To summarize some of the findings from the paper:
1. The gender gap does have a real and measurable effect on Wikipedia
content. As one example, movies which were significantly more popular
with women (as rated by 150,000 users of the site MovieLens) end up
having significantly shorter articles on Wikipedia.
2. The gender gap has been at about the same level since 2005 and does
not show any signs of getting better or worse.
3. Certain content areas are more popular with women than other content
areas. For example:
People - 11% women editors
Arts - 10%
...
Science - 5%
Geography - 4%
4. Women have a higher percentage of edits on User pages and User Talk
pages than men do, i.e. they are more community-oriented.
5. Female newbies are reverted more often than male newbies.
6. Being reverted as a newbie has roughly the same effect on women as men.
7. Women are more likely to edit contentious articles than men. (This
result was unexpected.)
Ryan Kaldari
Hey all,
I wanted to forward along a link to a detailed new study covering the
topic of gender on Wikipedia which will be presented at WikiSym
soon. The GroupLens research group has done a great deal of work on
Wikipedia in the past, and one of their PhD candidates is actually at
the Wikimedia Foundation for the summer studying broader editing trends.
I highly encourage anyone interested in seeing hard data on this issue
to read it. There's a PDF in the link below...
Title: WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance
Link:
http://www.grouplens.org/node/466
Abstract: "Wikipedia has rapidly become an invaluable destination for
millions of information-seeking users. However, media reports suggest
an important challenge: only a small fraction of Wikipedia’s legion of
volunteer editors are female. In the current work, we present a
scientific exploration of the gender imbalance in the English
Wikipedia’s population of editors. We look at the nature of the
imbalance itself, its effects on the quality of the encyclopedia, and
several conflict-related factors that may be contributing to the
gender gap. Our findings confirm the presence of a large gender gap
among editors and a corresponding gender-oriented disparity in the
content of Wikipedia’s articles. Further, we find evidence hinting at
a culture that may be resistant to female participation."
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org <http://wikimediafoundation.org>
_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap