that we don’t necessarily belong, or that our contribution isn’t welcome, be they social, physical, environmental or lingustic.
Hollaback is the most obvious example of how this info is collected and disseminated – I almost suggested a ‘sexism wiki’ but we all know how that would turn out ;)
Wikipedia editors indicated that you didn’t belong there because you’re a woman? That your contributions weren’t welcome because you’re a woman? I’d like to see some examples of this. I’ve experienced hostility and rejection of my contributions, but it has nothing to do with my sex.
I rarely edit Wikipedia for some of the reasons given above, particularly no. 5, and I’m a man myself. Generally it’s a contest of who has the most time to sit around and recommit edits that someone else decides to revert or change because they have another opinion, and ultimately if they turn out to have more spare time on their hands, you’ll give up. Plus, there’s the faceless nobodies (with biographies that give long lists of their supposed achievements but nothing on who or where they are) who decide that your subject is “not notable” enough (like my entry on Lynn Gilderdale), or that your sources are trivial or not reliable enough. It’s not democratic, but rather a pseudo-meritocracy of established but faceless editors.
I’ve also had problems with a certain former schoolmate posting a malicious entry about me, which took months to get removed, and reverting my edits as “just my opinion”. On one occasion, I edited the ridiculous entry about Maria Goretti, an Italian peasant girl who became a Catholic saint after dying while resisting rape. The entry was Catholic-biased and suggested that she resisted because the act would be a sin, rather than for the normal reasons a woman resists rape, regardless of their religion. This former schoolmate reverted my edit on the grounds that it was “just my opinion” that women don’t want to be raped. (He really said that.) For a while the guy was cyber-stalking me because I said negative things about our old school. When another old boy exposed him, he jumped back into his hole and left me alone.
Someone who follows a link to this article and thinks “tl;dr” after reading the first few paragraphs is going to come away thinking “women don’t participate in Wikipedia because women are sissies.”
Why is Wikipedia’s misogynist atmosphere Reason #6 rather than Reason #1?
Seriously, does a crappy user interface really get in female users’ way more than that of male users? I would think that this would dissuade casual editing by males and females alike. The user interface is a barrier to entry by anyone; the misogynist atmosphere of the community, on the other hand, is specifically a barrier to entry by women.
[…] Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words) A lot of these make sense to me; after all, they are why I've never edited Wikipedia, and I'm a woman. How widely shared is my experience? I don't know (tags: feminsm wikipedia) […]
I no longer edit Wikipedia primarily because of reason 5, and I’m not surprised that this genders female: Wikipedia is a system where the majority rules absolutely. while 13% female is undoubtedly a lowball estimate (I never identified myself as female on my editors page: why set myself up for sexual harassment from people who disagree with me?) still, it would not surprise me if it represents a minority.
And any minority trying to edit Wikipedia will find their contributions tend to be disrespected and deleted by the majority.
I don’t edit Wikipedia because I’m not interested in repeatedly peeing on the same fire hydrant.
I edited once and was deleted. I added a verse to a nursery rhyme that my 100 year old aunt told me they used to sing at school. I thought it was valid.
The aggressive deleting actions of ignorant US culturally imperialistic pimply teenager-oids in things like misunderstanding and declaring the Aussie Govt “12 Canoes” Project as just a cheap rip off of the “10 Canoes” movie and deleting the whole entry just disgusted me and was pretty much the start of the end. Protesting just labels you as an Argumentative Troublemaker. Less than 10% of ‘contributers’ are considered ‘current’ too.
Thanks for posting this. It’s a fascinating read. I edit wikipedia and my username makes my gender obvious (it’s my real name). I started by making minor edits, like typos and grammar. As I gained more confidence, I started making more significant edits. I haven’t had a lot of negative encounters, the other users and moderators have been very civil with me. I don’t take it personally if my posts get deleted – I recognize that it usually happens with ‘living persons’ (that I assume publicists who monitor their wikis for anything potentially negative). I also do most of my serious edits on very academic topics – especially my areas of expertise (archaeology, ancient history, etc). They are probably very low traffic and people have less invested in their content.
I think that more women need to be on Wikipedia, it is the only way to confront and fix the gender gap.
Agreed: thank you for writing this. And for editing :-)
[…] Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (interesting in light of the recent spout of incidents we’ve watched, notably the one with Nick […]
Hello all! I like this forum, i organize multifarious inviting people on this forum.!!!
Great Community, good all!
I’m male and I quit actively editing Wikipedia for a lot of these reasons. Not sure why you present them all as sexism issues when they’re not.
Oh I didn’t mean to present them as sexism issues necessarily. They’re reasons women cited for stopping editing (or never editing in the first place). Presumably lots of men would cite the same reasons as well.
[…] including this recent NYT story. WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote this insightful blog post on the topic as […]
[…] including this recent NYT story. WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote this insightful blog post on the topic as […]
[…] The New York Times, la Directora Ejecutiva de la Fundación Wikipedia, Sue Gardner, publicaba un artículo en su blog explicando las posibles razones por las que las mujeres se sentían menos atraídas por la […]
[…] reported, only 13 percent of the people editing Wikipedia articles are women. Though there are endless articles debating the causes, my interest lies elsewhere: What can be done to change […]
[…] speaking, I opened up the floor to the women there and – using the nine points discussed by Sue Gardner in her blog post from February as a starting point – we talked and discussed why we thought women remained a minority on […]
Just had a perfect example – having added a page to Wikipedia – one of Han Suyin’s novels, The Mountain is Young, set in Nepal at the time of the King’s Coronation – has promptly been deemed “not notable” by a male gatekeeper who evidently thinks a book by a woman writer with a Chinese name can’t possibly be worth having in Wikipedia. What’s the point?
Hello! This is very interesting.
I have just come from a dispute with a male editor of Wickipeidia, and I think it may prove of interest, as it illustrates some of your points.
I recently wrote an article about the absurd, low brow but influeemtial misogonystic epic film ‘Troy’ because I was so concerned at the lack of response from viewers over the distasteful romantisizing of Potential Rapist and Potential Victim in the film. This was published in the fword July issue, ‘Brieseis in Troy and Stockholm Syndrome’. [[http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/2011/06/briseis_in_troy]]
For part of my research, I read an article on it on Wickipeidia and recently, t hiking how it avoided mentioning the abusive relationship aspect between the characters Achilles and Briseis, I visited the site and added a couple of alterations to the plot summary, and asked in the discussion if I could create a link to my article under ‘outside sites.’ The alterations were immediately deleted by an abrupt male reviewer. I expressed no opinion in t hese, merely stating that the film’s Achilles had been violent to his captive (which undeniably happens) and that she feared rape from him ( which is why she tries to kill him].
Theis male editor accused me of having tried to use my article as independent research to back my alterations, when ezines were excluded by t he guidelines. I hadn’t in fact used it as evidence, merely asked if I could list it as a connected article. When I pointed out that violence in the film towards woman and the whole abusive relationship was being glossed over, the editor continued to lecture me about ‘neutral point of view’. When I suggested that he was being ‘uncivil’ he accused me of not even having read the guidleines (I had) and said that that was my problem.
When I asked why ‘romantic’ details had been left in, whereas t he details I had raised were excluded, he made no reply… I read his details; he describes himself as ‘right wing’ a gun owner, and a proud father.
