On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Joan Goma jrgoma@gmail.com wrote:
Another factor is the meaning of the words. In our survey we ask them for the reasons not to contribute. There are several women saying: mmm... well... in fact I have contributed a bit but not very often because.... It seems that women have a more restrictive understanding off the words "contributing to Wikipedia". It could be that you have several women making a small contribution once a month and saying they are not contributing to write Wikipedia while several men having created their personal page several years ago and doing nothing else saying yes I am contributor to wikipedia. This feeling is reinforced when you look at this proportion by gender. 35% of men answering the survey say they write while only 9% of women say they write.
I found that it's very interesting and tried to check it yesterday. Not very seriously, of course; I asked my friends in Livejournal. On this moment I got 24 answers from men and 17 from women. 7 men said that they aren't Wikipedia editors because they don't edit often (3 of them has a good contribution, for example, 4500 edits), 2 men (one of them is former administrator and made last edit two months ago, the second made last edit a week ago) said that they aren't editors because they aren't edit Wikipedia now (in Russian: Я когда-то правил Википедию, просто сейчас не считаю себя её редактором). 6 women said that that they aren't Wikipedia editors because they don't edit often too (one of them - 13372 edits). Don't edit at all 8 women and 4 men, and edit - 3 vs 11.
So I don't sure that women have a more restrictive understanding off the words "contributing to Wikipedia".