It may not be statistically meaningful, but the results are certainly
valuable to discussion. The idea that women have better things to do,
i.e. don't think contributing to Wikipedia is valuable, is a new one for
me. Since I consider editing Wikipedia to be one of the most valuable
ways I can possibly spend my time (more so than raising children or
curing cancer), this idea had never occurred to me. Is it possible that
men are more indoctrinated to value knowledge, information,
epistemology, etc. and thus see Wikipedia as inherently more important
than women do? I'm not saying this is the case—indeed, it seems like too
easy a scapegoat—I'm just wondering if it's a valid hypothesis. Perhaps
someone should conduct a survey asking How valuable do you consider
Wikipedia? and correlate this with the respondent's gender. This also
seems to relate to empathizing–systemizing theory,[1] which
controversially suggests that men (whether due to social or biological
factors) prefer systemizing over empathizing, while women tend towards
the opposite. It may also relate to the fact that men are much more
likely than women to be diagnosed with autism and Asperger syndrome,
although no one is sure why. These are just hypotheses, however, and we
shouldn't jump to any conclusions. I do think, however, that we should
incorporate this idea into future research and see if there are any
significant results.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing_theory
Ryan Kaldari
On 7/10/11 9:32 AM, Nepenthe wrote:
To be frank, a sample this small really doesn't support much of
anything. If the results had been more extreme, perhaps they would be
meaningful, but these data are not sufficient to reject any hypothesis
besides men and women have totally and utterly different motivations
for editing and for not editing. The survey results do, however, play
into our theory of the situation; I think we have to be aware of
confirmation bias.
Nepenthe
On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 11:10 AM, Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com
mailto:la...@fanhistory.com wrote:
Cross posted this to my blog at
http://ozziesport.com/2011/07/why-dont-people-edit-wikipedia-small-survey-results-provide-some-insights/
I tend to be a bit obsessive. An issue that keeps cropping up in
my personal sphere is women editing Wikipedia. Various reasons
keep being offered as to why women don’t edit, if their reasons
are different from those of men, if women don’t edit because they
don’t have time as they are too busy taking care of their
families, etc. I wanted to know why women and men in my particular
peer group didn’t edit Wikipedia. Thus, I posted surveys to my
Facebook and to my LiveJournal. The raw data, as of 10:13am
American Central Standard time could be found at Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/notes/laura-hale/if-you-dont-edit-wikipedia-why-dont-you-edit/10150232414360642,
LiveJournal http://partly-bouncy.livejournal.com/923973.html.
Please feel free to continue to vote. If I have bigger samples, I
can always update this. I had responses from 22 people, 12 males
and 10 females. This isn’t necessarily a representative sample and
if I was looking for that, I’d try much harder to get a larger
response from a bigger group of people. I don’t think you can
necessarily extrapolate out much from this, except to have it help
confirm other smaller samples.As a side note, the Facebook poll
allows people to add their own responses. (The sample size isn’t
statistically significant for one thing and one response can
really change the percentages.) People have and it is possible
that people may have chosen responses had they been available. In
any case, on with the findings.
There were several options offered that no one selected. Those
answers have not been included as the totals would have been 0%
and given the small sample size, it didn’t seem as relevant.
ResponseAll MaleFemale All % Male % Female %
The atmosphere on Wikipedia is not conducive to random user
editing.10 4 6 45.5% 33.3% 60.0%
I have better things to do. 8 3 6 36.4% 16.7%
60.0%
Not enough time to contribute. 5 2 3 22.7% 16.7%
30.0%
I don’t want to research citations to support my edits. I can fix
grammar/typos. 4 2 1 18.2% 25.0% 10.0%
I know people who were treated poorly. Why subject myself to
that? 3 2 1 13.6% 16.7% 10.0%
There is no community. 2 2 0 9.1%16.7% 0.0%
They keep deleting my edits.2 0 0 9.1%16.7%
0.0%
The editing window is confusing and I don’t understand the
markup. 1 1 1 4.5%0.0%10.0%
I used to edit but people treated me poorly so I quit.