I believe there is some sort of appeals process, but it is obscure, and I don’t know if I an be bothered, yet I find it sinister that this project passes as in any way netural if an administrator can get away with this…
On the blade runner article it says “forcibly compels her”
so leaving sex is perfectly fine because, as they said, it’s neutral.
[…] post Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words) found that some women are put off by the editorial in-fighting or note that the information they […]
I admit that I am a woman who frequents Wikipedia and edits Wikipedia (to correct anything, mostly minor errors) since she was 15 years old in 2006. I do rather minor edits, such as fixing typos or recategorizing information. Thus, I usually do not experience any real edit warring or disputes. Recently, I edited anonymously on the Microwave article on the English Wikipedia, and for some strange reason, that registered user kept reverting my changes, saying that “microwaves are radio waves”. The result was an edit war, because I kept changing the article to “microwaves are electromagnetic waves”. Then, the page was semi-protected, so I got a new account (my old one was irretrievable, because there was no e-mail attached to it) and made a compromise: that microwaves were a subset of radio waves. I also made the word “electromagnetic wave” in the upper tag a link, because I wanted to hint that microwaves were electromagnetic waves. I didn’t really get why such a little change would cause an edit war. As an anonymous editor and registered user, I have never felt discouraged to the point that I would stop editing altogether. If I see a typo, I suddenly get the urge to edit Wikipedia and correct it.
The following comic may be of interest to readers of this blog.
http://www.icanbarelydraw.com/comic/629
[…] Cohen, led to the creation of a new internal discussion over the site’s gender balance, a renewed outreach effort by Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardener, and and a Wikipedia “fork” of the Change […]
I’m a woman and I edit Wikipedia regularly. Many of these comments seem to be by people who swung by WP, wrote a brief article without actually learning how to do so according to WP guidelines, then got upset because their article wasn’t “notable.” First of all, it’s not the subject matter that determines notability, but rather the scholarship of the article, so simply writing a few paragraphs without having any books (which are preferred to online citations, not the other way round) or essays or much at all besides one’s own ideas about the subject will definitely get it tagged as being problematic. The other thing is that there seems to be an idea that WP is a bunch of essays–it’s not. For those who are really working at making it a place of accurate information, again it’s scholarship that counts. None of our opinions matter within the articles themselves. And if you’ve done the scholarship and have the sources and citations to prove it, no one can win an argument for deletion of your article. On the other hand, when there are content disputes, one really should care enough about the work done to stand by it and be willing to fight to keep it (by which I mean exert strenuous effort, not argue for the sake of arguing).
I use a non-gender specific name and most people assume I am male–they do not assume I am female and fight with me for that reason. And I have a couple of relationships with other female editors and we look out for one another. The biggest problem I deal with is anonymous editors vandalizing articles, or adding nonsense without paying any attention to whether it’s appropriate or properly sourced, or people who want to assert an opinion about a movie, rather than read essays by film scholars and then create content that reflects that scholarship. I protect the content I’ve contributed, and when I run into others who are doing the same, I expect to discuss what I have to contribute with them, and often have to remind them that too much protection is a bad thing in a community environment. But I expect to be required to deal substantively, not through opinions or whining or bullying. And I don’t tolerate those things being used against me. WP can be a good place to keep one’s writing skills honed, learn new things, read new things in order to create new content. It’s not a casual place like a fan site might be, and it’s not a social network. It’s an encyclopedia, and therefore, substance is what counts most. And it is true that confidence is required, as you will be expected to explain yourself intelligently. I find that stimulating, not intimidating.
Hi MirrorGirl: I became a WIki editor in June 2006. I have 2000+ live edits on Wikipedia and have edited 708 unique pages, of which over half are articles, nearly one-fifth Talk pages and about one-sixth User Talk pages. I’ve created a dozen new pages at last count. I didn’t quit Wikipedia because I couldn’t learn how to do it. I quit Wikipedia because I chose not to invest my energies in trying to create an accurate and complete information resource inclusive of my own country when the Americans who are the majority on English Wikipedia were in charge, by overriding majority vote, of what gets to be counted “notable”.
I quit Wikipedia in 2008 for reasons outlined on User page on Wikipedia, too tedious to relate here: I realised that to be a true Wikipedian you have to think of the endless endless stupid battles as the POINT of editing Wikipedia – you can’t just be someone who likes research and wants to add information, you’ve got to enjoy the fight. Well, I don’t.
I went back to Wikipedia briefly in 2011 in order to add material to a UK-specific issue which I deemed necessary as the Wikipedia page in question was definitely being used as a media resource in a current news story. I found it strangely enjoyable and added a few new pages and expanded some material on related pages, just for the hell of it.
Then I made the mistake of adding a page for a notable novel by an internationally-renowed writer with one-a-them-funny-foreign-unAmerican names, making clear in the body of the text WHY this book was notable… only to find that yeah, Americans – a book is “notable” if it’s been referenced in the Rough Guide to Nepal, by God, but not if it’s just a famous novel about a notable historical event that took place somewhere far away from America.
I quit WIkipedia because it wasn’t worth my time.
Quick P.S. Go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:American_Psycho#Plot_summary_madness
to the section called Plot Summary Madness and see a discussion between me, an experienced editor, and an anonymous one about dealing with rewriting the plot summary, and go to the articles’ main page to see that his ideas were incorporated. I can’t guarantee that all WP editors will deal as respectfully with an anon. editor or a newbie, but I certainly do, even though, in this case, the anon had no intention of sticking around to keep on top of the work he had done, but was content to leave it to me and other, more dedicated editors to protect the changes (which is irritating, believe me). Our discussion includes an explanation of why his ideas weren’t immediately adopted or accepted, and goes on to explain how to proceed with those ideas. This one exchange illustrates both a big problem and some solutions.
The point at which I personally think I should have quit Wikipedia as not worth my time, was the discovery that Wikipedia will list porn films as “notable”. A bunch of porn actors who specialised in “lesbian scenes” were listed as “Notable Lesbians” because they’d done more than a hundred porn movies,
But, try to add one novel by Han Suyin… ooh, no, can’t be doing with THAT.
I’m sorry that you have had such a disappointing experience on Wikipedia, but don’t quite follow the argument of your last post. Where does Wikipedia have a list of “notable porn films” or “Notable lesbians”? When I search on those terms, I don’t find anything. Articles will be written about things that exist, even things some people don’t approve of, like pornography, conspiracy theories, Nazism. “Notable” doesn’t mean “good” or “great”; it merely means known, and any such article still has to meet guidelines of scholarship or it will be tagged and possibly deleted. “Notability” is a concept on WP that has to do with the quality of the scholarship, as I’ve already stated, not the fame of the (in this case) book you mentioned.
But what has the presence of articles about pornography have to do with your article on Han Suyin’s book? Your article, such as it is, is there, just as you wrote it. It hasn’t been deleted. I read it. I can see that you didn’t follow the usual format for writing an article about a book, and would suggest you do so–look at several first–then find reviews, articles, essays, whatever, about that book and put together an article that includes the sort of information one usually expects to find for a book. Then improve the prose, list your references properly, and there should be nothing left to criticize.
