A number of folks involved here are mentioned - Joseph Reagle, Sue
Gardner, Denise Paolucci (Dreamwidth!) and a project I worked on, the
Teahouse.
http://news.yahoo.com/study-shows-gender-bias-wikipedia-linux-180400641.html
ByJared Spurbeck
<http://contributor.yahoo.com/user/261857/jared_spurbeck.html>|Yahoo!
Contributor Network -- 6 hrs ago
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Today inthe age of the "brogrammer,"
<http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/07/tech/web/brogrammers/index.html>whose
frat boy tendencies are glorified and sought after by cutting-edge
online startups, women in tech often find themselves objectified and
excluded -- especially in communities likeWikipediaandopen-source
software, where women make up even less of the population (around 13
percent and 1 percent, respectively) than in more mainstream technical
fields.
That was one of the factsJoseph Reagle, an assistant professor
atNortheastern University, drew on for his study about"Free culture and
the gender gap."
<http://geekfeminism.org/2009/09/23/open-letter-to-mark-shuttleworth/>He
discovered that just because a community (like Wikipedia)/says/that it's
open doesn't mean that it isn't hostile to women.
*Free for all?*
The "Free Encyclopedia" Wikipedia's claim to fame is that anyone can
edit and contribute to it. To keep errors from cropping up, it has
policies that let anyone flag part of an article for review, and allow
trusted editors to decide how to present something.
The process by which those editors decide, however, is often highly
combative and alienating to women, who "are socialized to not be
competitive and avoid conflict" according to Reagle. Sue Gardner, the
Executive Director of theWikimedia Foundation(the project behind
Wikipedia), wrote a list of"Nine Reasons Women Don't Edit Wikipedia,"
<http://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia-in-their-own-words/>in
which she noted Wikipedia's "fighty" and "contentious" culture, where
loud and assertive people drive others out regardless of their competence.
*"Otherwise commendable features"*
Reagle found that Wikipedia's values of radical freedom and openness
actually led to a culture that is more closed off to women. He noted
that "implicit" power structures existed, even in the absence of formal
ones; and that imposing few restrictions on how people treat each other
can lead to "a chaotic culture of undisciplined vandals," which
disenfranchises women from participation just as surely as if there were
rules against women participating.
Similar dynamics exist in popular open-source software projects like the
Linux kernel. Open-source luminaries like Eric Raymond are legendarily
combative andhostile to "idiots," <http://www.catb.org/esr/aim/>even
while they theytolerate abusive personalities
<http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1310>whodrive female contributors away.
<http://geekfeminism.org/2009/10/08/psa-mikeeusas-hate-speech-and-harassment/>Reagle's
study quoted numerous female writers with experience working in Linux
and open-source software, who called its community "cliquish and
exclusionary" as well as "more competitive and fierce than most areas of
programming."
*How to achieve equality*
Wikipedia's new Teahouse page
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse>is "a friendly place to
help new editors," which is designed especially toencourage women to
participate.
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/05/wikipedia-teahouse-a-warm-welcome-for-new-editors/>Meanwhile,
women like Denise Paolucci are creating their own startups
likeDreamwidth, <http://dreamwidth.org/>which are based on existing
open-source programming code. Unlike most "proprietary" code, it's still
free for women to do what they want with it -- if they can overcome the
obstacles in their way.
/Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an
Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about
technology and electronics since 2008./
Study Shows Gender Bias in Wikipedia, Linux
--
*Sarah Stierch*
*/Museumist and open culture advocate/*
>>Visit sarahstierch.com <http://sarahstierch.com><<
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