* Johannes Rohr wrote: >So in essence you are saying that Wikipedia is a game that boys like >to play more than girls. And there is not much you can do about it, >because editing Wikipedia is more like building Lego space ships than >like playing with dolls?
I am saying that women are not driven to do this kind of thing; you'll hear from female non-contributors that they don't know why they should contribute. Almost a quarter of Wikipedia contributors also happen to contribute to open source software, even though they are probably less than a percent among users. They are driven to do this kind of thing. There is much you can do about it, but you have to first understand it is a general societal thing; contributing to Wikipedia is not blogging, and so even if there is not much of gender gap in blogging, that does tell you anything about the gender gap among contributors to Wikipedia. >What I was wondering about is, has this or any other hypothesis >actually been substantiated with some real (quantitative or >qualitative) research? Is there more that anecdotal evidence, >providing some solid ground for us to set the right priorities? That women do not know why they should contribute to Wikipedia can be found in various surveys; beyond that I've not seen much of an attempt to underlying causes. Like in your initial question, people look for "deterrents", but not so much for motiviation or qualification beyond silly answer options like "I don't have enough information to share". You would have to ask questions like whether non-contributors are used to collaborate with large and diverse groups of mostly strangers. You would have to ask what people (intend to) do for a living. When they've last been recognized by a stranger for having built or made something, online in particular, perhaps from someone living on the other side of the planet. If they tell their friends they made some article about the local monument, would they find that cool, or not care, or what else do they think the reaction would be. Are they used to write texts in some semi-formal, fact-oriented writing style? Are they used to some form of markup, "bbcodes" on a forum, formatting tags on their blogs, perhaps a CMS syntax they use at work? Is there something they would like to see covered in Wikipedia that currently isn't, and do they feel able to do the research needed to make one, even if they don't have the time? How would they like to be among the people who made Wikipedia? Open source developers are hundreds of times as likely as women to be a Wikipedia contributor, they tend to "build stuff" for a living, they are likely to have experience with collaborating with strangers, they tend to write documentation in some non-personal writing style, they tend to have their contributions in this area recognized by their peers, they're likely to have experience with code, and so on. They probably often like this whole Sharing Stuff thing, the ability to find something online and add to it to make it better. Every time you load a Wikipedia page, it'll have run through hundreds of lines of code I wrote when in secondary e- ducation when friends of mine played some football game. I am quite sure I am getting a greater kick out of that than they got from their game. Instead of looking at this, you get survey reports with "Percent of female editors who reported experiencing the listed harassment" where one of the "listed harassments" is "Someone tried to flirt with me". -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
