An interesting set of questions, Lennart! Let me first explain why I am looking for reliable sources on the Gendergap. I have been involved with efforts to reduce the Gendergap in the Netherlands since 2011. Our big news today is that we have nearly doubled female participation from 6% (measured in 2013) to 11% according to our latest survey results from this year. One of the problems I have in discussions regarding the Gendergap is the whole chicken-and-egg theory about whether women don't participate because of a lack of female-related content, or whether we lack female-related content because we have so few female participants. It would be nice to have an article in the Dutch Wikipedia on the Gendergap to answer these questions without repeating myself constantly, but I see that so far since publication of that article on the English Wikipedia on 30 April 2014 (called "Gender Bias on Wikipedia" in order to differentiate it from the "Gender Pay Gap"), only the Turkish Wikipedia has managed to create an article in their wiki on the same subject.

I would really like to make an article in the Dutch Wikipedia about this, and in this context we would rely on Dutch "reliable sources" but what they have published so far is quite thin and only refers to the English Wikipedia, which is not helpful. Slate is not recognized as a reliable source by the Dutch Wikipedia, and this article, though interesting, does not touch on the participation gap in the Netherlands or indeed why it even matters. The Slate article is focused on an edit-war which is not really relevant to the larger community because as you say, though the language on talk pages in nlwiki can be very condescending or negative, it's generally not profane like this one. I do think from conversations I have had and research done by Aaron Halfaker and others, that the problem stems from the strange need to throw links to help pages at newbies rather than talk to them normally in language they can understand. Some of the very worst articles in the Wikiverse are help pages, which are probably bad because they are not indexed by Google and have too few eyes looking at them. That said, the help pages need a better "between the lines" analysis for the AfD queue, so that Dutch abbreviations like "Vrouw-baan" on the Dutch AfD list are interpreted correctly to mean "This editor is probably a woman promoting her own business and COI policy applies here" rather than what it sounds like "all women who work should have their articles be deleted on eye contact". I have also noticed that articles about women tend to be nominated much more often for deletion than articles by men. Ditto the books they write, the movies they make, and any notable news items they are the subject of. I think women give up quicker because they are less tech-savvy at finding their way around the various bits of behind-the-scenes discussion areas. Often they can't even find their way to the discussion at the AfD queue or the Village pump.

Why doesn't the Swedish Wikipedia have an article about the Gendergap? What is the Gendergap in Sweden today?

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson <l_guldbrandsson@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

Slate recently published a, at least to my eyes, fairly well-balanced article about Wikipedia:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_disputes_the_crowdsourced_encyclopedia_has_become_a_rancorous.html?wpsrc=sh_all_tab_tw_bot

The Gender Gap Task Force gets more than a shout-out:

"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.” Two of her chief antagonists in that group got comparative slaps on the wrist. One was the productive but notoriously hostile Eric “Fuck Wikipedia” Corbett, who has a milelong track record of incivility, had declared the task force a feminist “crusade ... to alienate every male editor,” and called Moore “nothing but a pain in the arse,” among less printable comments; he was handed a seemingly redundant “prohibition” on abusive language. The other editor was Sitush, who repeatedly criticized Moore for being “obsessed with an anti-male agenda” and then decided to research and write a Wikipedia biography of her; he walked away with a mere “warning.” With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap. (After the decision, several editors announced their intentions to resign in protest.) Moreover, it’s reflective of the challenges Wikipedia faces as it attempts to retain and improve its content quality and editing force."

Also mentioned, the Chelsea Manning name controversy and the overall fall in editors.

What I miss here and in almost every article in English I've seen on these types of topics is that English Wikipedia is the only one mentioned. I grant that many readers only know English, but I for one, don't recognize the same bad language and anti-women behavior in my daily work on Swedish Wikipedia. We would simply not allow people to speak that way.

This leads me to wonder how those types of behaviors affect editors. We have a golden opportunity to A/B test this, because of all our language versions.

So, my question, stated another way, is: if the bad language and anti-women behavior on English Wikipedia deter editors, and maybe especially female editors, and we have other Wikipedias with less bad language and anti-women behavior (perhaps), do these language versions have a higher female-to-male ratio?

And stated a third way: how much do the bad language and anti-women behavior really influence the gendergap?


Best wishes,

Lennart Guldbrandsson

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