To suggest that your article is being criticized unfairly because it’s not about porn, or that if it weren’t for all those porn articles there would be room for yours (or whatever your point is) is silly. I would criticize your article as being incomplete and not particularly well-written, and would make suggestions for improvement on the Talk page (the suggestions I made above). If you think the book is important enough to write about, do it properly and challenge anyone who thinks it should be deleted. It hasn’t been deleted even in its very brief form, has no tags on it, so what is your complaint? Why are you claiming that one “can’t be doing THAT” when you’ve clearly done it and it is sitting right there for anyone to read?
You’ve made several untrue claims in that last post, and anyone can see for themselves that you’ve grossly mis-stated the facts. If that has been your style on Wikipedia, of course you’ve run into problems. We have to be able to back up everything we say and are expected to have sources and cite them to prove what we’ve written is true. You could not cite any of your above claims because they are demonstrably incorrect–that won’t fly on Wikipedia.
And your assertion that Americans are running the show is not my experience. Two of the strongest voices on Wikipedia, Malleus Fatuorum and The Parrot of Doom are British, have a slew of excellent articles under their belts, and are just two I can name off the top of my head. There are many more.
“Where does Wikipedia have a list of “notable porn films” or “Notable lesbians”? ”
God knows. Back in 2006 I was trying to improve a category on notable LGBT people, and found that it included a bunch of porn stars who were defined as notable lesbians because they’d had very convincing lesbian scenes. I removed them from the category and got into a discussion with another editor who told me that the Wikipedia decision was that a porn star was “notable” if they’d been in at least 100 movies. I established that this was true, looking through a bunch of back arguments about how many movies porn stars had been in: I thought that was moronic, but not a battle worth fighting.
“To suggest that your article is being criticized unfairly because it’s not about porn, or that if it weren’t for all those porn articles there would be room for yours (or whatever your point is) is silly”
Straw man! Try arguing what I’m actually saying.
“I can see that you didn’t follow the usual format for writing an article about a book, and would suggest you do so–look at several first–then find reviews, articles, essays, whatever, about that book and put together an article that includes the sort of information one usually expects to find for a book. ”
The main reason The Mountain Is Young is notable is because it’s about the coronation of the King of Nepal in 1956. Why bother trying to “improve” this when a depiction of an extremely notable event is not regarded as notable, but a reference from The Rough Guide To Nepal is?
And your assertion that Americans are running the show is not my experience.
My experience is that any discussion on Wikipedia, majority vote wins. And on English Wikipedia, Americans are in the majority. It’s Americans who get to decide, for me, whether Scottish events are “notable”.
Yonmei: I also saw on your Talk page an argument over an article you wrote (Remember When) that was so brief and sketchy it didn’t meet notability requirements, but when asked to please improve the article so it wouldn’t get deleted, you simply chose to assert that there was no point because Americans ruled the place and that was why your article was having problems. You were being offered support by and American, yet chose to just blame others, then call it a day rather than do the work necessary to make the article a keeper. That isn’t a particularly sensible strategy for anything except self-defeat, which you accomplished in that instance.
You also have a history of edit-warring rather than discussing problems and resolving them, and seem to have been attracted to very controversial subjects. Taking on controversial subjects requires three things: a level head, a strong constitution, and an almost limitless amount of patience. If you have none of those things, it’s better to stay away from such articles. They are, by definition, battle zones. I stay away from them myself because I want to enjoy my efforts on WP. I admire those who take them on successfully, though, as they are valuable to the community.
It seems to me, just based on your comments here and your Talk page, that you are not suited to the environment on Wikipedia–many people aren’t, no shame in that. But to blame everyone else for the problems you ran into is disingenuous. Your difficulties were clearly at least partly self-created, so maybe take a look at that and come back with a different attitude about the process, or at least stop mis-representing it here.
“I also saw on your Talk page an argument over an article you wrote (Remember When) that was so brief and sketchy it didn’t meet notability requirements, but when asked to please improve the article so it wouldn’t get deleted, you simply chose to assert that there was no point because Americans ruled the place and that was why your article was having problems.”
Yep. I’d written an article earlier on Aberdeen Pride. It got deleted because, in the estimation of the Americans running Wikipedia, it just wasn’t “notable”. I tried to defend that, got outvoted – I was the only Scot in the discussion – and by the time Remember When got challenged, I just thought it wasn’t worth my time: I could have written a lengthy essay as a Scot on why it mattered, I could not expand on the RW page myself for reasons I can’t discuss here, and all in all: why waste my time?
“It seems to me, just based on your comments here and your Talk page, that you are not suited to the environment on Wikipedia”
I agree with that! What I was challenging was your bland and unsourced view that I was dissing Wikipedia based on lack of experience. Plenty of damn experience – just bad experience.
And your sarcastic comment about how the article was dissed because it was written by “an internationally-renowed writer with one-a-them-funny-foreign-unAmerican names” is patently absurd and, again, demonstrably untrue. Han Suyin has an article all to herself, with a full list of her books. It could be improved, but obviously no one thinks she’s too “unAmerican” for English Wikipedia.
“patently absurd”
I agree. But it happened. You don’t have to take my word for it; go read the Talk page of The Mountain Is Young.
“It could be improved”
I agree. But I’m bloody well not going to bother when the first time I tried to improve it I got hit with a demand to “prove” that The Mountain Is Young is “Notable”. Why should I waste my time trying to improve a page that the Americans on Wikipedia really don’t want improved?
I’m not sure what “straw man” means in this context, but if you think I am a man, please note both my user name here and the fact that I immediately identified myself as female.
My point, which was made by others at WP and which you have steadfastly refused to understand, is that when you originate an article you must do it properly or else it may be too brief and sketchy to meet notability requirements. Once again, notability means NOT that the subject is objectively notable, but that you’ve fleshed out the subject with scholarship, reviews, commentary, a plot summary (in the case of a book or film), information about its reception, so the ARTICLE IS NOTABLE. The ARTICLE must be notable, not the subject matter. Do you see? IF there isn’t enough information available on a subject so that making a fleshed-out article is possible, then it may be reasonably concluded that the reason for the lack of information is that the (in this case) book is so little-known as to be considered “not notable.” But I would never let that stop me. I’d find everything available and put it all in and do it according to the correct format, and then fight for it. If it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing right. And your article, for all its brevity and incompleteness is still there. No one has deleted it. It is you who have chosen to only half-birth the article, then abandon it because ONE person questioned its importance. Right now I’d suggest that the best reason for its deletion is that the originator of the article didn’t herself feel it was worth her time and energy. Your article on the Pride group was clearly neither well-developed enough nor well-defended enough to survive. Look at the article about the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Gay_Pride_Parade and follow it as a guide, with history, photos, dates, founders, etc., and then dare anyone to call it “non-notable.” They will lose and you will win, no matter any of you live.
All of your posts show a curiously circular logic which always come back to “I was a victim of the mean, arbitrary American bullies on Wikipedia and that’s why women don’t edit on Wikipedia.” Take some responsibility for the fact that your own lack of understanding of how to make articles, your rejection of all assistance and advice, and an absence of fortitude in the face of even the slightest opposition are the major reasons you “had” to quit Wikipedia. I have fought harder for a grammar fix than you have for your supposedly important articles.
