In a revealing glimpse inside Wikipedia in kimono on its Annual Conference in Haifa weekend described co-founder Jimmy Wales the typical Wikipedia editor as a 26-year-old nørdet male with a PhD. in the end he will get married, move on to some other project and leave the site, said Wales. And the Wikipedia's own research found that 90% of editors are male.
This imbalance has meant that while technology and science are covered in detail, other issues are left wanting. "The important thing is to bring in people of all different backgrounds," Wales told the incident, the independentreport. "If you do, you increase the knowledge base on the site, which can only be a good thing. At the moment we are relatively poor in a few areas; for example, biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare. "
He was careful to say that there is not a crisis exactly in a lack of Wikipedia editors, and it is obvious that with fewer pages to update – now that Wikipedia covers 3 m pages — there is less to edit. Wales described this as "natural attrition", but said, it is important Wikipedia make some changes to try to attract a new parts of contributors. Sue Gardner, head of the parent organization, Wikimedia, said there were around 90,000 active contributors as of this March, and the site wishes to recruit 5,000 more by June next year. Wales would like to many more of them to be female.
Part of Wikipedia and attempt to make the task of editing seems more attractive (and these are obviously unpaid contributions) have involved introducing the feature Wiki Laws , which formalises a spirit of "niceness" that had arisen on the Wikipedia mailing lists of a couple of years. Contributors are rewarded for helpfulness or good edits with different badges, including kittens, stars and hearts, a bit like these potty training kits encouragement. Perhaps Wikipedia also try making some pages pink, to see if that helps?
There are many reasons for posting or editing entries on Wikipedia: editing your own entry (politicians favorite); satisfaction updates an entry to reflect a breaking news event; correct an error, spelling errors or poorly written sentence. But the inner sanctum Wikipedia editing is a very serious and deep competitive affair with higher profile tasks reserved for long-standing editors of status and a complex, is only partially visible code of conduct. Frequent documented editing used witness to the level of competitiveness; David McCandless has beautifully and eloquently illustrated lamest Edit wars.
We could speculate this potential female editors had, until now, been the investment program is an aggressive, rather protective community with a clear hierarchy and Wales admitted was "a lot of editorial guidelines, which is impenetrable for new users".
For me, there would be less of a deterrent than the enemy time: much as I do not doubt if I would find contributes quite satisfactory, these kinds of projects is a very long way down the list, which gives priority to spending more time with my son and less time looking at the monitors.
Have you noticed a lack of great famous women on Wikipedia? Is Wales sexist to suggest women are needed in order to write about child care? Let us know below.
(Making pages pink was a joke, incidentally).
Jemima Kiss PDAblogs on
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