Please, please, please be careful here. The data offered here answer the question "How many editors self-identify on Wikipedia as female?" not the question "How many females edit Wikipedia?" There's a very important difference, and these numbers should not be generalized beyond the small percentage of editors who give their gender in "preferences" on Wikipedia. In other words, of the 280,285 people (2% of all editors) who identify their gender, 16% self-identify as female. It is very probable that women who self-identify as women (and who are interested enough to say so in "preferences") differ in important ways from women editors as a whole. To use that number as a proxy for "How many of the 13+million editors are female?" would be a serious mistake. The survey with over 100,000 responses, which was purported to be anonymous (although I know of at least one woman who refused to give her gender even on that survey because she didn't trust the assurance of anonymity) is a much more valid estimate of female participation. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better.
The only thing these numbers tell *me* is that editors on Wikipedia, male and female, aren't terribly interested in identifying themselves by gender. I wouldn't draw any conclusion, even tentative, from it beyond that, or use this as a number to (shudder) "extrapolate from." If you're going to extrapolate, you need something solid to extrapolate from.
Woonpton
On 2/11/11, paolo massa paolo@gnuband.org wrote:
I posted on my blog the table. See http://www.gnuband.org/2011/02/10/percentage_of_men_and_women_on_different_w...
Amir left a comment saying that the User: namespace in Russian is translated into the equivalent of User_male: (I guess if the user set male in the preferences as gender) and User_female: (if female in the preferences).
Do you know if this happens in other wikipedia as well? In Russian Wikipedia, if gender is not set, how User: is rendered? With the male equivalent or there is a neutral form?
P.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2008@reagle.org wrote:
On Wednesday, February 09, 2011, Oliver Keyes wrote:
So, depressingly, it looks like en-wiki is actually doing the best! :P. Any chance we could have that broken into percentages?
My preliminary tabulation shows WP in the middle. Also, oddly, a lot of Russians apparently gender declare. One of the odd things with the survey from which the 13% is derived is how many Russians participated. Maybe the really like to identify with WP?
en.wikipedia : 2.01% declared: 233312 men; 46973 women; women are 16.76% de.wikipedia : 3.47% declared: 35726 men; 4800 women; women are 11.84% fr.wikipedia : 2.16% declared: 18556 men; 3054 women; women are 14.13% commons : 2.26% declared: 27980 men; 5070 women; women are 15.34% sr.wikipedia : 2.66% declared: 1666 men; 414 women; women are 19.90% ru.wikipedia : 16.80% declared: 80491 men; 23750 women; women are 22.78% pl.wikipedia : 3.64% declared: 12106 men; 2999 women; women are 19.85% nl.wikipedia : 2.92% declared: 8977 men; 1781 women; women are 16.56%
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Paolo Massa Email: paolo AT gnuband DOT org Blog: http://gnuband.org
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