And one can’t prove notability through the writing of a “lengthy essay.” You must make the article substantive and well-sourced, and again, NO ONE WILL BE ABLE TO WIN THE ARGUMENT AGAINST YOU. I will come to your defense myself (as others have offered to do) if you will put in the work to do it right and stop blathering on about side-issues, all of which are all clearly excuses to avoid learning what it takes to make a proper article for Wikipedia. I will leave a message on your Talk page so you can find me there if you like. I won’t support you because you’re female, or because you feel wronged, but I will support you if you decide to try again to make a good article about Aberdeen Pride, and will advise you on how to ensure your book article doesn’t get deleted. I haven’t read the book myself, so I’m not sure how much I can contribute to the article, but if the book is as important as you say it is, there must be stuff out there that will allow you to flesh out the article. You could start by writing a plot summary and finding a review or two to quote and cite. It’s hardly hopeless–it just needs some time and energy. From you.
If you’re still paying attention, User Netmouse just expanded your [[The Mountain is Young]] article in exactly the ways I’ve suggested. It didn’t take much work or time to find a NY Times review and put in a plot summary. And he left a kind and helpful note on your talk page.
Thank you for copyediting The Mountain is Young – my edits were a bit rushed. But I wanted to correct your assumption: Netmouse is not male. My user profile makes an effort to stay gender neutral but it’s pretty easy to follow links to netmouse.com and find out my real identity. I visited [[The Mountain is Young]] because of this discussion. I was disappointed to note that it has no Talk page, since Yonmei specifically suggested you go read it. Perhaps she was thinking of the page history. And I forgot in my comment on her talk page to point out that just as all books are not notable, so also all books by a notable author are not necessarily notable themselves.
I disagree with your assertion, however, that it is not the subject but the article that has to be notable. I think the subject needs to be notable. IMHO you can find a lot of media and even scholarly coverage of material that’s not really worth putting in Wikipedia. And it can be hard to find coverage of stuff that is important but not mainstream. But some should exist, if something really is notable, though it may be in publications that are themselves difficult to get other (mostly mainstream white male) editors to accept as references. What the article needs to do, however, is demonstrate the notability of the subject. You can’t just write “this exists”, you have to explain, “this exists, and here’s why it exists, why people care, and how it influenced the world.” You can’t expect other editors to read your mind as to why you thought it was worth making an article. You have to make it clear as day in the content of the article itself.
I didn’t assume you were male, but I use proper English (as I’m a writer) which unfortunately means I just can’t bring myself to say “they” as others do. Thank you for clearing that up, though.
My understanding of notability is based on what others have said to me when evaluating articles. If the sources use are acceptable to Wikipedia, and there is enough material to make an article substantive and it’s well-written, notability is generally established through that. The problem is really axiomatic, in my opinion: if there is enough scholarship in the larger world about a subject, then it’s likely to make a good article and no one will object to it. If there’s nothing out there, then that’s the proof that the subject isn’t notable. The proof is the pudding, in other words.
I may be living in some sort of weird denial land, but this constant insistence that white males (American) are ruining it for the rest of us just isn’t so in my own experience. I have never successfully been beaten down by anyone, and if I allowed myself to be I would blame myself for the lack of backbone, not them for taking advantage of someone who can’t stand up for herself. As you’ve just proven, we can’t tell what someone’s gender is by user name, so how are you all so sure that white men are a problem? They may out-number us, but they don’t have to defeat us, not without our permission. At 53 years old (and as a former long-time director) I just don’t lie down for anyone, whatever their gender or their age. I don’t fight nasty, either. I just stand up.
And as far as I know, a publication helmed by Tina Brown gets as much credence on WP as one by Graydon Carter. Can you name some female-written publications or books that you’ve been unsuccessful in getting these men to accept as reliable sources as per WP policy?
I got involved in a (successful) Article Rescue Squadron effort to rescue the article on Lily Collins in late 2009. Not a topic I would normally be interested in, but I found it notable that editors were insisting the subject was not a model, even though she had been designated as a Best Model by a major magazine. I don’t remember the details but I believe if you scan the talk page and the (now archived) AfD, you can see what I mean. There was also a particular editor who would not listen to women who were saying that particular activities by the subject (that had received media coverage and were not otherwise in dispute) were in fact considered notable in the world of fashion. He actually came and discussed it on my talk page – he thought they were saying that he was being unreasonable he should have heard of the subject before, when nobody in the AfD had said that. They were quoting publications indicating the subject was notable, and he was failing to see their point.
I have since studied issues of racism and other forms of oppression and you tend to see that sort of pattern – the person in power has trouble following the logic of the minority, gets defensive about any suggestion his (power-causing attribute, e.g. gender) is affecting his perception of the situation, and tends to perceive the minority as being much more upset and unreasonable than they are really being.
As an aside, I think there really are quite a few subjects that don’t get coverage in media that some Wikipedia editors respect. I have in the past been involved in defending pages about webcomics, for instance, which are almost never discussed in print media – the entire community of authors, artists, and critics who are interested in webcomics is on the internet, and the only substantial coverage, awards, etc, at the time were all from internet-based or industry-internal sources that some editors insisted were not valid sources. I know of pages that have been deleted on that basis.
I did notice that, and felt warm and friendly about Wikipedia for the first time in quite a while – as your berating us all for being inferior editors did not.
Still notable that it’s got to be an American newspaper, though…. *grin*
Gender gaps may be due to different interests or different personalities. In high school, I attended two different school clubs simply because they sounded interested and had no “pay dues” and required far less socializing (Chess Club and Quiz Team). One just needed to go in and do. Most of the time, I was the only female in both. In university, I associated myself consistently with the “Astronomical Society”, an extracurricular club on campus, simply because I could listen to interesting lectures about astronomy, cosmology, and eat free pizza and pop. Similarly, the number of women in this club is often greatly outnumbered by the number of men. Most people in the said club are Astronomy majors, Physics majors, or general science majors (Chemistry & Biology).
The experience of a lone woman (or one of a small number of women) greatly outnumbered by men in a group, is a whole other discussion topic.
Yonmei: I have not berated you for being “inferior editors”! I have felt that you were blaming others because, as anyone who reads your comments can see, you are! And your Talk page reveals your history. I didn’t make any of that up.
I am quite accustomed to being the only female in an all-male world. I began film school in 1981 when the debate about whether women could direct was raging (despite decades of women directors in Europe) and was the only woman in the dept. until my last year. My entire crew was male, many of whom were older than I, but I rose to the challenge and excelled in school and went on to start my own film company and make my own films for 15 years, and to shoot/rewrite/produce other people’s films for even longer, until illness left me unable to do so. And I did it all without being belligerent about males dominating the field. What did I care about that, except philosophically? I cared that I became the best director I could be, and although editing Wikipedia is hardly in that class of endeavor, my attitude there is the same–I do the best work I can, I stand up for myself, I ally with others, I do not throw fits or edit-war, I explain my reasons for writing or rewriting what I do, I work on cooperative efforts with anyone who wants to work with me, and in all ways bring my best to the table. That is how one wins respect, not through blaming and whining about unfairness. I had to work hard to be taken seriously as a film director, and the fact that I was taken so was due to my work and my strength of character, not to mention the fact that I never, in a million years, would have even suggested that I was at a disadvantage due to my sex. To do so is to give power to the idea, as well as to those who are looking for weakness and a way to exert themselves against another (and it happens to men who can’t stand up for themselves, either, not just women). Unless I agree to be downtrodden, no one can do it. My suggestion is that you stop subscribing to the notion that you are at an unfair advantage and simply step up your game. I would say that to anyone, of any sex, age, nationality. It is not necessary for men to “make room” for women–the space exists already. We just have to step into it with confidence and expertise and claim it as our own.
