Ryan wrote again:
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.
I comment:
I do recall someone (a woman, don't remember who) observing in the halcyon days of
blogging that while most women blogged about their personal lives, men blogged about
anything but (again in line with frequent clinical and non-clinical observations about
gender differences in preferred topics of conversation*).
I suspect that has an effect on an Internet user's desire to edit Wikipedia ...
adding information about baseball statistics, medieval Turkish sultans or reporting and
blocking vandals falls far more readily under "anything but".
Daniel Case
*I really ought to post those excerpts from You Just Don't Understand that I've
been meaning to.