Ole, could you invite Jessamyn? It would be terrific if she would spend a little time here :-)
Hi!
Ole invited me and I'm happy to stop in and say hello. My full-time job is working at MetaFilter as a community manager or whatever you call it. When I'm being fancy I'm COO, when I'm being informal I'm a mod.
People have rightfully pointed out that our $5 barrier to entry is an intentional growth-limiter and also more of a spam-defender. While our user numbers are up in the 100K range, we have about 20K active members and maybe a thousand or two active in any given day. This is small by Wikipedia terms, very very small. That said our M/F ratio is more like 60/40 m/f.
I credit this both to some aggressive moderation in what is otherwise a lightly moderated site [we delete rape jokes and I'll take the heat when people flip out about censorship] some cultivation of female members and some visible norm-setting among all the moderators for how we want the community to run. We also have a Q&A part of the site, Ask MetaFilter which has probably more female contributors than male ones. Though I am the only female moderator out of the three of us--we also have one additional male programmer and one part time mod from a different time zone who is also male--we're all very very on message that we don't want MetaFilter to be a place where random drive-by racism and sexism is okay. That said, this is easy to enforce because we're a small site with a small mod team.
I'm also an editor at Wikipedia, username: jessamyn, usually working on small projects like the Vermont town pages, new article creation and a little vandalism undo-ing. I've also been on welcoming committees in the past. Most recently I participated in a very long and drawn out conflict [not mine] with a user who had been a long time [to my mind] problematic user. This is a user whose comments often got personal and would trail me to my own website to leave annoying comments. I left Wikipedia for huge stretches of time to avoid this user who I felt was editing with a serious conflict of interest and yet I personally found working through channels exhausting and resulting in unwanted attention from this user. Nothing scary, just more of a "why bother" situation.
Anyhow, I'll go introduce myself in the introduction thread tomorrow, just wanted to say hi, I'm around. Someone called me from the New York Times today to talk about the issue [why me? I have no idea, honestly] and there's a small piece that is up now with my comments and a few other people's. I'd suggest that people who are interested in this topic might do some PR work and make some comments if commenting is allowed. I had about 400 words and a few hours to make my point, sorry if it doesn't resonate for people.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wikip...
Thanks for inviting me in to talk about this.
Jessamyn West _____________ librarian.net