Two women just came in and helped to ensure the survival of your article for you. No one gave us any trouble about it, and if they had done so, they would have had to deal with me. They would not have won any points against me, I can assure you. The article is improved, and you should be happy about that. You might try saying, “Thank you,” too. And lose the dig about the American publication being the “only” acceptable one–clearly it was the only one she found, or there would have been others. You really are not helping yourself here, or there. It appears that no one and nothing quite pleases you sufficiently to stop the complaints.
I may be missing the point here on what you’re trying to say, but I think my point about being a lone woman is on-topic, as this blog post all about the “nine reasons why women don’t edit Wikipedia in their own words”, which discusses the gender imbalance between the men-to-women ratio on Wikipedia.
I am merely pointing out a possibility that this “gender bias” may merely be a product of differing interests and personalities in a particular situation or social group rather than a systemic bias against females. If I had gone to a different school, I may have encountered more females. Perhaps, I just happen to be at a place and time (2004-2008 were my high school years) when women at my high school were simply not interested in the same activities as I did. I also joined Creative Writing Club in high school, because I loved writing, and OMG, girls greatly outnumbered boys. Actually, the only male in the classroom was the teacher/advisor and an occasional fellow student. :P
And I just copy-edited it for you, so the prose is much improved. I doubt this article will again be tagged, though there is probably more that could be done to expand it.
K.L.’s here again!
I have been receiving notifications to this blog for the past few days (probably because this blog takes full advantage of submitted e-mail addresses), and read all the posts behind my former post, and it seems that there may be an additional reason why more women do not edit Wikipedia: that they do far less research. This reason may tie closely with “having less time”, or it may stand by itself as a reason that may indicate the women’s overall or typical personality on Wikipedia, in which case I do not think there is much to do about it.
I think one needs to understand that not everything depends on discrimination. Gender gaps may be due to different interests or different personalities. In high school, I attended two different school clubs simply because they sounded interested and had no “pay dues” and required far less socializing (Chess Club and Quiz Team). One just needed to go in and do. Most of the time, I was the only female in both. In university, I associated myself consistently with the “Astronomical Society”, an extracurricular club on campus, simply because I could listen to interesting lectures about astronomy, cosmology, and eat free pizza and pop. Similarly, the number of women in this club is often greatly outnumbered by the number of men. Most people in the said club are Astronomy majors, Physics majors, or general science majors (Chemistry & Biology).
I also think the “bias” depends on which Wikipedia one is editing on. Some Wikipedias are far more developed than others, and thus require fewer editors and edits. Some Wikipedias (such as the Simple English Wikipedia) have a lot more work to do before being considered fully usable. The more developed Wikipedias may consist of older men and women, whereas newbies (especially female newbies) may be more likely to use the resource than to contribute to it.
Interesting that Wikipedia thinks that the word “cunt” is alright to use. There’s a guy Malleus Fatuorum, who regularly calls other editors “cunts”, and uses other sexually derogatory terms, yet he is considered one of the best editors on Wikipedia.
That is the culture there.
There’s an immediate response on Wikipedia to this post of mine above!
“I would prefer such words not be used (I do understand that British usage is different from American usage, though some women may not realize that), as I don’t think they’re particularly helpful, but it doesn’t make me feel that it should be banned, or that the user should be banned. I object not because I’m a prude or averse to bad language per se (as you’d know if you heard me in conversation with my friends), but because it ends up making the argument about something else instead of the actual substance of the issue. It takes time and energy away from the real problem. …”–TEHodson
That’s what’s wrong with Wikipedia! Read the talk pages! They are consumed with this sort of stuff, not writing articles.
Wow. Someone complaining about rudeness on Wikipedia just lifted my comment from a friend’s Talk page and posted it here. If that isn’t rude, I’m not sure what is. Here there is no context for my comment, nor any of the other comments on either side of it. Call me a “cunt” if you like, but do not do that again. How dare you use my comment to try to make your point? You failed, by the way, but that’s what happens when you resort to such tactics instead of speaking for yourself, Mr. Cook. I think you have just illustrated why people might be driven to use the sort of language you are decrying.
Article Talk pages are for discussing articles. User Talk pages are for exactly the purpose we’re using them: talking about writing on Wikipedia, and the conversation from which this comment was lifted is about this very blog. Where would you suggest we discuss it? Give me your user name and I’ll happily move the conversation to your Talk page and explain it to you personally.
There was a fashion among a certain class of women some years ago to have their breasts tattooed, one mild ale, the other bitter (beer) –User_talk:Malleus_Fatuorum|Fatuorum 23:00, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
Typical talk topic on Wikipedia
Look at that: friends enjoying a relaxed chat on a user’s talk page. Men and women getting along nicely, everyone joking and sharing stories. Thank you for sharing with the world how much fun some of us have there. Couldn’t have made the point better myself.
[…] Nine reasons women don’t edit Wikipedia (in their own words) | Sue Gardner’s Blog […]
Is this blog shut down, no longer accepting comments? If this is the case, say so. My comment above has been there for several days “awaiting moderation”.
There is currently an ArbCom case on Wikipedia (over “Civility”) that arose because a long time editor continues to call women “cunts”. Apparently Arbcom can’t decide whether it is OK on Wikipedia to use terms derogatory to women.
This case cannot be discussed here? Seems to me it pertains to the general topic of why women may not feel comfortable editing on Wikipedia.
I would expect that Sue was busy these last few days–the Wikipedia blackout and all, you know?
And Cook, you have mis-stated the case: the ArbCom case is not being conducted because a user calls women cunts–he has a habit of using language with other uses of both sexes that some users of both sexes find offensive. Women may be especially shocked at some of the words used, but they are not, as you claim, directed at women exclusively, or because they’re women. In fact, most of the disputes seem to be between male editors.
You yourself have here demonstrated a problem that certainly does exist at Wikipedia: the using by one disgrunted (and in this case, banned) user the comments of others out of context, misrepresenting problems, and personalizing things have nothing to do with you. It is difficult to take anything you say seriously when you’ve lifted bits and pieces of a converstation between friends on a user’s talk page and, without permission from any of us, posted them here and claimed they’re examples of something else entirely. I find that extremely uncivil, and not good faith behavior by any means.
The ArbCom case did not arise “because a long time editor continues to call women ‘cunts'”. That is entirely inaccurate. Do try to get your facts right.
Is the information on Wikipedia sound?
As in correct, useful, reliable?
If yes – does it matter who put it there?
Richie–Some of the information on Wikipedia is very sound, some not at all. One problem with the open-door editing policy is that anyone can go in anonymously or under a user name and replace good info with bad, or bad with worse. They can type in “blahblahblah” and, indeed, have done just that, and during the seconds, minutes, or hours before it gets caught and corrected, that’s what it’ll say. A great deal of time is spent dealing with vandalism and people sticking in their own opinions instead of encyclopedic information. I would say it’s a good place to get a quick hit on a subject, but it should not be considered infallible by any means. Or complete. It horrified me to hear that the blackout would cause problems for kids doing their homework–they shouldn’t be using WP for serious research at all, in my opinion! And I write for it! But for an overview of a subject, it’s not a bad place to start.
