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.