Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-14/In the media

Discuss this story

Re:Wikipedia fails to bridge gender gap

Obviously we're not even close to where we would like to be, but if the 21% female number of Wikimania attendees [1] reflects the current editing population, this is significant progress from the 9% figure from 2011. --LukeSurl^{t c} 11:01, 16 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The problem I have is that there's a lot of talk about the gender gap problem - but almost no attempts to propose solutions that I've seen. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 11:37, 16 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sadly, there's not much we can actually do. What little we could, we've mostly done (and if you know what else we can do, please let us & WMF know). The problem is society-wide (ex. consider the percent of women in a tertiary level CS class), and until we can successfully convince people that being interested in computers is an acceptable pastime/career choice for women, the situation will look as dire as it is now.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 18:03, 16 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are various things that are being worked on. The biggest is the visual editor, the theory being that our current editor makes editing a daunting experience for nonprogrammers, and programming is a largely male profession. I understand that our current editing community has a strong skew towards programmers so this theory has some credibility. We have various chapter initiatives to tackle the gender balance, including offering training sessions to groups of potential editors where there are likely to be a higher proportion of women, and creating articles on notable women who've not yet been covered. There are also some longstanding bugzilla requests to reduce the number of edit conflicts, this would be useful in its own right but there is a theory that new male editors might see an edit conflict as a challenge to be dealt with as opposed to a rejection. However I wouldn't take too much comfort from the 21% female attendance at Wikimania, I'm pretty sure that is at least partially due to staff having a higher proportion of women than volunteers, which is only to be expected, especially for staff positions recruited from outside the community. Ϣere SpielChequers 03:22, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are lots of ideas waiting for someone to act on them at meta:Proposals for more female editors. 98.220.58.72 (talk) 03:28, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No, LukeSurl. The people who attend Wikimania are highly unrepresentative of Wikipedians, in many ways. Over representation of women at real life gatherings as opposed to their rate of participation online is a common phenomenon for web communities.

As far as I can tell, there has been no change in the gender composition of editors for quite a while. Yesterday, of 2730 editors with a known gender, 2564 were male (94%) [2]. Which is about what it has been for the last few years, IIRC. Xrt6L (talk) 04:22, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So according to WereSpielChequers, women are unable to use the traditional Wikipedia source editor because they are by nature nonprogrammers; they also need extra training and are frightened by edit conflicts. Just as well that all these problems are well on the way of being solved. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 07:39, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In fairness, a lot of the men at Wikimania 2013 were paid to be there too (either by virtue of being on the WMF payroll, a Chapter payroll, or on a WMF scholarship to attend) such that I don't believe Wikimania attendance is uncorrelated with the volunteer content contributing community on just the gender front.--Brian Dell (talk) 08:22, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Chinese Wikipedia editor Huang Zhisong barred from leaving the country

After Jimmy Wales makes a stand against China, Wikipedia’s Chinese editor banned from leaving country --Andreas JN 466 14:43, 17 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]