And does it matter who put it there? Not to me, but then I have a strong constitution and do not faint away at the use of strong language by irritated and fed-up editors who are fighting for the integrity of their work. What offends me is immature editors (usually on the popular culture pages) who throw a hissy fit when their favorite bit of fan cruft is edited out of an article; that’s my pet peeve. Or anyone whose attitude is “poor me; someone was mean to me!” And of course, people who get their facts entirely wrong (as above) and yet base their strident complaints on their own misinformation. Regarding the ArbCom case, I much prefer civility, but I’ve been called uncivil and taken to task for writing, “Grammar, people; watch your grammar” in an edit summary, so who is to say what civility is? There are a lot of silly people on Wikipedia, as in the rest of the world.
[…] According to recent data, only 9 percent of active Wikipedia editors are female. In surveys and conversations with women, some common reasons given for not editing Wikipedia include being discouraged by […]
[…] don’t want to; what’s stopping them? etc. – crop up in any number of situations, from the dominance of males among Wikipedia editors to the depressing findings of the Vida project, which charts the gender imbalance in high-profile […]
This article must be a shrine for the feminists… But if you stop to analyze it point by point, you can see it’s just a big bunch of misinterpretations cooked in the most chaotic way possible. Wikipedia’s value for humanity goes beyond words and whoever rages against it in such a stupid way as this article does deserves to have it’s tongue&finguers cut, plain and simple. Besides that, most of the sources used for this so-called compilation are a joke, if anyone has even bothered looking at them :) Plus in some cases they don’t even represent what’s appearing at the “compilation”!
Ahhh wish I could have back the minutes I’ve spent with this. Please, just realize once and for all that this crazy feminism isn’t helping us at all, but damaging our social relationship with men and also our inner self…!!!
Jennifer: What sort of person lauds “value for humanity” in the first part of a sentence, then states that failure to recognize that quality should be punished by “cutting tongue and fingers”?
And regarding “all this crazy feminism”….well, I don’t even know where to start. I quite agree that you’ve wasted your time here. And now mine and everyone else who reads your comment.
What is extremely interesting about the discomfort many women feel regarding participating in wikipedia is that many or most wikipedia editors do not identify their gender directly or indirectly. It shows that it isn’t just the ‘male gaze’, etc., that creates a female unfriendly environment (and the OP provides a nice discussion for why this is the case).
I’d like to see tools built into wikipedia that humanized the discussions and made collaboration easier – and hopefully also enticed more women to join in. Why not have embedded access to instant audio or video chats were meetings could be held that would decide contentious issues or allow for quick collaboration. In the real world, most folks recognize that contentious issues shouldn’t be dealt with by email but rather face to face – but on wikipedia, text is the only option offered. But, in the end, there is no getting around the jerkwad factor – participants will still need to have meetings with whoever wants to participate, some of them are jerks, and contentious arguments will arise.
[…] Sue Gardner, executive direction of the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit that runs Wikipedia and several other free knowledge sites), wrote a blog post discussing 9 reasons why women don’t edit Wikipedia: […]
[…] Miksi naiset muokkaavat miehiä vähemmän wikipediaa?[https://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia-in-their-own-words/] […]
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[…] there aren’t many female editors on Wikipedia. For more background on this you can read a blog from Sue Gardner, Executive Director. By promoting the idea of the Ada Lovelace Day we wanted to […]
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I am a female and have recently left Wikipedia after editing and creating articles for approx 8 years. I had the misfortune, when posting my last article, to come across a clique of bullying, spiteful editors (one of whom was a woman!) who decided, with pack-mentality, to gang up on the ‘outsider’. One is particular is, as we speak, systematically tagging all the articles I created with deletion’ and ‘unreliable source’ templates. So I have left, which is a shame as I greatly enjoyed writing the articles, some of which took me many days to write. Life, however, is too short and I don’t take bullying from anyone. Be aware that there are some very nasty people on there calling themselves editors. One of them also told me that it doesn’t matter how badly-written an article is (I often correct grammar etc), as long as its ‘notable’. On an encyclopaedia!
[…] Gardner on kerännyt naisten kielteisiä kokemuksia Wikipedian muokkaamisesta. Omat kokemukseni seitsemän vuoden ajalta […]
Great work Sue I am sure you got all A’s in Gender Studies. But, any one of your generalizations here regarding “why women don’t” – is true for a large percentage of men as well. Any attempt to apply parity to something this high level would likely yield lower value to overall content. Lets applaud good contribution regardless of gender. There are more women than men in academia in the US. But to stay on point I will add that maybe its time to drop feminist dogma that preaches political idealism over rigorous academic competition in our universities.
I actually wish to bookmark this posting, “Nine Reasons Women Don�t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words) � Sue Gardner’s Blog” on my very own internet site. Do you care if Ido it? Thanks a lot ,Mitchel
[…] ensures those articles featuring men are widely read. Wikipedia’s over 95% male editors have been accused constantly of a gender bias in editing, as well as being an amplification and glorification of […]
[…] those articles featuring men are widely read. Wikipedia’s over 95% male editors have been accused constantly of a gender bias in editing, as well as being an amplification and glorification of […]
You made a really good post, but as a woman, I don’t find any of those things are the issue for me. I know how to edit a Wiki, I’m not at all put off by rejection or competition and I deal with enough men who are less then kind about their speech of women. None of that is why I don’t edit Wikipedia. I prefer to spend my time on things that matter, writing things that will advance my career or that will have some real value to my life. Wikipedia just does not matter to me. Since I would never trust their information I wouldn’t waist my time editing it.
[…] director, Sue Gardner, has been struggling with an editor retention problem – especially among females – one Wikipedia editor thought that Gardner should read the Wikipediocracy blog about Bibby, […]
I left Wikipedia because of over-officious deleting of my articles, which were not even slightly in line with their own guidelines. I got the articles back, but only after a short fight. That was when I left. What kind of stupid system is it where the only way to make Wikipedia follow its own guidelines is to be stroppy with the editors, who are volunteers like you?
I came back after half a decade’s break. Now I tend to write low-traffic articles in a specialist subject. Keep my head down. Be polite and kind, and above all human in my dealings with other editors.
The thing is, I really love Wikipedia. Sure, it’s biased towards young American males. All the more reason to jump in.
Be the change that you wish to see.
More women in Wikipedia are 100% going to make it a better place. Already look at the Teahouse.
The last quote in this blog post was, “there’s no structure set up to find like-minded people to assist one’s first attempts. Instead I just find lots and lots of links to lots of information-dense pages”.
But that’s what I love about Wikipedia! It makes my heart beat faster.
I definitely don’t go onto Wikipedia to indulge in human interaction. More like to escape it. Wikipedia is pure shallow pools of information, referenced, indexed and linked ten ways to Sunday. Ah. That’s what does it for me.
