--- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
From: Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net Subject: [Gendergap] Why women and wikis do mix... To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tuesday, 8 March, 2011, 19:09 On Signpost:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/...
http://lola-pr.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-women-wikis-do-mix.html
Fred
Thanks Fred, interesting. Here are some sample articles from Wikifashion:
http://wikifashion.com/wiki/Christian_Dior/Resort_2011 http://wikifashion.com/wiki/Yasmin_Sewell
I don't think there is anyone in en:WP who would write these articles. Yet the article on the Resort 2011 collection is precisely the level of detail that we would have on something like wrestling or Pokemon, and it's notable, with coverage in decent sources.
Yasmin Sewell doesn't even have an article on en:WP (look her up in Google News to see how notable she is ...).
We discussed the design issue that the Wikifashion lady highlights a few weeks ago.
I like the Wikifashion interface design ... having a toggle option to change to a design like that would be useful in WP. A real eye-opener. Please let's add a design like that as an option.
Following on from what Carol said, and from observing how and why my wife writes, I think women do get a kick out of writing an article about someone whose work they think is important, be it a biography or an article about that work. There clearly are women out there who enjoy writing a wiki article on a widely covered fashion collection; they're just not doing it in Wikipedia.
I like that Wikifashion has lots of images: again, this follows entirely the model of reliable sources writing about fashion. Yet I can't recall ever seeing such richly illustrated fashion pages in Wikipedia.
Andreas