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.