[…] Gardner outlined some of the issues women have with Wikipedia in a 2011 blog post called “Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia,” and they’re all still relevant problems. And Gardner should know – […]
[…] post Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words) found that some women are put off by the editorial in-fighting or note that the information they […]
[…] here for a blog post by Sue Gardner, Wikimedia’s Executive Director, about why women don’t […]
“Double standards may dictate that one may take credit for someone else’s work, but the ultimate achievement should be that one’s work was in fact used at all.”
I’m not sure what your actual point is. But I don’t think it’s acceptable to take credit for other people’s work. Besides being plagiarism, that’s a violation of the license Wikipedia uses.
Regarding “Some women whose primary language has grammatical gender find being addressed by Wikipedia as male off-putting.” that actually should work correctly, and I verified that it does on Portuguese Wikipedia. You do have to specify your gender in the preferences, though. If it doesn’t work on some other language, or in a particular part of the user interface, it’s a bug.
Disclaimer: I work for Wikimedia, but these are my personal views.
[…] kendi blogunda, kadınların Wikipedia’ya katkıda bulunmama gerekçelerini yayımladı (bkz. https://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia-in-their-own-words/). Bu gerekçelerin, Aurora’nın Linux için yazdığı gerekçelerle benzerlikleri olmasına […]
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There are no barriers to editing Wikipedia, it is no more challenging than keeping up appearances on facebook and twitter, which women do far more than men. You can rationalize till the cows come home.
Women are more subjective than men in their interests and mindset. Many girls barely take an interest in anything which does not relate to themselves – beauty, fashion, relationships, weddings, babies etc – which is why most women’s magazines consist of the above. Few are interested in planes, jet engines, markets etc
“Women are more subjective than men in their interests and mindset.”
A statement that demonstrates its own fallacy, as it is not based on anything other than your own subjective perceptions.
I’m a woman and I have never lived in a household with subscriptions to “women’s magazines” like you describe. Instead I read the Smithsonian, the Economist, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Mother Jones, and other publications you no doubt think are for men, since you are clearly oblivious to the existence of the millions of women in the workforce being doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, social workers, journalists, therapists, architects, artists, police, EMTs, drivers, and hundreds of other professions that do not fit within the confines of your narrow-minded belief system.
Did I say “It is a fact that all women are more subjective than all men”? It was obvious that I was stating my opinion and comparing two populations, which means two overlapping bell curves with different averages. Since I am comparing the average girl with the average man, your personal interests are irrelevant, as is the fact that there are other girls who are interested in science, engineering etc. Stating your opinion is not a logical fallacy either. Also, earning a living and one’s interests are not the same thing. How did you cram so many errors of reasoning into one short post?
You did not say “all women,” but neither did you say “most women”, nor, “on average.” You just said “Women are more subjective than men in their interests and mindset,” with no qualifications. If you intended qualifications to be read in your statement, you should have put them there.
My personal lived experience and interests (I saw your assertion that “earning a living and one’s interests are not the same thing”, but I am betting interests and career align with one another far more often than not) are only irrelevant if you persist in your apparent belief that I am an outlier rather than a fairly normal person within the main part of the bell curve. If you so dismiss the reports of anyone who disagrees with you, you thus preserve your own prejudices about the world. Congratulations.
I continue to hold that your beliefs are wrong-headed, subjective, and illogical. Not to mention overly influenced by commercial media that want you to believe they are more popular than they are.
(Do you know the circulation of “women’s” magazines? All the major ‘style’ ones together is about 14 million a year. (per http://www.cosmomediakit.com/r5/showkiosk.asp?listing_id=360478&category_code=circ&category_id=27808). The world Female population 15-64 years old is 2 billion, 270 million. So less than 1% of the female population buys those sorts of magazines over the course of a year, even assuming that none of them buy more than one title in that group, which isn’t true – Cosmo elsewhere asserts that between 30 and 50% of the readers of the other magazines also read Cosmo, for instance. Assume all those sales are in the US, with a female population 15-64 of 103 million, and you still only see enough copies sold to sell to 14% of that prime adult female population. Pretty small percentage for something most of us are supposed to be interested in. )
Putting the word “average” into your argument doesn’t make it more correct. There is no mythical “average” man. People are complicated. I like how you say you are “comparing the average girl with the average man” though. To me the use of the term “girl” instead of “woman” reveals more about your underlying sexism than any analysis I have written. Well done!
Sorry for the delayed response, I have no account here. If you really think the evidence shows that men and women are equally interested in technical, objective subjects, then we will just have to disagree. The tiny number of women in tech courses, on wikipedia etc is the fault of the patriarchy, I presume. Women’s media provides no indication about their interests, sure. There is no such thing as average in population studies, sure, in the name of Equality.
If you simply disagreed with my observations without getting so clearly offended about women being viewed in a way you don’t like, then I would think you were being objective and nonpolitical about it. I’m sure I could describe any feminine trait and you would get angry and accuse me of stereotyping and generalizing. So, what is the point. We had better leave it there.
[…] Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia […]
[…] hat Sue dankenswerterweise die ausufernden Beiträge sortiert und eine erste Zusammenfassung geschrieben: „Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words)“. Sie belegt die […]
My gender has never been an issue on Wikipedia. I have been there for a year and have over 400 edits yet still no signs of unfriendliness or what other women say they face. I love editing Wikipedia.
[…] Kong. Ms. Gardner is leaving the organization soon and has written a well-publicized blog on the hurdles that women contributors face at the organization; chief among which is a systemic bias against […]
I would also add racist or very provincial to the list. A few years ago a number of Chinese related posts were not allowed on Wikipedia’s English section or were deleted because the non-Chinese editors lacked depth to understand the significance of the entries. Like Communism, Wikipedia is a fantastic idea and doable on a small scale, but fails in its objectives when scaled up. People who think otherwise are in the fishbowl.
My own view is that “Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they are conflict-averse and don’t like Wikipedia’s sometimes-fighty culture” is the main issue. Conflict is inherent on Wikipedia and the only solution is to have friends and allies who support your views and know the system. I’ve now been there over 7 years and have over 50,000 edits, but not without having to develop a tough hide. My own frustration is that too few of the existing women editors stand up for each other; when I’ve been caught in a dispute, most of the other women editors turn tail and hide.
