Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/In the news

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Needs moar spellcheck. Nathan^T 14:19, 8 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How to achieve a 94% female contributor ratio on a wiki

A little analysis of three Wikia wikis (the top 100 editors):

http://familypedia.wikia.com - 89,185 pages - 15 males, 3 females, 82 unknown. Female/Male ratio: 16.6%
http://recipes.wikia.com - 42,312 pages - 5 males, 2 females, 93 unknown. Female/Male ratio: 28.5%
http://vintagepatterns.wikia.com - 36,471 pages - 0 males, 11 females, 89 unknown. Female/Male ratio: 100%

All three using MediaWiki and cool interfaces. All three big wikis. All three using the same toolbar and rich text editor. Explanation?

Two different Wikimedia communities (users >= 10 edits):

http://en.wikiversity.org - 14,454 pages - 167 males, 69 females, 3331 unknown. Female/Male ratio: 29.2%
http://en.wikibooks.org - 36,016 pages - 206 males, 30 females, 9061 unknown. Female/Male ratio: 12.7%

Both use MediaWiki and the same toolbar. No rich text editor. Explanation to the 29 >> 12?

I have read some blog posts about gender gap, and the proposed reasons are not clear and not verified. I'm trying to compile some numbers here. Comments are welcome. Regards. emijrp (talk) 14:48, 8 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It funny this comes up time and time again. I was active in the first and second waves of BBSing in the 1980s, and ended up working for a company that made a Mac-based BBS. The main Toronto BBS using it had a ratio of about 45% women, when most BBSs of the era were 5% or less. Network effects had a major part to play in this, but so did the GUI. Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:05, 8 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I could care less about this place being near stag, but I LOVE the proposals to improve the GUI. Edit view is a mess. Talk methods are a mess. And WAY too much acceptance of this from the techies and Wiki veterans. But it is holding the project back. Realio trulio.TCO (talk) 17:50, 8 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would love some sort of threaded talk mechanism, but don't know whether it would limit our accessibility to those with slow connections. Danger (talk) 14:32, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The UI really is daunting for many newbies, whether male or female, and deterring well-intentioned editors is a serious problem. The average vandal doesn't really care about mastery of markup, so an unfriendly UI even affects our signal:noise ratio. bobrayner (talk) 12:45, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wait, all the cool girls secretly wanted to date me? Dammit! Powers ^T 01:41, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's a very well kept secret, Lieutenant. Danger (talk) 14:32, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well the secret's out now.. Watch out cool girls! Here we come! -- œ ^™ 04:13, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]