I also think there are more women editors on wikipedia than the statistics indicate, but they prefer to run under the radar, which includes not answering surveys
[…] van Wikipedia) wees dan ook op de drempels voor vrouwelijke redacteurs. Bijvoorbeeld de ‘delete’-cultuur van Wikipedia, waarbij artikelen kunnen worden verwijderd als ze niet door de keuring komen. […]
[…] editors consist of almost entirely men with an estimate of only 13% being women. After a study of why women rarely make edits, researchers found “some women don’t edit Wikipedia because the editing interface isn’t […]
[…] Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, has written extensively about the editorial gender gap, and pledged to raise women contributors to 25% by 2015. This year, […]
[…] survey in 2010 found that only 13 percent of the site’s editors were female. Since then, many theories have emerged to explain women’s low participation (e.g. their dislike of “editing […]
[…] Flera har skrivit om det här. Wikimedia Foundations VD, Sue Gardner, har exempelvis skrivit om några sådana tillfällen. Jag, som är med på en mailinglista om kvinnounderskottet (gendergap-l) har läst om många […]
[…] ett blogginlägg 2011 presenterade Wikimedia Foundations VD, Sue Gardner, nio orsaker till att kvinnor, enligt dem själva, inte redigerar Wikipedia. Kommentarerna kom från ett antal olika webbplatser där kvinnor hade kommenterat Wikipedia, och […]
[…] Nine reasons why women don’t edit Wikipedia (Sue Gardner’s Blog) […]
Princess Samantha Kennedy-Honored Poet
I just had a terrible experience with wiki and feel very bullied. My friends and family emailed me that my user PRINCESS SAMANTHA had been rewritten by one male editor with such libel and obscenities. I saw it recently, it was shocking. The user page was created in 2006. Unfortunately, the provider of my email, webtv, ended webtv in September of 2013, thereafter in this same month, this male editor who we know now, slandered me and made up horrible things and obscenities. I had lost my password, tried to get help, they would not help. Family members all using the same IP address, tried to edit and repair this, then some editor came in and blanked it out. One relative has been working on a story about me for months, with correct references, newspaper articles and references to stories on television about me, headline newspapers articles about me, but, it has been continuously been rejected as not notable, not enough references, all males rejecting it and a male relative writing it. One editor deleted all of my photos claiming my relative infringed upon my copyrights, when in fact I gave my relative permission to upload my photos and for him also to edit the old user page. Now the old user page was deleted completed for total lies and that we were all blocked from editing, using the same IP address, we all feel very bullied and not included. These editors did and said anything to just get rid of me. Very sad. No one should go there anymore.
I don’t agree with most of the reasons given. They sound more like excuses than plausible reasons. Women aren’t as ego-driven as men, and don’t normally strive for recognition for defining subject matter.
[…] https://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia-in-their-own-words/ […]
[…] their bias but it is very apparent that this is not working, neither women nor non-western men are very interested in editing […]
“4) Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because they are conflict-averse and don’t like Wikipedia’s sometimes-fighty culture.”
What is written in this section is the truth, absolute truth, and 100% truth. And what is written in this section is also true for male contributors like me. I stopped contributing on Wikipedia just because of this single (but very big) reason. Good bye Wikipedia.
I think most of these answers hit all around the mark. As much as we try to live a non-sexist existence, men and women are made for fundamentally different roles in society. men like to build things, fix things and make their mark in the world. editing a Wikipedia article satisfies many of those desires. Women like to create beauty and comfort, and a Wikipedia article doesn’t lend itself to much of that. An edited article is also likely to have critics and challengers, and I think we all know that no one likes to be questioned or criticized, and women are no exception.
2012 United States labor statistics (http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/20LeadOcc_2012_txt.htm)
indicate the top occupations for women are:
2.6 million female registered nurses
1.8 million female Nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides
2.3 million female Elementary and Middle School Teachers
Percentages of people in those fields that are female are 92%, 81%, and 87% respectively.
Women are also 37% of the country’s physicians and surgeons.
Women do not teach and nurse and doctor just to create beauty and comfort.
They do it to build and maintain strong people, and a healthy society, and to leave their mark on the world.
Teachers in particular, do it to pass information on to people who need it.
Kind of like Wikipedia editors.
[…] Why haven’t I edited the entry on nightlife instead of complaining? I’m too busy doing science. […]
Thank you for this very interesting collection of perspectives! I would agree on most of them. Being a heavy user of Wikipedia by myself, I have never contributed or edited entries to Wikipedia for two simple facts: (1) I’m too busy to discuss with dudes (2) just for the sake of ending up being right (a.ka. I’ve that too much in “real” life and don’t need it in “virtual” life, too).
I conduct research in the field of the night-time economy and have noticed that wikipedia is pretty silent about nightlife (urban-night-life.com/2014/05/25/wikipedias-silence-on-nightlife/). Thus, I would extend your remarks to the point, that wikipedia in general is highly influenced by the interests of its contributors and pretty biased. Which is not new, but still surprising once in a while.
[…] has written several times on Wikipedia’s lack of gender diversity. In 2011, she noted that various studies and articles have found that registered women editors tend not to contribute much writing. Some of them say […]
Thanks for finally talking about >Nine Reasons Women Don�t Edit
Wikipedia (in their own words) | Sue Gardner’s Blog <Liked it!
[…] that they, like other wikis, were becoming oligarchic (pdf) and that their defense systems were turning people away. Realizing, this Wikipedia has been changing how they work, adding systems like […]
[…] there aren’t many female editors on Wikipedia. For more background on this you can read a blog from Sue Gardner, Executive Director. By promoting the idea of the Ada Lovelace Day we wanted to […]
[…] אומרות ולמה הן לא עורכות בויקיפדיה ופרסמה פוסט בנושא: תשע סיבות שנשים לא עורכות בויקיפדיה. בין הסיבות: ממשק עריכה לא ידידותי למשתמש, עסוקות מדי, […]
MS XXX
I am currently editing a very contentious Wikipedia article whose editors as far as I can tell are all male except myself and one other, and I chose to remain strictly anonymous for obvious reasons (to avoid a patronising attitude and misogynistic remarks). I have therefore encountered no problems based on gender. Why don’t more women do this? However, far worse in my experience of Wikipedia editing is the battleground, “Lord of the Flies” mentality that dominates it, which has nearly driven me from editing there more than once. I have been at the receiving end of extreme and persistent hostility from one editor it seems merely for standing my ground (politely) and refusing to be beaten down. You need a very strong stomach to edit there. I am conflict-averse, but Wikpedia editing is riddled with male conflict, at every level. To watch it can sometimes be very entertaining, but to be involved in it is hell. No wonder Wikipedia is having problems retaining editors.
In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin explored this social dilemma in “The Tragedy of the Commons”, published in the journal, Science. For all it’s advantages, a common enterprise will allow every sort of competing interest into the “arena.” In Wikipedia, some want to contribute to furthering knowledge, some want to push an agenda, and some just want to fight an ego-driven turf-battle.
Still, I think we are all richer for the opportunity everyone has to contribute. In a Wikipedia article, I rarely get the impression I’m being totally fed the pablum of propaganda, because such an article would likely be challenged repeatedly, and the result is usually a fairer compromise of different viewpoints, which I think is valuable.
Sticking to just the facts is the best approach, and one of the best way to hold people accountable to the facts is the way is to allow everyone a voice on the subject.
[…] כל מיני סיבות. אם נחזור לפוסט של סו גרדנר על תשע סיבות מדוע נשים לא עורכות בויקיפדיה, אני חושבת שאני עונה על שלוש מהן לפחות. חלק מהסיבות […]
Interesting read that deserves to be shared more (god knows women suffer enough discrimination on the internet)! The skewed coverage of topics concerning language, the arts, and social sciences has left a gap in the database of necessary cultural information available to the everyday browser. Too often the likes of certain entries on the military, male-oriented pop culture, and ahem, even video games are making their way to the top of wikipedia searches. Disgraceful and in need of reparations.
[…] internet connection. Yet as we all know, “nine out of ten Wikipedians continue to be men.” Many possible explanations have been offered for the gender gap, but I think it is a labor issue. As a librarian, I couldn’t agree more with DNLee’s […]
[…] Una interfaz de edición poco amigable, agresividad en los debates, una atmósfera sexista e incluso misógina, falta de tiempo libre o una escasa interacción social en los proyectos, son algunos de los múltiples factores que se apuntan como causas de la desigualdad de género. […]